The French have been revolting for much longer than that.

I wonder to what extent this is an end-run around export restrictions. It's much easier to regulate the export of a fixed product line than of custom chips where there are different products for every customer. And could Nvidia design products that are easy for the customer to aggregate together to produce a high-performance device, i.e., make it so that multiple small, exportable chips are as good a single large chip whose export is banned? That kind of thing would quickly be noticed in a public product line but not so much with proprietary, custom designs.

Of course it won't, despite all their "generative AI" and "content-aware fill" features. Having only some sources of AI content marked just gives a false sense of security. It's not going to take long for the invisible marking system to be reverse engineered and removal techniques and software will quickly become available. Whack-a-mole here we come.

In the US, presumably the first amendment is going to make it tricky to try to force AI vendors to apply invisible marking, especially with open-source software available.

All these AI-generated images, video and audio must be great for kidnappers. Proof of life is now so easy to fake. Welcome to the post-truth world.

Seems like this wouldn't have happened if Google weren't so dominant in search. Bing is still offering cached pages. However much more reliable the web is now compared to when it was when Google was founded, the cache is still useful for cases when content is intentionally removed or modified.

How can you block a specific program using an external firewall? How would the firewall distinguish between Chrome, Edge and Firefox connexions?

Describing copyright violations as piracy has a long history, going back to at least 1808; see here.

I'm talking about a proof-of-correctness program that, depending on its input, returns "correct", "incorrect", or runs forever. The fact that it runs forever in some cases doesn't mean that a "correct" result in other cases is invalid.

The Halting Problem is basically that you can't write a program that can always determine, in finite time, whether any other program will ever terminate. Not sure why that made you think that programs can't prove program correctness from that. You could write a program that can correctly determine whether or not a program will terminate in a large fraction of cases, just not all the time. Similarly you could write a program that can correctly determine whether or not a program is correct in a large fraction of cases. Now it's possible that your correctness program could run forever without being able determine the correctness (or otherwise) of some program, but that doesn't mean that a determination of "correct" is invalid.

The camera needs a secure chip or the ability to sign is easy to reverse engineer. That's not something that can be added with just a firmware update.

SpaceX is a US company. The US Department of State says "the United States does not and never will recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula. Crimea is Ukraine." So for SpaceX, legally, Crimea is Ukrainian territory.

Of course Russia controls the ground there but, as I said, that doesn't prevent Starlink from providing service unless Russia can knock out all the ground stations within hundreds of miles or shoot down the satellites. A lot of them; in 2023 SpaceX launched 1984 Starlink satellites. Even if Russia attempted to destroy a small fraction of the over-5000 currently operational, the ensuing debris cloud could take out all LEO birds, including things like the ISS and China's space station.

Since the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, they've clearly taken the view that objects in orbit are not within the territory of overflown nations. Attacking US property in international space would be a very serious escalation, far more serious than providing communication services to disputed territory.

Are you saying that Ukraine won't give Starlink a licence to operate over Crimea? Most, if not all, of the peninsula is in range of Starlink coverage based on ground stations in territory under the control of Ukraine.

This is the wrong place to draw the line. SCOTUS has ruled that speech that is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" can be outlawed.

Yes, I understand that the Universities are not governments and so aren't bound in the same way by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, they present themselves as beacons of free speech modelled on the same principles. They need to realise that there are limits, and that these are well short of waiting for incitement to genocide to turn into conduct.

There are already continuous timescales like you describe, notably TAI. Leap seconds just increase the difference between TAI and UTC by 1. Computers should just keep TAI internally and maintain a list of leap seconds. When displaying something like a file modification date, stored as TAI, the computer can then use the list of leap seconds to convert to UTC. The computer then has to consult a historical list of "daylight savings time" rules to convert UTC to the local time of the relevant time zone.

We have also used this method in reverse to go from the reported locations of ancient solar eclipses to knowing the length of the day almost 3000 years ago. Back then, days (from one noon to the next), averaged around 50ms shorter than today.

You're assuming the rate of drift is constant but it's actually constantly increasing. The second we have matches the earth's rotation as at around 1900 but the earth continues to slow down so leap seconds, minutes, or hours will become more frequent as the years go by. This article estimates a 1 minute difference (relative to now) by 2076, an hour by 3023, and a full day by 7633.

Weirdly, we're currently going through a fast patch with one estimate that "we are almost as likely as not to experience a negative leap second in the next 12 years." We've never had a minute with only 59 seconds before so that's very likely to break some software.