Why should section 230 protect Google or others when their AIs do bad things? action 230 was meant to be an extension of the principle that the printing press is not responsible for the content, but the creator of the content is. With AI the owner of the computer should be responsible for allowing it to be published. Otherwise, how do we get accountability?

I don't think Econ 101 price/quantity equilibrium is entirely what's going on here. Gigabit service *availability* is about the same in Spain and the US, despite America's per capita purchasing power adjusted GDP being about 60% higher than Spain's.

I think the relevant figure is this: Spain has roughly 2.8x the population density of the US. It's surely a lot more expensive to build the infrastructure to cover roughly the same percent of the population here.

Although that's not *nothing*, the question is who exercises admnistrative control of that data. If the Chinese government demands data from ByteDance's management, and ByteDance's management complies, that data is not safe. Of course, even in the US a federal agency can obtain a secret warrant which enables them to help themselves to your private data held by a third party, and because it's *secret* you can't challenge the warrant's legality.

The smart thing is don't put anything sensitive onto any kind of social media. Now some metadata may itself by sensitive for certain persons, like your approximate location at various times. Such persons shouldn't use social media at all, even if the data is hosted in the EU, which generally has the best data privacy protections in the world, because there is *no* country in the world where a company can defy a lawful warrant, whatever "lawful" means in that country.

It is not because you have a choice to go anywhere and life off the land. No one has the obligation to provide you with a modern form of life.

For you, or me, to have something to eat or have things we want or need, we have to give something in return.

To confuse that with exploitation (real exploitation), Jesus F Christ, talk about privilege crying about first world problems.

I was originally thinking about how silly the authorities were about "investigating" salty mist, but then you remind me about natural sea spray blowing inland.

Natural sea spray is taken into account in areas near the beaches for gardening, agriculture and construction. Sudden increases in salt mist can cause damages to plants and animals.So I guess that might be a reason why authorities stepped in.

The reported story seems to blow it out of proportions, though.

Managers, investors and staff can go to jail if they are found to be involved in a crime committed by a legal entity (a corporation being one type.)

I shouldn't be shocked that authorities and the tech/sales people that pushed for this didn't think of it. It's human nature.

Not only that, legal teams should have seen this coming. Like, who has jurisdiction over someone on the other side of portal if he/she flashes a minor on the other side, for instance? What happens if one side has stricter anti-racist policies than the other side, and one side commits an act that is criminal on his side, but the only witness is someone on the other side? Etc, etc, etc.

People just don't think shit through, tbh. But whatever, someone got paid mucho dinero deploying those portal thingies.

It seems more than a trifle odd to see this move at the same time they are getting rid of the free tier of ESXi.

Broadcom's interest is in the big customers who are locked in enough to support juicy margins, sure; but the crippled version of ESXi was not a meaningful substitute for the VMware stuff that those customers depend on; and (unlike workstation) it could draw directly on the engineering effort that they needed to expend anyway to keep ESX up to date to support the customers they really cared about and its existence helped provide a supply of IT people who were at least reasonably familiar with small ESX environments.

Workstation seems like it falls in a similar bucket in terms of being no serious threat to the high margin product lines, but providing a general warm fuzzy feeling of familiarity; but seems like it would involve more work to maintain(things like the guest OS components are reused; and I assume that things like the emulated peripherals are shared with ESX; but it's considerably more distinct software than just ESX with low core count and memory limits baked in).

Makes me wonder if it will even survive; or if this is just what them squeezing some goodwill out of however much time their obligations to people with fancy support contracts require them to keep it alive.

It seems...not at all...self-interested that he dismisses the idea of doing UBI by just giving people money with which they can buy whatever products or services they deem most useful to them(including; but far from limited to, chatbot time) as an ineffective old-and-busted idea; but hails the potential of providing a universal chatbot ration as an exciting way forward; despite the fact that someone with money can always just go and buy chatbot; while someone with chatbot had better have a problem that chatbot can be applied to or be ready to go to the trouble of finding a buyer in order to cash out and reach the state that the UBI guy starts in.

