Your privacy will be violated any which way, but you won't feel it.

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom

If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and taking Daystrom's sanity with it), I think his speech sums up my outlook on technological progress pretty well. If somewhere, someone is toiling, that's an error to be corrected. In a weird way, creating the fat slobs of WALL-E is, in fact, the goal. (Though for some reason, I prefer to picture Hedonismbot from Futurama as my true ideal.)

As for how to solve the resulting "finally, we can all afford to be fat slobs, so now we are all fat slobs" problem, I dunno, someone else can worry about that. ;-)

Not really. Photographers might be swapping SD cards in their cameras all the time, and leave the ones not in use lying about, in a camera bag, coat pocket, or whatever. They are small and easy to lose, so encrypting them at least ensures that whoever finds your card can't get at the images. You might even want the manufacturer to have a copy of the key; in this application the convenience for data recovery in case of damaged hardware outweighs the small risk imposed by such a back door. Maybe it makes less sense on a camera mounted on a vehicle, but still.

It's even worse: the encrypted SD card can be decrypted by anybody who owns the same device. Meaning practically, it's not encrypted at all.

the manufacturer had the decryption key.

Why does this story not make me feel all warm and fuzzy?

Self-hosted Atlassian products seem to be just fine.

As for what "they said", they also said this cloud shit would be cheaper. It isn't.

Have you seen who's in the White House? Remember: he was voted in. Twice. That only happens in a nation with a widespread case of mental retardation.

if all your customers hate it 10x more than humans?

India should protect its pool of human workers: when the backlash against AI hits full force, they'll be well-positioned to retake the market.

I never thought I'd say I find calling customer support and being greeted by this unmistakable heavy Bangalore accent refreshing and reassuring: at least I know I'm talking to someone who understands my question and not something that serves me the nearest matching boilerplate answer from the support knowledgebase in a sycophantic transatlantic accented tone.

Another issue is the lack of affordable public charging. Especially here in Europe with our sky high petrol excise, an EV might be a bit more expensive to purchase but a lot cheaper to run than an IC car. If you can charge at home, that is. Charging at a public charger can be twice as expensive, and if you're forced to use a fast charger it's even more. That changes the economics of EVs rather a lot.

How else will I be able to feel that deep sense of dread when I call any company's customer support and I'm greeted by an overly polite chatbot that's so syrupy it gives me type-2, that doesn't understand my problem and refuses to let me talk to a real person?

Censorship is a big no-no for tech companies. Particularly when it doesn't make then any money.

I hope that doesn't mean the modern game system experience.
80s console: Turn on, 5 seconds later the game is ready to play.
Modern gaming conveniences: Turn on, wait 30 minutes for the console to patch, then another 30 while the game pulls in a 1 GB update.

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?