I'm no lawyer but there are plenty of cases in the record of private entities attempting to sue reporters for publishing information leaked to a reporter, and unless there are serious aggravating circumstances the courts generally reject such lawsuits. Although under the corrupt Roberts/Federalist Society court who knows what the future will bring.

The fascinating one to me is Google Labs and Google Research, where they hired hundreds of top-level computer people and research PhDs from all over the world, gave them free rein to investigate and create, and got basically nothing out of what is probably hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 and Doubleclick in 2007, and then 20 more PII-stealing, I mean online advertising, firms from 2007-2015. Anyone who knew what Doubleclick was and what they did knew what was coming back then - and it has.

"Are you buying advertising? Because if not, you're not the customer."

Corporate entities and organizations that are paying for corporate Google Suite are legally customers in the traditional sense, not just product. I'm sure Google's standard contract for GSuite is thick with disclaimers about the support service level being 0.000001% coverage and response time within 43,800 hours, but nonetheless they are actual customers.

The reporting of leaked information is generally, in the United States, protected under the 1st Amendment for the person who reports on it. Theft of proprietary information, whether or not the with intention of giving it to a reporter, is generally not protected and can result in civil suits, civil prosecution, and/or criminal prosecution of the person who takes it. Theft of physical property, such as CDs or game cartridges, is a crime in any jurisdiction regardless of whether or not the taker has good intentions or leaks information deriving therefrom to a news outlet.

Nope, they are easy to access here. I've been in hospital a few times with kidney stones and promptly received a CT scan to see how big the offending bodies were (all with no out of pocket cost).

I think you underestimate the average person's desire for a simple single-purpose device that "just works". The average person doesn't want to have to think about attaching dongles to their phone or bluetooth pairing or have the phone unavailable. I'm a nerd and I don't want to be dicking about with that stuff during leisure time.

It's not cheap, but for a device that would allow me to unlock more value from my PS5 by making it usable when the TV it is attached to is otherwise occupied it's not super expensive either.

For those of us with, ahem, mature eyesight it is even worse: you can vaguely see the street name, but when you zoom in Google Maps makes the font smaller so that the street name remains impossible to read even if you zoom in to the 3nm scale. Apple Maps does the same thing. Can't wait until the designers of these systems hit 50-something... ok, I'll be dead by then, but it will be satisfying to hear them complaining from down in Hades.

Terminator 2 was 1991.

The original Terminator's plot explains that SkyNet was an AI developed by humans to more efficiently control assets of war, making the military far more effective. It became self-aware and decided to use its ability to control warmaking to eliminate humans, eventually creating the Terminator cyborgs.

So, even in-universe in The Terminator, it's originally a computer AI created by humans that eventually creates real-world soldier cyborgs. SkyNet never was "a robot holding a shotgun." SkyNet was, from the very beginning in the Terminator universe, an pretty classic AI that was given control of real-world resources and used them for its own, internally logical, purposes.

I was searching for that quote but you beat me to it. Good work!

Not really enough with modern cars that have all sorts of fancy features. For example, here are a few things off the top of my head in my wife's new Subaru that basically require a pretty robust interface:

Driver recognition system (figures out who's sitting in the driver's seat and adjusts various things to their personal settings)
Lane departure warnings
Adaptive cruise control
Automatic braking
Backup camera
Front view camera
360 degree camera
Multi-mode X-mode
Auto-downtilt side view mirrors

Then there's Android Auto/Carplay which you may not want but I do. I don't think my car's infotainment system is great by any means, but there are a lot of things in this new car that I really miss when I drive my 14-year-old car.

Who listens to FM radio and CDs anymore anyway? Saying those are enough in a modern car is silly. You might not want all these features, but being dismissive about literally all of them is just stupid.

32 proteins are going to have something like 32 factorial functions in the body - it will be almost impossible to isolate which combinations are doing what to the brain and what would happen if any of the mechanisms of action were changed by human therapy.

"Hey, theory says if we block this protein dementia risk will decrease at age 70!"
[blocks protein]
"Unfortunately the subjects' arms fell off at age 40"

As someone else noted, these are beloved in the home lab market. They are small and low power, which means you can put several of them into a small space in a rack or cabinet and not have problems with heat or power consumption. Great for running Docker or Proxmox or whatnot. Put one on the network as a low power Plex server, one has a pfsense router, and another running bunch of Docker apps and you have a highly capable home lab in a very small space.

They're not even talking about "another moderating system." These protests are all community-supported. None of the protests I'm aware of are being imposed on the subreddits by power-hungry mods. Most have had, and are continuing to have, ongoing discussions within the communities and various polls and votes.

These protests are almost invariably community-supported. Replacing current moderators has nothing to do with overhauling the moderating system or getting rid of power-hungry mods.

I spend a lot of time on redddit, and I really hope these protests succeed, even though they won't. This new move (intentionally eliminating third party apps by introducing comically high API fees) is incredibly anti-user and has pissed off most of their core users and mods. The mods are volunteer workers who basically make reddit able to exist.

So a lot of subreddits, big and little, are protesting. They are continuing to protest. That's great. But there are two reasons, IMO, that it won't ultimately work:

1) Reddit will simply replace the mods of those subreddits with ones who will agree to open them back up to business as usual. There's nothing the current mods can do to stop it. Yes, this will piss off some of the most active contributors and workers, but this leads us to the second point:

2) There's nowhere else to go. When Digg did something similar (implementing extremely anti-user policies that pissed off their core user base), Reddit already existed. It was a relatively easy transition for the users to slide over to Reddit. However, at the moment, nothing else exists for Reddit users to move to. There's nothing in the pipeline, no up and coming social post/discussion sites. There's nothing else really like it that can absorb the culture.

This is a shrewd move by Reddit. It was the right time, from a business perspective. However, while Reddit is not actively dying, I do believe this will lead to the ultimate downfall of the site. Driving users to the official app and new site is an effort to boost "engagement" is going to kill a lot of the appeal of the site. Reddit is actively trying to fight against the way that most users actually interact with the site, instead trying to boost popular "content creators," monetize views, and push sponsored content and ads.

Redditors don't want TikTok and don't want Instagram, but Reddit sees the money in those sites and wants to move in that direction. Reddit wants to be ready when TikTok is banned to absorb those content creators and sponsors.