Yeah, and precedent on derived works and copyright is *extremely* well established in most courts, regardless of whether you agree with the specifics of the legislation or not (and most here almost certainly do not). Whether you use "AI" or not, try and produce a derivative work based on, say, Mickey Mouse post-"Steamboat Willie", or wherever we're up to entering into the public domain by now, I think we all know what'll happen once Disney finds out about it.

As usual though, the creative sector is split. Some artists are clearly embracing tools like DALL-E and Midjourney to produce some incredibly impressive images that, and let's be honest here, require levels of creative skill and effort that are beyond just typing in a few phrases to describe what they want, typically making a number of training and refinement passes through different tools to achieve a satisfactory result. Others have, entirely predictably, resorted to the courts to get their works removed from the learning models and/or seek damages, so we can expect some precedent to get set fairly soon and, on previous form, most of that will almost certainly align with Hollywood's take on copyright law while trampling all over fair use. I'm fully expecting to see some sizeable damages to be awarded against the big players and numerous takedowns issued during all this, although what survives appeals and is practically enforceable will be somewhat less impactful. It also remains to be seen whether governments have the will to enforce things, especially since there are big tax-paying and lobbyist employing companies involved; due to the derivative works angle, I certainly don't see this as clearcut as another Napster, let alone taking down a torrent sharing site/group.

Because I guarantee you no EU commissioner gives a rat's ass about improving internet connectivity with Georgia.

Definitely not the case since Georgia submitted their application for EU membership in March 2022, immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine (just as others looked towards NATO and/or expedited their own EU membership bids), which was met by a statement of readiness to accept Georgia's candidate status once key membership conditions were met. Georgia also works with NATO but does not currently have MAP status, although that may change post-Ukraine. I've been to Georgia, and the post-soviet generations generally lean pro-west, hate Russia for their occupation of Georgian territory, and would probably jump at a chance of EU (and, ideally, also NATO) membership. While "pissing off Putin" might well be a significant part of the ultimate EU motivation for this (especially since Stalin was born in Georgia, making it a real poke in the eye) the EU has never shied away from expansion as long as the candidate meets most of the entry criteria and pays more than lipservice to the rest, and full-EU membership of another former SSR is much more politically damaging than a data cable. Building stronger communication links and trade between the EU and Georgia is a definitely good first step in that process though.

Doing so also makes it easier to expand links onwards to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which could also an extremely prudent move for the EU at the moment - both are oil and gas rich nations that could make up the Russian shortfall while the EU migrates to green alternatives. Azerbaijan is already supplying natural gas to Europe via the TANAP pipeline that runs through Georgia and Turkey, so anything that that will move them further away from Moscow's sphere of influence and towards Bussels/Strasbourg is going to go over well with the EU. While both do still have pretty strong ties with Moscow, Kazazhstan is having issues with lease payments over Baikonur and, like Georgia, my experiences in Azerbaijan are of a pretty sizeable pro-western element amoung the younger generations.

Why not indeed? We successfully moved to remote working with the Covid lockdowns, then went back to a more hybrid approach once those ended that allowed employees and their line managers to agree on a office/remote balance that worked for the individual and the larger team, with most staff now just using the office when needed for specific team/client meetings and our periodic all-hands face-to-face team meetings. We also have some staff that are essentially fully remote (myself included) or fully office-based if that's their personal preference.

The end result is that we've now halved our inner city office floorspace, refitted what was left to remove the cube-farms and geared things up more for communal working with a much more limited number of bookable desks (a mix of sitting and standing). The resulting OpEx savings are massive, and really helped with offsetting the double digit inflation / cost of living rises in this year's annual pay review. Who'da thunk it? Happy employees are more productive, and also much less likely to leave which reduces rehire costs and agency fees which can add-up too, so it's absolutely a win-win.

I get each company is different, but I'm really not getting this arbitrary insisitance from some C-levels that workers return to the office when they could just as easily work remotely, at least part of the time. I thought the idea was to maximise profits for the shareholders and get the most out of your workforce?

Russia will be fine in the long term.

Long term might be right. Putin is very good at one rather important thing for Russia's stability (such as it is), and all the potential candidates for a successor that have been mooted - one of the oligarchs, Prigozhin, Gerasimov, or Shoigu - don't seem very likely to be as adept at it, namely balancing the oligarch, mafia, military, and intelligence factions off against one another. I've seen the situation rather neatly described as four chains pulling in different directions, with Putin being the central pin that's keeping everything from flying apart. If that's accurate, then Russia is going to get very unstable and have a LOT of internal power struggles going on once he eventually goes, and that's going to take some time to play out and be rather messy while it does.

For a "gas station with nuclear weapons" that's a situation that could easily have consequences outside Russia's borders; China will absolutely take massive advantage of anything like this, and I suspect at least some of Russia's nuclear arsenal, plus associated materials and resources, are going to find its way into the hands of countries that are probably not going to be aligned with western ideals (or Chinese ideals, for that matter). Plenty of people want Putin to fall because of Ukraine - let's just hope it's not a case of being careful about what you wish for.

Just signing up to a site like this isn't illegal. Legit security researchers like Brian Krebs who wrote TFA do this all the time, and it'd be pretty hard to prosecute based purely on intent just because of a website sign-up. If they were to offer actual services, as the FBI has done with some seized darkweb sites, then you're potentially opening the door for an entrapment defense - plus have to deal with some of the blowback the FBI got from their efforts, which wasn't all that much really.

