I doubt they fear lawsuit from the counterfeiters, but a customer which ends up with a device bricked due to a driver being explicitly engineered to sabotage it is another story.

Outdated laws have nothing to do with this issue, at least according to the article:

That's actually true for most laws: rule-book slowdown is based on the fact that without the due "flexibility" most laws/rules interpreted literally with utmost zeal would make the system stop working.

It might be a full-blown U2 album but in my opinion is still crap. Anyway automatic downloads for things I have purchased are fine. Automatic downloads for things someone else thinks I might like are not. Even Sony did get it right and in the PS4 you have separate option for purchased content (free stuff included) and "featured content". Apple could do just that and offer the additional option to automatically download "featured content" they think you might like, maybe even trying to match the user's taste.

It' not something that uncommon, Italy has basically the same situation: truth can be used as defense only in very specific cases. The idea is protecting "honourability", so whether you are telling the truth or not doesn't matter. The fundamental question is whether your main intent is to harm someone's honourability, no matter the validity of your claims.

The problem is that privileged access to the market is exactly how the system was meant to work.

A taxi driver in most of the countries involved is required to buy a license which costs as high as $250'000, which the taxi driver is usually able to recoup only after 15 years of activity. No sane person would invest that much money (often requiring to get a loan) without some guarantee that they will be able to recoup and profit from it, which is what the regulated access to the market was supposed to do.

Now most municipalities would gladly let Uber or other private companies operate, but taxi drivers paid them a lot of money to get the licenses supposed to protect them from the competition which Uber is doing... many of them have not recouped their investment yet and if Uber is allowed to operate most likely never will.

Some practices are technically legal, but it doesn't mean they should. In some cases the laws are simply lacking and new ones should be defined (especially true in technology). It might also be that some practices are technically legal through loopholes which allow you to do something legally in the letter of the law even if against the spirit. In other cases the laws are actually made with the required loopholes, a blatant example defining some practices which are clearly torture as not being torture to be able to "legally" employ them.

Is that 30% success rate actually meant to be the threshold to pass the test? From the article on Wikipedia it simply looks like a prediction about how AIs in the future will fare:

It's true that today's engines are much more complex, but this also means they are much more sophisticate: today all new cars have to comply with very strict emission and fuel efficiency standards, which means you basically can't do without electronic fuel injection.

His strategy is to remove impunity from their actions. It should happen through prosecution of unneded violence, but sadly this is not the case. He might also be correct: unneeded violence is much more unlikely from if that would put the "aggressor" in danger too. As they say: "if you want peace, prepare for war."

Gnome?

Can't you "disperse" the concentrated light on more panels once it reaches the ground station to avoid the 1.1 "suns" limit? Another way might be to avoid photovoltaic panels and use the concentrated light to boil water.

In this case there is no cause at all, or did I miss the lawsuit, her testimony under penalty of perjury and the subsequent cross-examination?

By which crazy logic? Knowing the source of the accusation doesn't make it automatically "true until proved false".

You just need another abstraction layer...