Lots of countries have laws which manufacturers don't like, and yet they continue selling their products in those countries anyway because although they are obviously trying to push for more profit at the expense of the customers, if given the choice between lower profits or simply none at all they'll take the lower profits while bitching and moaning about it.

And in the hypothetical situation that they did stop selling in a country, then their competitors would just come to dominate the market instead.

Who's to say the local version has to be inferior? With sufficient budget, as well as being able to build what works directly rather than having the learning process earlier players went through there's no reason it needs to be inferior.

And even if it is, heavy marketing could easily overcome that without having an outright ban on the foreign alternatives.
Plus if the government uses it themselves, they could tie essential services in to it - effectively forcing people to use it.

You won't get real legacy IP with most new providers these days, at least not without playing extra - sometimes a lot.

The only reason companies like comcast can offer it is because they got huge allocations back when that was possible, and since their customer base is declining they have plenty spare.

It's not LLMs that will replace such people, its robots and even manually operated machinery as such people are typically employed in manual labor fields anyway. And this has been happening for a long time, and spreads into more areas as robots become cheaper and more capable.

One of the biggest problems with existing programs is fraud (ie people making claims who shouldnt). Because such fraud happens there is then a lot of money spent on enforcement, as well as entitlement checks for anyone applying.
With a UBI scheme everyone gets it by default, so there is much less fraud and no entitlement checks. Everyone simply gets it wether they're employed or not.
It also means that actually working is beneficial, because someone working will always be better off than someone relying solely on their UBI. Contrast that with the current system where someone on low paid work might actually be worse off, or could be claiming welfare anyway to top up their low salary (more complexity).

You have a camera in your phone, you have a laptop, makes no sense to buy a separate camera for use with the laptop.

Skype used to have "supernodes" that were not encumbered by NAT, and would route traffic through them.
CGNAT was also a lot less common when skype was using this system. When MS bought it, they moved it to a centralized model.

There's nothing to stop individual participants from recording or transcribing, a centralised model only makes sense for a closed user group - eg internal use within a company and SIP very much provides for that while still allowing individual participants too.

NAT traversal requires a centralised server of some kind to coordinate, and is often unreliable. There are lots of different methods, and none of them work 100%.

Centralized services require enough bandwidth to support all the users, this is far from cheap for a system of any scale, especially once you start pushing high resolution video.
They also require geographic diversity, if the users are in france and the servers are in tokyo the latency is going to be horrific, large players like microsoft can afford to host equipment around the world but this excludes smaller players from the field. Even for a large player like microsoft they don't cover every country, so the service still trombones for a lot of people in smaller countries.

Netmeeting may well be a microsoft product, but it was just an implementation of H.323 and there were other implementations that could be used, netmeeting is just the most well known. There was also SGIMeeting back in the day that ran on IRIX and let you video conference using the SGI Indycam/O2cam that those respective machines had, and it could interoperate with netmeeting, as well as other implementations for other platforms.

Because of how netmeeting worked, when you made a call to someone that call was directly to that user, and only traversed whatever ISP networks existed between the users - so a call between two users in france would stay in france. It did not depend on a centralised server,

It is NAT that killed off direct protocols like this, and pushed people onto centralised platforms.

You used to have various standard video conferencing software - eg microsoft netmeeting back in the days, which allowed direct communication between individuals without depending on a central service. Larger orgs could run a central service of their own if they wished, and external callers could connect in to it.

Now most users only have partial legacy connectivity encumbered by NAT and might not have IPv6 so this peer to peer approach no longer works, instead you get locked in to a centralised system. And since these centralised systems require a LOT of bandwidth and geographical diversity to reduce latency they cost huge amounts to keep running.

So the real answer is finish the deployment of IPv6 (which France is doing quite well at compared to other countries) and then use existing standards like SIP instead of relying on centralised services.

If the company doesn't operate in $COUNTRY then they're not liable for anything there at all.
If the employee is working in $COUNTRY then he is responsible for his own tax affairs as an employee of a foreign company. This is nothing new, people have worked for foreign companies that have no local presence for many years.
Also for this to apply you have to spend a significant amount of the year in the country, typically between 90 and 180 days depending on the country before you become liable for local taxation.

Did he still do his work?
Then whats the problem where he did it from?

Sounds like you're jealous he got to do his work while sitting on a beach, while you had to waste hours of your time trekking into a miserable office every day.

Most "creative" works nowadays are built upon years of influence from other existing work. What an LLM is doing isn't all that different really.

Note that in many countries locking handsets is explicitly illegal because it is nothing but harmful to consumers.

The idea that it prevents people from reneging on their contract terms is a flat out lie, there are already well established laws and processes for breaches of contract.

It's SOLELY to squeeze more money from customers.

Lots of people want to use phones with other simcards, especially when travelling...

Someone who's going to stop paying for service is still going to do that regardless of wether the phone is locked or not.

A GPS tracker on a car does not prevent legitimate usage of the car unless you were limiting it to specific roads or areas, which would be entirely unreasonable.

Locking the phone does absolutely nothing to prevent someone from defaulting on the contract terms. What it does do is coerce them into buying a more expensive roaming package, or force them to continue using the service in cases where they otherwise wouldnt, or prevent them from using the phone at all if they visit areas where the operator has poor/no service etc.

It also prevents other perfectly legitimate activity, for instance someone may get a new handset on credit but choose not to use it, which should be noone else's business so long as they're paying for it. I know several people who get new phones this way and then give them to family members as the individuals in question are perfectly happy to continue using old/dumb phones. The operators know this use case well too, so they want to force those family members to buy service from them even if they otherwise wouldnt.