It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.

The question was literally, "What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?"

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.

The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

How on earth can you "exhaustively" deidentify millions of chat logs that could contain literally any personal details, and presumably all without OpenAI's own employees also sifting through personal information in exactly the way they're claiming would be bad if others did it?

For sure. And that's why I think it's important to distinguish harm caused despite good intentions and reasonable practices being followed from harm caused because someone did not follow reasonable practices or actively chose to cut corners.

Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.

The perfect vs good argument is the pragmatic one for moral hazards like this. IMHO the best scenario as self-driving vehicles become mainstream technology is probably a culture like air travel: when there is some kind of accident, the priority is to learn from it and determine how to avoid the same problem happening again, and everyone takes the procedures and checks that have been established that way very seriously. That is necessarily going to require the active support of governments and regulators as well as the makers of the technology itself, and I hope the litigious culture in places like the US can allow it.

Windows has supported USB in the loader since Vista. It was necessary for USB boot, which was first added - partially - in XP. Windows PE (which underlies RE) has supported USB peripherals from its inception. Just no PnP initially.

You don't think policies like VAT on private school fees and pushing up business taxes instead of personal ones play well with the typical Labour voter?

They're cratering in the polls anyway for a host of other reasons, and I suspect Starmer is already toast anyway for a host of other reasons (though it's significantly harder in practice for Labour to replace a leader they're not happy with than it is for the Tories), but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that some of these policies are being chosen because of their political alignment.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.