If you train a system with protected content in a way that makes it possible to produce a duplicate of that content or an identifiable, non-trivial portion of that content under any conditions, your system is a derived work of the input, and you cannot use it to create additional derived works of the input without permission of the copyright holder unless whatever it is you are doing qualifies as fair use, which seems relatively unlikely if your system can replicate its inputs wholesale and those inputs have commercial value as such.

Systems like that that process images, audio, or video in particular tend to look like a walking talking copyright violation of the first order and unless you basically want Congress or whoever to eliminate copyright protection as we know it someone had better figure out a way for such systems to identify what is uniquely protectable about everything they scan (brute facts probably not for example) and either not to scan it or to quit parrotting anything that is. The same rules that any human author, creator, or publisher is required to abide by in other words. Just because you consume enough electricity to boil the oceans does not give you an exemption from federal law.

The questionable nature of all this aside, this does not appear to be a government seizure of the funds in all the remaining accounts. Those funds simply remain inaccessible until the account owner goes down in person.

According to the Comsure Group: Funds Status: Contrary to some viral claims of "seizure," official SBV statements describe this as a cleanup, not forfeiture. Funds remain in the accounts but are inaccessible until verification. Recovery is possible by visiting a bank in person for biometric scanning—challenging for expats or those abroad. Crypto advocates and some media outlets highlight the risks of prolonged inactivity, which can lead to potential escheatment (funds reverting to the state), but no widespread seizures have been confirmed.

For a variety of reasons I think the desire for a "cashless" society is just short of insane, but it would be interesting to find out why the people in charge in Vietnam felt that this was such a great idea. To me it sounds like a good way to cause a minor dent in your GDP, waste a lot of people's time, and make life *really* inconvenient in any area where there is some kind of natural disaster, long term power outage, or other technical failure.

Pretty sure China was not buying all of Nvidia's chips. I hardly need to explain why. Nvidia does have other customers here and there.

It is a remarkable stretch to claim that copyright extends to turning something on. Copyright doesn't deal with that sort of thing at all. You could say that he did not have a license to turn the device on, but you cannot have a license violation against a party you have no privity of contract with, you can only go after them for some sort of alleged copyright violation.

There is a *reason* why every software company on the planet tries to have users accept a license electronically before installing or using a software package - namely, if they do not there is probably no contract between them at all, and the First Sale Doctrine or something like it generally applies, and the purchaser gets to do all sorts of innocent things (like reverse engineer software for example) that the publisher would prefer to prohibit.

If the end user did not actually purchase the item, things might be different, and that is why it is also common for software packages to include a notice that if the user does not like the offered license terms to please return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. And on occasion shrinkwrap licenses have been enforced in the United States at least, but guess how likely a shrinkwrap license is to apply to the purchaser of a surplus item? As far as I am aware a shrinkwrap license has never been applied to someone who acquired a previously paid for copy of a software package. A vendor might refuse to support such grey market items but that is an entirely different issue.

All that said, if Nintendo is the lawful owner of the item in question, he has to turn the item over to them anyway, and whether he turns it on briefly is irrelevant as long as he does not make an unauthorized copy, or public performance, or something like that.

There are some states especially in the Northeast where natural gas is extraordinarily expensive and has to be shipped in LNG form to local ports because of opposition to expanding supply pipelines. In most of the rest of the country, however, natural gas is cheaper or nearly so than it has been for about twenty years now, down from peak prices by at least a factor of five, partly due to fracking and partly due to producers getting very good at it.

Across most of the country natural gas is replacing coal for baseload power and that is the number one reason why net CO2 emissions have been in decline in the United States for about three decades now.

Solar is a great way to shave peak demand in the late afternoon and evening when combined with batteries, but it cannot provide baseload power during the night or when the sun is not shining. You need natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, or coal(!) for that. But is a great thing as long as Congress quits subsidizing it. It isn't economically efficient to do so (excess deployment due to subsidies make retail electric rates go up not down) and we have a $2T a year budget deficit and we cannot afford it. Same for wind, with slightly different characteristics and more unreliability than solar. Like no wind for weeks in the winter sometimes.

