FamilyMart, Lawson and 7-11 are franchise chains in Japan.
Who made this decision to bring in the robots? Do the store-owner have a say in this or was it imposed on them?

I want the choice to buy from a store that is not involved in this or who has declined to have them.
If the robots' presence are a corporate decree, then I'd have to avoid all stores from the "big three".

That would leave Ministop, NewDays and Daily Yamasaki as unsullied.

It is not a simple issue. Militaries of the world, even the US military in particular, are very aware of how global warming lead to unrest and instability in the world. For example, rising food prices is what had triggered the "Arab Spring" in 2010 onwards, which had led to several wars.

Militaries have sometimes dissuaded politicians from building nuclear power plants from which radioactive material would be spread over a wide area if they ever got bombed.

Military have also sometimes protested against building of wind farms where it would interfere with radar, making it more difficult to detect incoming ships, planes, drones and missiles.

Yesterday, my non-techie mum asked me to install Linux on her PC. Apparently, one of her friends' husband had written a book about migrating from Windows to Linux, but she asked me first because she knew that I was using it.

I will need to get her a more user-friendly and Windows-like distro than the custom setup that I have been using myself.

Earlier today I had already selected Zorin for the first try. Let's see if she likes it. The runners up are Kubuntu and Mint.

> I want two coins.

Did you mean to write: "I want a two-dollar coin" with Woz on it?

(Context)

Before an AI-bro comes in and yells "Bwaaaa.... it is just fair use, bro.", let me just tell you that Japanese copyright law does not have any concept of "Fair Use".

There haven't been much performance increases or features since Haswell, other than increased core counts.
People have been perfectly fine with that for the things they have been using PCs for.

I suspect it is from the Israeli children's expression "Nana banana", which means something like "I don't care".

As in: "I am going to steal all these images for my generative AI tool, and I don't care about who owns them".

I want the EU to have an "Abandonware Institute". For any product that requires an online service, the manufacturer must first provide a package with sufficient information to the institute on how to unlock it and use it to a reasonable degree without the service. That could include free software, protocol specs, keys for unlocking it etc.

Then when the manufacturer discontinues the service for any reason then the institute would publish the information package they have freely on their web site.
That way, the consumers rights would be protected even if the manufacturer goes out of business. This should not just apply to hardware, but also to software-only products, such as video games in particular.

The institute would be funded by a fee, paid by the manufacturer in advance, as a condition to sell their products within the EU. If the manufacturer does not want to do the work to make this package and pay the fee then that would be an incentive for them to not make their product depend on an online service in the first place.
And once the product is discontinued, the manufactured would be absolved from any responsibility for the safety of what happens with their product (e.g. hate speech in live chats, or whatever). But each product's abandonware package would be required to fulfil a certain standard in the first place.

The institute's web site would be region-locked by IP. If any other country would like their citizens to benefit from this, then they could pay a fee and get a local mirror of the repository of unlocked packages.

I would demand from my representatives that there was a school for my kid that did not participate in this program.

Even in Hamburg, you can today easily find a "HÃnschenburger" (chicken) or a "Putenburger" (turkey) on a menu.

A "Hamburg steak" / "Hamburger steak", which is the origin of the dish with a meat patty in-between two buns as we know it today is not 100% beef either, as the recipe typically contains eggs, breadcrumbs and sometimes chopped onions.

BTW. In Sweden, "Hamburger meat" is smoked horse meat, because it used to be imported from Hamburg.

I'm all for clarity in food labelling, but this proposal just seams like it was weaponised by the anti-woke lobby to strike at those pesky progressive vegetarians.

There are many other risks associated with "AI" than issues with copyright and plagiarism.

LLMs encouraging kids to commit suicide ...
Video generation systems used for fraud ...
AI systems being put in control of things that they shouldn't, and doing crazy decisions when reality is different from training data ...

And so far, the issues of copyright and plagiarism haven't really been put to the test at all. Most cases have been thrown out of court on technicalities.
And they have been in a small number of jurisdictions. There are more places in the world than Texas or California, many countries with different judicial systems and different legal traditions, frameworks and regulations.
For example, many countries in the world have no notion of "Fair use": that is a mostly USian thing.

Facebook is Social Media..
Instagram is Social Media.
TikTok is Social Media.

What about YouTube?
Reddit?
Slashdot?
Forums running on PhpBB?

Where do you draw the line?

This is the new "AI", which is just a higher-order statistics of words and their relations that have been found in text scraped off the web.
You know: racist rants, shitposts, memes .. and posts like this.

The older, classic, type of "AI", such as "expert systems" used to be based on highly curated information, input by experts in the field. With each datum and relation known to have meaning beforehand.

The best path down Mt Misen isn't really paved all the way. It is a forest path, with stone steps.
They had set out to descend after sunset, and I don't remember seeing any lights on the path. Even a paved road can be dangerous in pitch black.

But I'd agree that it is stupid to rely on any third-party time table you'd find online.
Many travel sites and Google Maps often have outdated information, and often don't account for seasonal variations in opening hours. Many sites' own web sites don't get updated properly, and things may have closed early because of various reasons.
They should best have visited the ropeway's lower station before ascending, but... the station is not on the best path up.

Still: Relying on a chatbot to have accurate info about anything? Don't make me laugh.

... and you'r note the least bit concerned that the company entered the enshittification phase years ago and has been caught up in a bubble?