There are just some people who are too stuck in their ways to ever own an EV.

There are those people who don't want to ask their vehicle for permission before they can drive it. They want to turn the key and go, not be tied to an app or some nebulous company who can disable the vehicle they bought on a whim

you will own nothing, pay a subscription to get your purchases downloaded, and like it.

you will own nothing, pay a subscription to get your purchases downloaded, can have it taken away at any moment, and like it.

Fixed it for you.

Make IBM Great Again: go back to .. leasing computers?!

Nobody remembers or cares that a B-2's toilet cost $23k, so the Pentagon is updating to a newer, better form of government waste that kids today will better understand.

"The whole network" hasn't been copper-based since the late 20th century. Long-distance phone connections went microwave in some areas by the 1970s and were largely fiber by the '80s or early '90s.

When people talk about "copper based" these days they typically mean either from the local traditional telco switch to the premises, from the neighborhood "box" (typically a fiber-to-copper conversion box, but possibly a radio-to-copper converter) to the premises, or from somewhere on the premises (e.g. your cable television or fiber-provider's VOIP-to-analog modem) to the analog telephone device, depending on context. The bottom line is to the end user, it "looks like" plain-old-telephone-service to a device that works on a POTS (analog) line, preferably with a cost that is no higher than a POTS line would be.

In the areas that are truly cost-prohibitive, nobody else will want to do it without some kind of subsidy.

Have you considered cell service with an analog-phone-to-cell-phone adapter? That will give your kid a phone he can call in or out on along with reliable 911. If long power outages are a problem, keep the phone on a charger 24/7 that's plugged into a UPS with enough juice for several days.

Even simpler: a "kiddie cell phone" that can only talk to parent-approved numbers plus 911.

If you have land-line-cable-TV available, you should be able to get a cable-tv-analog-telephone-adapter that has a several-hour battery in it. As long as the cable-tv-provider doesn't lose power you'll be good to go.

In the short term - like maybe for 10-15 years - allow AT&T to use satellite and terrestrial radio technologies as the backhaul for copper-to-your-house and bill you the "normal" land-line rates. In rural areas this might be nothing more than a satellite- or cell-to-copper conversion box sitting outside your house.

Sure, they will lose money (possibly hundreds of dollars per year) on every customer but it's far cheaper than maintaining a copper plant in hard-to-reach areas.

Eventually though the regulators will have to tell customers "sorry" to regulated-low-cost service in expensive-to-serve area: If you wan to live in a hard-to-reach area, expect to pay a lot more for services or possibly even not have them available at all.

This doesn't solve the problem for providing affordable communications to people who live in areas where satellite and terrestrial radio can't reach. I'm not sure if there is a feasible solution for these customers.

Yes, and no.

In many places the cost of putting in new fiber even where the poles and other infrastructure exists is cost-prohibitive. In those places, other options including satellite, fixed-wireless, and wireless-backhaul-with-fiber-to-the-premesis should be considered.

In a few very remote areas where even satellites can't reach, the only economical answer will be "tough, when the copper fails you will be without service" because it may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in what amounts to new service to serve maybe one residential customer. I don't know of any such places where people actually live in the continental United States, but it's possible that there are a few.

3-5 cups a day of coffee might be associated with less cardiovascular risk? Who paid for this? Guess what else 3-5 cups of coffee is associated with? In no particular order: excessive sweating, inability to sleep, the jitters, lethargy once caffeine wears off, heart burn, excessive pissing, shitting your brains out and let's not forget withdrawal if you try to quit. I'll stick with my single six ounce cup in the morning, thanks.

As I say in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in more detail here: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
        The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
        We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
        Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ..."

I can't guaranty 100% that we survive AI by embracing an abundance perspective, but it is probably 100% certain that we will all be doomed if we keep our current scarcity perspective while using such powerful technology.

