If riding in one of these driverless cars would cost less than riding in a conventional taxi or Uber, I would definitely use them for the rare occasions when public transport won't work.

This is why browsers should not launch apps without first prompting. Steam, Discord, Roblox, GlobalProtect VPN, and BeyondTrust, Office 365/Teams, and gzillions more work this way. You should never click the "[ ] Don't prompt me any more for this application" button. This allows any arbitrary web site to get out of the browser sandbox and chain to security flaws (or even direct features like "subscribe to podcast") that are in the application.

I seriously doubt any streaming provider is actually going to invest in the kind of quality Australian content that really should be made and instead will invest in more of the same cheap junk that infests our free-to-air networks.

This is comically incorrect.

The point is, its possible to drive on roads in NZ that are not maintained by the government, so the tax ostensibly being paid per mile in fuel tax isn't going to maintain the road you are necessarily on...

And when driving from the UK to France, the ICE drivers are using UK road-taxed fuel, so the counter-point is the same :)

It doesn't even have to be linked to the car tax.

NZ uses "Road User Charges" for diesel - it does not have the tax built in at the pump (petrol does), so all diesel cars have to buy blocks of kilometres as tax. The government get updated when your annual vehicle inspection is done, but between those inspections its up to you to make sure you have enough spare kilometres left for your trips. If you get stopped by police and they check, being too far out is considered to be tax evasion and a criminal offence.

Who are already required to record mileage on UK roads for other reasons, so thats a solved problem.

And in New Zealand you can easily drive miles and miles on private roads, which are not maintained by the government...

I doubt it. The elites have capital to invest in the means of production. Absent this they have no real power or purpose.

When you no longer need to pay countless thousands of people to perform a task this is a double edged sword. It not only means you can make do with less it means anyone else can step in and accomplish the same tasks without you.

Chatbots are trained not programmed. If you have evidence OpenAI's chatbot was explicitly trained to manipulate people then FFS please don't keep it to yourself.

Every byte transmitted over the Internet goes over a telecommunications provider therefore telecommunications providers are responsible for everything.

They have no such thing.

Selling guns to a five year old is itself illegal under the gun control act. Walmart would be breaking the law.

I don't think UK qualifies as a Western Democracy anymore.

It's historically a representative democracy, but the representation has been corrupted by outside influence, including political parties,
and has thus fallen to despotism.

I mean a country is by definition sovereign, so the idea of 'legal precedent' is meaningless. You probably mean that it's not in keeping with the 'rules based global trading order' which is true, but that was/is simply a post-war construct that is getting pretty shaky these days. You're not supposed to be able to slap tariffs on whoever you feel like to strong arm them into doing your bidding either, but here we are.

Ultimately the government of India can fine Apple, or whoever they want, whatever they feel like if their voters don't kick up a fuss. I imagine that Apple has tried to appeal to the government and hasn't made any progress, so they're going for a constitutional ruling since this has authority over the legislature.

But I think Apple still has a lot of leverage here. They probably can't pull out of the country, though I imagine they could threaten it and see if the government calls their bluff. But they have large factory investments there (through Foxconn), people like their products, and I imagine lots of Indians work on products tied to the Apple ecosystem. Closing all of that out would not be good for the Indian economy. There is also wider leverage from the US government. I'm sure Tim Apple can find an even bigger piece of gold to gift to the administration.

In other news, the catholic church is suing OpenAI because they had the idea to simply make suicide illegal a thousand years ago and have been using it ever since.

Not sure if it's a trade secret or a copyright case, the news often don't mention the fine details.

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.