IIRC, in music copyright cases one bar of sufficiently similar notes is enough to justify suing for copyright infringement. And a composition of names is enough to justify the grant of copyright.

Law being what it is, that doesn't really prove anything, but it strongly suggests that a "novel combination" of code should be copyrightable even if all the pieces are public domain.

That's clearly the ideal approach. The problem is that you're likely to end up drowning in submissions.

Yes, but if you take several pieces of public domain code and create a new composition with them, that new composition is copyright. (I don't think you can even avoid having a copyright, though you can have a license that is essentially the same as public domain.)

Well...now I suppose you can avoid a copyright by feeding it into an AI and then having the AI regurgitate it. Or, if I've understood the news stories correctly, by claiming that an AI wrote it rather than "wrote the basic parts which you later adjusted".

Insert simpsons meme here: Largest prime number so far. A native English speaker would understand this to be the meaning unless they were trying really hard to be obtuse.

No, I'd say NASA is a military organization because it exists first and foremost to support our military. Anyone who believes differently has proven their vulnerability to gaslighting. Our spaceflight projects all have direct military applications.

Microsoft keeps claiming they're changing and then I keep seeing new ads for functionality I don't want to use pop up to distract me while I'm trying to work, and yes this is a locked down work environment where an effort has been made to turn all of that shit off. But you fire up Teams after some trivial update and it wants to tell you how you could use AI in it, no I am literally never going to do that on purpose. If Microsoft has changed it's only that they're adding more gaslighting.

It's easier than washing one's balls.

That's a different problem, and I can't speak to it. But chickens could not be raised as they are without LOTS of antibiotics. (I happen to think the way they are raised is an abomination, but it's cheap.)

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

"Vets and wholesalers who supply farmers should be shut right down."

Yes, but... if you do this expect the price of meat to go way up, especially chicken and eggs. Perhaps it's a price we need to pay, but expect that it would need to be paid.

Yes.

For "security' I must be forced to log in again every few hours and change my password every few weeks, but downloading random code off the Internet and then shipping it to customers... sure, that's fine.

It's not just about the packages and whether they are malicious or not. These, so far at least, are not - AFAICT they don't even *claim* do anything at all that is functionally useful to a coder so they are never going to get downloaded; their sole purpose is to earn the uploader some of these TEA tokens which, when amalgamated across a few hundred thousand packages, is presumably worth something to them, or why bother? Now that the jig is up, the people that do like to peddle such malware are probably not looking too kindly on whoever pulled this off.

That's the secondary issue here ; like many similar things, whoever came up with this TEA token either didn't consider, or didn't care about, human nature. Anyone with half a clue, or the slightest care about the integrity of such a scheme, should be well aware by now that if you can earn something of value (which need not be monetary) by doing some online clicks, likes, shares, uploads, or whatever then some asshat is going to try and exploit the system so they can get all the benefits without the effort. If your system isn't baking in countermeasures against that kind of abuse, then it's a PoS that should never have left the drawing board but, all too often, human nature rears its head again and says "ship it anyway!" and the enshitification continues.

They hyperscalers are building out (or re-activating) grid-level power supplies for DCs that are not online yet, so are essentially not included in the 2025 figures. All Electrek (a pro-green energy site with a very obvious bias to that effect) are saying is that we collectively built out enough solar and wind to exceed the overall global increase in demand during 2025. Sure, that's a good thing, but it says nothing about how much excess non-green capacity was decomissioned last year (relatively speaking, hardly any), or by just how much that annual green capacity roll out will need to ramp-up to avoid building/re-activating additional non-green power plants to power the new hyperscaler DCs over the next few years (quite a lot, unless the AI bubble pops and most of them never get built).

Frankly, I'd prefer it if they just stopped trying to put a positive spin on everything green and told it like it is for those too dumb/lazy to read between the lines. Yes, we're collectively rolling out greener energy sources at a decent clip, but still far, far, below the rate needed to achieve any meaningful mitigation of mankind's effect on the climate in the timescales that are probably required. According to Electrek nearly everything moving us towards a net zero economy automatically gets an A+ when the reality is probably closer to a B-, or even a C+, must try harder.

It's weird because I watched a Youtube video the other day where some guy who has a long-established UK car channel had collected all the registration data from DVLC for EV sales in the UK and showed that they'd dropped significantly in 2025.

Is this a case of classifying hybrids as EVs or something?

You think Democrats are going to run on an open "Send all your jobs to China!" platform?