errr... Apple doesn't charge for its operating system. macOS literally doesn't have a price.

Forget legal power ... HOW? What technical mechanism does the FCC have that can block firmware updates over the public internet? Are we proposing a China-style "Great Firewall" for U.S. consumers?

But your copy and pasting [...]

I don't cut and paste, but I do quote.

Don't let any of the art or art history profs at the local college hear you say that, they'll probably turn violent!

I've talked to quite a few, I'm still in one piece ;-)

Yes, I agree that voluntary attendees are more likely to actively engage. If they've been lucky enough to learn the process at school or elsewhere, they will know how to proceed.

But Bones, it's AI. Just not as we know IT.

Sitting and Looking at Art as a form of appreciation is not really a form of engagement. Engagement means using your brain and actively performing tasks with a goal. That's not true if you're merely enjoying an image, a natural environment or even a movie, passively. It is true if you're an art critic preparing an essay in your head without using an LLM.

There are things that seem like appreciation but are actually engagement. For example, meditation. It isn't sitting still, it is concentrating for the purpose of total awareness and control of one's body and its automatic functions. It's quite stressful when you're a beginner.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Not at all. When it's rigged, it's not gambling,and the law agrees with me.

And that's why OP was not allowed to drive taxis at the time. Can you say the same for AIs?

On the contrary, evidence seems to suggest that AI has long been very good at generating zero-day vulnerabilities. It has a little more trouble with identifying and avoiding them.

The high US insurance prices aren't funding a lot of medical research. The research is done around the world in universities and research institutes at a steady rate.

The US pharmaceuticals want a lot of money from Americans so they can *develop* the existing research into products and corner the market. That is not cheap, because the bar to entry is high. The bar to entry is high because when private corporations rush to market, they make mistakes. And they rush to market only so that they can beat their competitors.

Other countries don't mind waiting a little longer to see if the rushed drugs have side effects. This lowers their price. Because once the pharmaceuticals have served the impatient clients first, their marginal costs are almost zero and the added revenue is effectively free.

It's not gambling when a participant can act on insider information.It's a rigged system.

The comparison with casino games is not appropriate. The casino merely biases the outcome to give players a less than even chance of winning. That chance is low, but guaranteed to be nonzero, and the gamblers are able to agree to the conditions of the game in full.

Insider trading causes the "gambler" to be deliberately misled into thinking a particular game is being played when it is not.

3D printers are bought all around the world, and many countries do not have the lawful right to carry or manufacture personal weapons designed for killing people.

Bambu Lab wants to sell its products in the wider international markets - for the purpose of increased profitability of course. Therefore, it needs to optimize its offerings so that it doesn't fall afoul of the law in all countries of interest simultaneously.

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.