With the ESA supplying the spacecraft, most of the software is likely to be competently written and/or open-source. This will prove to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth.

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

I would think it goes further. If the company has already failed (ie: no longer exists) then the action is not taken by the company but a former employee of that company (even if said former employee was the CEO). Former employees are not granted special authority over PII or over company-owned information.

Irrelevant. PII protections are not subject to company discresion.

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

How the hell can this article start with the premise that this is a "Neo killer" and contain the sentence, "We still don't know what Intel will charge for the chip, nor do we know what you'll be able to buy a Core Series 3 laptop for."

"Intel releases chip to compete with $599 Neo, but who the fuck knows what it will cost" is not serious journalism.

I agree with the whole bit about "power users" being... let's go with "misguided" here, but this:

...Okay? You realize you can do that on Windows, too, right? Or Linux, or BSD, or...

And this bit:

GTFO of here with that BS, what could possess you to make such a bullshit claim... oh.

You're just one of those people that thinks your particular slice is the center of the universe. My dude, there are a shit ton more engineers out there in a ton more disciplines than just "software engineer" and the user population you're talking about is a small percentage of the whole.

It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

This was a default judgement as no one was present to defend Anna's Archive. As such, since no one objected, the remedy is the one proposed by the plaintiffs. This is how the legal system works, there is nothing unusual going on here.

The "worldwide injunction" is, however, an issue the judge should have stepped in on. The USSC ruled on the subject last year that universal injunctions are beyond the power of a district court to grant.

Based on my experiences as a teenager, I would say that "typing and mousing" did indeed affect my reproductive success... but not in a positive manner.

Only idiots spy in person. They either pay for an insider or do all monitoring remotely. When was the last time an actual foreign agent was caught in a base? Now look at the number of times they've used USB keys to import malware, used cash to pay off insiders, or used remote sensing technology like microphones capable of analysing vibrations in windows, or other tracking devices.

I'm looking at where spies are caught. And they are never caught trying to be janitors on bases. If they're caught at all, then it's because the people they bribed to do all the inside work were themselves caught.

You have to go by the evidence and the evidence doesn't suggest infiltration.

Regulation in the modern US is not about a level playing field, it is about corrupt businesses and corrupt officials using regulations as an excuse to persecute competitors.

Look, it's obvious that this will cause an absolute flurry of lawsuits so deep that it will become the new record holder for the world's tallest mountain.

I don't think anyone seriously doubts that.

However, if enough geeks and nerds back up enough of the films each, it could become another DeCSS John/Beowulf moment, where the status quo (who aren't currently in this collection) is untenable and a new dynamic is forced on the industry. It's blatantly obvious the industry intends to be stupid and naive, and learn only through pain, misery, and suffering on all sides, but we can at least TRY to reduce the trauma as much as we can on our side of the equation.

It's better to organize a mass arbitration campaign. One class action lawsuit is likely going to be far cheaper to defend that 50,000 arbitration claims that the company is on the hook to pay for the arbitrator (not to mention the cost of representation at these hearings) even if the case is ultimately found in their favor.

I think the Archive can reasonably get away with this one. Unlike their "we can give away all the books because copyright is no longer a thing because covid" initiative, this effort is clearly and unambiguously archival in nature. Now, if they go and implement some kind of Pandora or Spotify type service for listening to these recordings, they're going to have trouble, but if the recordings are made available in some kind of academic setting they should be fine.