Kind of like if a teenager is given a muscle car and they drive it a top-speed everywhere while ignoring stop signs and traffic lights (and also drinking, while being sleepy, and texting, and not wearing a set belt, at night). A disastrous crash is almost certain if someone drives that way.
"Risk Factors for Teen Drivers"
https://www.cdc.gov/teen-drive...
      "Teens are more likely than older drivers to speed and to allow shorter distances from the front of one vehicle to the front of the next. These risky driving behaviors appear to be worse when a male teenage passenger is present. 35% of male drivers and 18% of female drivers (ages 15â"20 years) who were involved in fatal crashes were speeding at the time of the crash in 2020."

Of course, AI for self-driving vehicles might help with those teenager issues. Then sleepy teens can drink and text all they want while the AI chauffeurs them around at a safe speed. :-)

Although the teen may still be at a psychological risk of feeling dis-empowered and frustrated as described in regards to AI in 1947 in "With Folded Hands" depending on the specifics of how that all is implemented: :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/......
        "With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908â"2006). In writing it, Williamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."

Other people with reasonable concerns about AI and how we will use it include:

* Tristan Harris, who gets that we need more compassion in our relation to technology and each other:
"Tristan Harris's New TED Talk, and "AGI Beyond the Buzz: What Is It, and Are We Ready?""
https://centerforhumanetechnol...

* Mo Gwadat, who gets that we have a problematical competitive perspective for developing and deploying AI:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

An interesting phrase here of "Sleep-racing into the machine":
https://www.theepochtimes.com/...
        "If we slow down, someone else wins. If we regulate, we fall behind. If we hesitate, another nation dominates the future.
        Humanity has heard this logic before.
        We once raced to build nuclear weapons under the same justification. But eventually the world understood that capability alone could not be the moral compass. At some point, nations realized that endless acceleration toward destructive power was not wisdom.
        Why are we incapable of having that same conversation about AI?"

Malware is any software that runs on your computer but is intended to serve the interests of someone else.

Calling it malware isn't so much inaccurate as it's unspecific. Not all malware is adware, but 100% of adware is malware.

They do business in the EU. If you do business in a country, you are subject to their rules and regulations.

Ya, thank goodness the U.S. is going to build some new large battleships so that the Russkies, Chinese, NORKS, and Iranians have decent sized targets to shoot at.

The current Ford-class aircraft carriers are decent-sized targets to shoot at. They are bigger than a battleship.

From: "On Funding Digital Public Works" https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
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What have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought?

Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).

We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?

Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?

Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.

And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.

Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?

If, for example, automotive intelligence was developed under some form of copyleft license like the GNU General Public License, then at least car owners or their "software mechanics" would be assured they could have access to the software in source form to ensure safe operation. What might be "street legal" in terms of software modifications might be a different story -- in the same way people can't legally drive with a cracked windshield or a broken headlight. For example, software changes might need to first be proven safe in simulation before being provisionally "street legal". But, the important thing is, foundations or government agencies funding code development could insist on some form of free licensing terms for automotive intelligence as a matter of public policy.

There are many other areas of human activities that the exponential growth of technology will effect. Automotive intelligence is just one of them that is here now and which I am familiar with from tangential interactions at universities with people developing it. In enough time similar issues will arise for the software behind household robotics or intelligent devices that assist the elderly or handicapped. The IBOT wheelchair by Dean Kamen using complex software to balance on two wheels is just the beginning of such devices.

Note the IBOT wheelchair was developed entirely with private funds it seems, so the reasoning in this essay does not apply directly to it. Also, in general Dean Kamen is a role model of a socially responsible for-profit inventor. Still, the issue arises of whether "Johnson & Johnson" should be funding such development, as was the case, as opposed to, say, the "Robert Wood Johnson Foundation", as was not, given the public policy issue of whether individuals should be continually dependent for personal needs on proprietary software. In either case it would be worth it to pay billions for such innovation, and the public will pay that in the end as a toll on for such devices.

There is a real question here of how our society will proceed -- mainly closed or mainly open. It is reflected in everything the non-profit world does -- including the myths it lives by. The choice of myth can be made in part by the funding policies set by foundations and government agencies. The myth that funders may be living by is the scarcity economics myth. How does that myth effect the digital public works funding cycle?
====

Glad to see more people -- including also with Princeton roots -- taking up the cause!!! :-)