What they've done instead is put some red flags against a several thousand names that have, in effect, already received their first legal warning, and therefore are going to get a lot less sympathy from a court if they subsequently get caught and prosecuted for cybercrime later. There's also the possibility that a few of the people they ID might already be on similar watchlists or under caution which that might lead to actual prosecutions, but that's not the job of the NCA, it's down to the police and Crown Prosecution Service in the UK (or the other legal authorities being notified oversea), who would almost certainly both be provided with the details. Whether they join the dots is another matter, of course.

It's not a bad idea, really. Low cost, low effort and, IMHO, a low level of deterrance factor too, but the real value is probably going to be those red flags and watchlists for any subsequent prosecutions of those that don't heed the warning and continue on down the cybercrime rabbit hole.

"It looks like you're having a meeting. Would you like some help with that?" *everyone signs off*

Yeah, but that's kinda like asking a human "What's your problem?" Those conversations don't generally improve over time either. Come to think of it though, maybe you would get different results if you specifically asked it about the code to Vi...

Have to agree on the quality of life aspects and health issues; cancer has only really become a thing because more of us are living to the point that it becomes statistically likely it will develop, for instance. Still, the first bar on there is 125 years, so we're potentially not talking about where we are on all that *now*, but where things will be when someone born very recently potentially gets to that age bracket, e.g. circa 2150. There have been some pretty big advances lately on conditions that effect the very old (albeit many "in mice"), but I think pushing things out just another 3 years (the current record is 122 years old) is pretty much a given statistically, even if it is still a serious outlier.

Getting past 175 though seems like an awfully big stretch (roughly a 45% improvent on the current extreme outlier), no matter how many medical advances there are on treating the health conditions that afflict the extremely old, at that point you're also having to deal with physical failure of cellular structures and breakdown of DNA due to the exhaustion of the telomere "caps" that prevent the ends being frayed. That's a whole other area of medical science that's really getting into cellular biology that I don't think we're remotely close to cracking yet.

Absolutely this. I've got a number of these so-called "smart" appliances, not from choice, mind - just because if you want decent functionality these days "smart" is increasingly part of the package. In every case, I've looked at the list of what actually it does for me and not found a single compelling thing that I'd want to give it an IP address for, just lots of data capture for the vendor, so simply skipped over enabling it. Of course, the vendors don't like this, and I've now found that some of them have started to just try and get an IP all on their own without asking first, so I now have a dedicated SSID for them that is explicitly blocked from connecting to anything outside its own /24, and isolates each IP from the rest for good measure.

Do. Not. Want.

What do we do with the people that civilization has absolutely no use for?

There's always soylent green. Makes them useful *and* addresses the inequality gap...

In the main, yes, it does. Not everywhere, but the pace of the roll out has picked up considerably over the last few years with increased deregulation and there are now a LOT of companies besides BT (actually Openreach) now putting fibre into the ground, on pylons, in pipes, or wherever Openreach is targetting 85% of UK addresses with ultrafast fibre by the end of 2026, and seems to be fairly close to being on target to hit that. Other providers/connection schemes should cover a decent slice of the remaining 15% as well.

In terms of technology makeup, FTTC is fairly rapidly approaching ubiquity in all but the most rural areas, and FTTP availability is increasing fast as well, but mostly in high population density or new build areas. 4G/5G or other wireless tech is often used for filling in hardwire notspots, which isn't perfect, but for most consumers it's more than ample for typical streaming media and Internet use. Ironically, there are some fairly significant inner city areas that don't even have FTTC yet, but rural broadband schemes have given some very isolated farms heavily subsidised broadband speeds ranging from from 100Mb/s up to 1Gb/s - go figure!

I'm not. OP asked about offshore windfarms as an alternative to nuclear, I just made a few points why it might not be so clear cut, one of which was that post-Fukasima any infrastructure on or off the Japanese coast is going to have to pay a lot more attention to the potential impact from tsunamis. I didn't mention the relative impact on nuclear vs. any other system at all, but yes, as you say, if nuclear goes badly wrong it'll probably be a least an order of magnitude worse than anything else. I even finished with the point deploying turbines or not is not really relevant to a discussion about how Japan is struggling supporting more nuclear, which might be why it's not mentioned in TFA.

That said, with Japan's topology (long, but relatively narrow, coastal areas on either side of a mountainous spine) off shore wind turbines probably would make a lot of sense as part of an overall power generation strategy provided that there is enough wind on the western side of the country and/or the risk of tsunamis on the side eastern can be properly managed/mitigated. It doesn't seem to be an area of power generation they've really developed though (just a handful of tiny farms), so there's presumably some social, political, and/or geological reasons why that is the case.

Actually, yes, that *is* my day job. Mostly as an principal engineer, but I've worked on enough politically sensitive civils projects to know where the political and civil tensions are most likely going to arise from and what they'll look like, although I can't claim to know the specifics of the Sea of Japan (which, to be fair, doesn't seem to crop up as much as the South China Sea in such matters). Ocean swell is absolutely an issue for off-shore wind turbines, floating or otherwise, as is siting them in international waters that may be used for any other maritime purposes, and the needs for diversification of energy supplies, especially when involving those dependant on environmental conditions like wind, tidal, and solar is hardly news anymore is it?