Flock is consenting to the search, and it is 'their' data. What the law hasn't really caught up to is whether people have any protection against this kind of collection. We do for bank data, health data, credit data. You can legally turn off your phone to stop its location tracking. You cannot legally drive on public roads without a compliant license plate, so it is reasonable to discuss if you have should have any protection against mass & passive collection of data you are required to display that was not meant for this purpose.

Think FMLA such as childbirth, or military-related absence. You aren't allowed to to fire someone for taking that leave*, nor can you fire them because their 'clicks per hour' metric for the quarter was low *because* they took that leave.

* There are qualifications on if the law applies to your business and if the person themselves qualifies, but here I assume all those are met

One doesn't "just" build a significant power plant; quick search says 2-5 years. Even then you have the problem of transmission infrastructure struggling to get the power to the right places.

* If you think people NIMBY a datacenter, power plants are worse.
* Lead time to permit and build a plant is nontrivial.
* Installing a new rail line or pipeline to get fuel to the plant is slow.

Now, market forces will tend to incentivize more power plant builds if there are economic gains to be had. However a new plant is not suddenly going to cause a reduction in prices -- have to pay off the plant.

Further, the power operators are possibly looking at the prospect of an 'ai bubble' such that they don't want to commit to 10 years of paying off new plants if the datacenters fail to materialize.

Based on a quick search, about 9,000 idle usb chargers would have to be unplugged to equate to a single GPU running a training task. The extra wear/tear on the outlets could eclipse the savings.

It will be interesting to see how the consumer refunds from businesses play out in cases where a bill had a specific 'tariff surcharge' as opposed to a generic price increase.

I suppose one could reasonably argue that having a complete dataset makes it easier for the city to optimize its repair schedule; they can see that there is a cluster in a given area and schedule a crew to fix all of them in one go rather then piecemeal. Yes they could do that today, but this way there is more certainty about the amount of work to be done.

The article doesn't make it clear if the drives containing the key failed (all of them), or if the decryption failed. Assuming the drives agree on the content of the encryption key, it sounds more likely that the *en*cryption key was incorrectly specified, or the vote data was corrupted such that it cannot be decrypted. Or perhaps someone swapped the data during transportation and this is a feature-not-bug.

Pretty sure those mailings aren't hard-pulls; if they were then everyone would have a rock-bottom score from all of them.

If you have a trusted 3rd party that exercises administrative control over transactions, why bother with a blockchain -- you've already established that you trust that providers vision of who has what so the overhead of a blockchain isn't necessary. You could instead deposit your funds with that provider and let them deal with it until such time as you want the funds to leave that provider. You only need blockchain when no party trusts any other party.

CC providers already do this with holdbacks based on amount and chargeback history, I believe PayPal does as well. Coinbase doesn't expose internal transactions to the chain -- same concept.

They claimed to not have plans, and now they do, surprising nobody.

Critical point. In a fair world I'd expect it to be one of the biggies with a deep market. In a less fair world it'll be one that just so happens to be mostly controlled by connected insiders where paying the coinage to publish the stats is in effect a transfer of public funds to those insiders.

Laws change, interpretations of laws change, enforcement of laws change. Once the data exists in their control there is no clawing it back.

This was prior to DoH / HTTPS ubiquity so public wifi hotspots still had some risk, plus it was a fun toy.

Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

Consider the difference between calling a plumber out at 2am on a holiday vs a regular scheduled appointment -- if you wait until it is an emergency it is going to cost more and the result will be lower quality.