One can certainly see why a supplier of chatbot would be enthusiastic about a new guaranteed market for it(in much the same way that the agricultural lobby is very interested indeed in welfare programs as a means of getting money spent on their products); but that's quite different from it being a credible or respectable view.

The trick is that what counts as an 'undue' advantage or roadblock is not really an objective measure; and is open to potential inconsistency:

Is protecting a given technology from 'undue roadblocks' in the form of lawsuits not an 'exemption'; for instance? Then there's something like 'subsidies' which is pretty obvious if you are talking the "we just outright cut them a check" flavor; but gets a lot more fiddly when less direct things like "we allow them to impose particular negative externalities at no, or heavily discounted, cost to themselves".

It's easy and attractive to call for fair evaluation; but once you get into the weeds the situation usually gets messier: is getting to proceed in the face of mass protest a protection from undue roadblocks; or an undue advantage? Both getting to pretend that coal is super cheap because the extraction guys have been effective at stalling regulations of their activity and getting to pretend that nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem are essentially subsidies in-kind; how big is each?

Aside from the physics and engineering constraints, the argument for SMRs seems to rely in no small part on some(pretty optimistic) assumptions about large reactor projects necessarily being embroiled in the most dire planning and project management hell and always ending up as more or less unique products of dysfunctional and expensive processes; and SMRs definitely not falling prey to any of that, reaping all the rewards of mass production, and definitely ending up in a regulatory category where anyone with a reasonably flat concrete pad that has a chain link fence around it will be allowed to plop some modules down with basically zero review.

There may be a weak sort of truth to this; in the sense that small scale projects that get mired in project management hell typically don't have enough inertia to avoid just getting killed; while very large ones can often trundle on under their own weight for quite some time because nobody wants to be the sunk cost scapegoat; but if you are just casually postulating that planning permission will be trivial to plunk SMRs down wherever it's not clear why proponents of the large-plant solution don't get to posit a standardized medium to large reactor design that you'll be able to plunk down with expedited approval as long as you specifically don't deviate from the validated design.

I think one place to expect operational savings is refueling. Conventional reactors spend about 8% of the time offline being refueled. Every eighteen months thousands of workers from all around the country come to the site to do the work. SMRs are designed to need refueling much less often, typical every 3-7 years. Some designs go for up to thirty years without refueling. Plants with a larger number of smaller reactors can also do maintenance and refueling without losing any revenue, as the remaining reactors put out a little more power to compensate.

SMRs shut down and cool down much faster; some don't require any active cooling measures at all. You just shut the thing down and a week later it's cold even if you don't have outside power. So there's a lot less plumbing to monitor and maintain.

Of course these are all just promises now. Running these things is going to be so different we won't really know until we've built and operated some.

"If we only did the right thing then we couldn't do what we want to do."

Which in itself says nothing whether you are or are not violating the creators' rights.

You as the non-owner of the IP have certain fair use rights that depend, not on the mechanism by which you obtain a copy of the data, but on the effect of what you are doing with the data upon the copyright holder's proprietary interests. A download button does *not* indicate content is free game for commercial use.

The only surprising thing here is that the studio did figure it out. It probably took twelve hours for one of the lawyers who knew what a shitstorm of trouble they were about to get in to find the right executive and convince them to back off. There is no copyrighted work to infringe here, except -- I am not making this up -- the fan video. There is no Tolkien story to infringe whether you own a blanket rights package to his works or not. You cannot copyright a name like "Gollum" or an idea like "let's tell a story about looking for Gollum after the trilogy." You can only copyright the expression of an idea, that is an actual, completed story. Tolkien never wrote such a story, and neither has the studio. Guess who has? The fan video guy. He doesn't even have to have registered it. In the US copyright issues upon creation of the work. Registration just gives you the right to countersue for punitive as well as actual damages. The studio was setting itself up for a massive, embarrassing loss if it pursued this even one more millimeter. It's a stark reminder that these multimillion dollar corporations do not, in fact, own everything (at least not yet). And that is exactly the sort of reminder those corporations probably do not want to drag out in front of a bunch of TV cameras, ever.