The photo shows it with shoulder-length hair, which in microgravity is a hazard for getting tangled in things like air vents or the robot's own hands. It could just as easily have been made with short hair, or no hair at all. Or is the newsreader look just for the publicity photos on Earth, and they'll swap the hair for something more practical before launch?

The janitor has the capacity to enter into contracts, because he's an adult human and (presumably) isn't mentally impaired in any way, but he doesn't have the authority to enter into contracts on behalf of his employer.

I don't know exactly how it works with online shopping, but I assume that when you place an order, certain employees or managers have the authority to cancel it within a short time, and if they don't, a contract is formed by default between you and the company. There were a few lawsuits about this in the early days of e-commerce, when database glitches or bad programming caused expensive items to be listed at very low prices, customers ordered them, and the company refused to honour the deal. The company's lawyers argued that the contract didn't come into existence when the user pressed the "buy" button, but rather when the company billed the customer's card, or when the company sent an email to say the order had been accepted.

If a court ever rules that an AI can enter into contracts, then companies that use them will update their rules to make it clear that their AIs don't have the authority to do that.

Amazon are presumably confident that there's no easy way to trick their website into selling you a TV for a dollar, so they just wave everything through. If a company wants to use a chatbot in its sales process, they'll just have to post a disclaimer that either it's not allowed to negotiate on price, or that any discount you persuade it to give you has to be approved by a human. This isn't really any different from bricks-and-mortar shops, where the janitor isn't allowed to sell you anything, or the cashier can help you to decide what to buy, but isn't allowed to sell it at a discount just because you asked nicely.

In many countries, though not in the USA, publishing a work under someone else's name without their permission is an infringement of their moral rights. ("Moral rights" in those countries' IP laws are a specific concept relating to respecting or preserving the wishes or reputation of the creator of a work, not a general theory of how people should behave.)

Friedman might have been able to sue Amazon and/or the author of the fake books for libel, but that would have been time-consuming and expensive, assuming the author even lives in a country that pays any attention to the US courts.

"End-to-end encryption" normally implies that the service provides encryption for its users' messages, but doesn't keep any of the keys on any servers that it controls. Keys are held only on users' devices, and encryption and decryption happens there. So if law enforcement want to read a user's messages, they either have to seize the user's device (and defeat its security), or find a flaw in the implementation of the encryption, or brute-force the encryption.

That's the sort of encryption that this bill is aimed at - the service could have decided that it would be able read its users' messages, or pass them on to law enforcement, but has "deliberately blinded" itself by choosing to make that impossible. If, say, you and I agree that we'll use our own encryption for messages sent over an unencrypted service, then I guess technically that's end-to-end encryption too, but that's not what the term normally means. The service wasn't involved in our decision to use encryption, so it hasn't "deliberately blinded" itself to what we're saying.

No, but those don't (or didn't) have end-to-end encryption built in, so if the authorities decided that you were using them to plan or commit a crime, it was relatively easy for them to find out what you were writing or saying.

Or as Brian Kernighan put it, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

So ZO'R TV doesn't have to provide evidence that they own the copyright to the material?

In theory, yes, in practice, probably not. If I file a DMCA takedown notice alleging that some film A that you uploaded to YouTube infringes the copyright in some film B, then the part of the notice where I assert that I own the copyright in B (or I'm authorised to act for B's copyright owner) is made under penalty of perjury. So if I lie about that, I could go to jail. But I've never heard of that actually ever happening.

All the other parts of the notice, in particular the part where I allege that A infringes B's copyright, are not made under penalty of perjury. The official reason is that in the general case, the question of whether A actually infringes B's copyright can be answered only by a court, but you can supply your own conspiracy theory.

It's up to the Prime Minister to decide when to call a general election, with the only restriction being that it can't be more than five years after the last one. Parliament doesn't get to vote on it. Theoretically, Parliament could pass a law to call an election against the Prime Minister's wishes, but as you say, at least 72 Conservative MPs would have to vote for it, and that's not going to happen.

There are several systems of proportional representation, some of which keep a connection between an MP and the area that elected them, and some of which don't. Among the ones that do -

• Single transferable vote, where constituencies elect more than one MP (usually 3, 4 or 5), and voters rank as many of the candidates as they like in order of preference. Unless you vote only for unpopular parties or candidates, there's a good chance that at least one of the candidates you vote for will be elected.
• Various additional member systems, where some of the seats in the parliament aren't filled by someone who was elected by voters in a particular constituency, but filled according to some formula that uses the votes from all constituencies. This makes the number of seats held by each party roughly proportional to the total number of votes cast for that party.

To be fair, most other languages aren't secure against remote code substitution either, but that's probably because their designers assumed no programmer would ever be stupid enough to load untrusted code from someone else's computer at run time. Whereas in most JavaScript frameworks these days, it seems to be the only way to get anything done ;-)

If they'd been able to make the M0 work, they wouldn't have had to spend the time and money to create a new, simpler design, and their customers would've been able to reuse existing hardware and software that are compatible with it. But yeah, a 32-bit chip that can monitor a sensor and emit a signal based on the sensor's value seems excessive.

I assume that 25MHz refers to how fast you could clock it, not how fast you do clock it. In principle, there shouldn't be any reason why you can't clock a modern CPU at 25Mhz, but some operations might time out. For instance, the RAM in modern computers is basically banks of billions of tiny capacitors, each of which can hold a charge or not, to represent a 1 or a 0. The charge leaks away quite quickly, and has to be periodically refreshed. The refresh interval is normally derived from the system clock, so if it's happening at a few percent of the frequency that it's meant to, the charge might drain before the chip has a chance to work out whether it needs to put the charge back. So your RAM might appear to always contain all zeroes.

Lasers bright enough to cause permanent blindness are banned under the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which both Ukraine and Russia have signed up to. Lasers that can cause temporary blindness are OK, though, apparently.

When the Kindle came out, there wasn't a widely-accepted standard for ebooks, mainly because there was hardly any legal market for them. The first open (free to implement) version of ePub that supported DRM was approved in 2007, the same year that the first Kindle came out. Before that, there was an open version that didn't support DRM and a paid-for version that did support it. The format that Amazon chose was created by a company that Amazon bought in 2005, so they wouldn't have to pay licensing for it. They might've left out ePub support at first as some way of competitive differentiation, but once it became apparent that the Kindle had won in the marketplace, I can't think of any reason not to have ePub, other than the usual corporate inertia.