This is what the article actually says:

"A customer can also choose a £649 "lifetime" subscription, but that is tied to the car, not the individual. If you sell your car and buy another ID.3, you would have to pay the fee again."

I agree. If you buy enough power you will get better rates as a commercial customer, in part due to economies of scale and lower transmission costs based on shorter distances, higher voltages, and higher currents to large and relatively large three phase commercial installations. And they usually get time of day pricing as well, sometimes down to the five minute level and usually can adjust demand appropriately. In some states residential and small business customers are punished in the form of higher tiered rates for buying more than the expected amount of power for customers like them however.

Electric utilities generally charge different, lower rates to residential customers than to commercial and business customers and cross subsidize residential customers from the rates charged to commercial customers accordingly. So the public utilities commissions or other regulators involved can simply tweak their pricing formulas so that residential customers feel minimal impact if any from extra loads placed by large datacenter installations.

Furthermore generative AI uses so much power that most new datacenters are having their own mostly natural gas power generators and large batteries installed "behind the meter" in N+1 configurations for reliability, and those generally do not directly affect the external, public power grid and prices charged to utility customers especially residential customers at all, except in some ways to make the electrical grid more reliable through peak shifting and by providing short term backup power.

Contract law is a state matter, so I imagine it would be just short of impossible for the federal government to *preempt* state level restrictions on noncompete agreements especially when both parties are in the same state. However, employment law is already heavily constrained by federal law, and has been since the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. But there states still can and do enact higher standards and tighter restrictions, such as higher, state specific minimum wages requirements and restrictions on noncompetes in California is a good example of that. Fortunately, federal preemption of state law is relatively rare, and is usually based on incorporation of some part of the federal Constitution (such as the First Amendment) against the states.

But as for making noncompetes unlawful nationwide, at least for all but the most highly paid employees, and with reasonable duration restrictions on those, I completely agree. Employees and others should have a right to make a reasonable living with the knowledge and skills they have obtained through their hard work, effort, and diligence as long as they preserve trade secrets and other proprietary information generally governed separately by non-disclosure agreements.

If you knew *anything* about how generative AI systems actually work - think stochastic regurgitation - you would not say such things. I wouldn't trust any such AI system any further than I could throw it. For non-entertainment purposes, such systems are only usable if you are smarter than than the AI *and* double check everything. Contemporary AI systems are subject to model collapse, confabulation, delusional behavior, anti-social or amoral goal seeking if given any kind of leeway, and on and on, as has been well established for quite some time now. And they are only gradually improving in those respects because those weaknessess are fundamental to the way they work. There is no there there - no logic, no reasoning, no reality, no morality, or anything like those things - just garbage in, garbage out.

I don't know, but no one should be burning plastic except at very high temperatures in incinerator and definitely not breathing in the fumes. It just sounded like a ridiculous number to me unless there really are hundreds of millions if not billions of people in the habit of doing so. Possible damage from use of things like plastic water bottles isn't even going to register except as a rounding error. Can't say I lose much sleep about that. But smoky fires are a real problem, and not just from plastic. So if anyone is actually doing that they should just quit, and quit blaming the plastics industry if they are doing something so remarkably stupid.

No one in their right mind believes that plastics are causing 1.5 trillion dollars a year in health related damages. If every household in the world started burning plastics in smoky fires and breathing in as much of the fumes as they could tolerate it would be difficult to reach a figure like that.

Any engineer who says "eliminates fire risk" about something like a grid scale battery is either incompetent or lying. If they were honest they would say something like "greatly reduces fire risk" instead. Everything burns and high power, ionized fluid and reactive metal containing components and conductors burn more readily than average, especially when heat and current are flowing through them. Try getting a copper wire not to burn at high temperatures with lots of current flowing through it outside of a vacuum sometime. Superconductors would not eliminate the fire risk in the battery cells or flow zones either - not even close - probably not even in a vacuum.

Contemporary AI is not so much artificial intelligence as artificial stupidity. This is one of many examples along the same or similar lines.