We go to school and read copyrighted material. We are tested on how well we can remember the copyrighted material. We are given essay assignments where we are to analyze and draw conclusions about the copyrighted material. Learning simply involves ingesting copyrighted material and making sense of it. There's no getting around it. We all did it in grade school.

Copyright holders do not seem to be lining up to sue Doctors who have memorized the copyrighted material. The only reason they would even entertain the idea of suing AI companies is the perception that their material singularly caused the model to make money. In fact, we don't know how the model learns. When/why does it get good at math? When does it get good at translations? What causes it to understand logic problems? If we knew exactly how it worked, we could probably get the same effect with synthetic data. For now we should treat the ingestion of copyrighted material just as we do for students. It's part of an education of how the world is.

Top apex predator out of it's mind on cocaine! Ha.

Is it possible that in seeking maximum truth the AI may not find that human activity is interesting? What if it decides man is ruining the planet? Man is the problem? Therefore man must go! Truth is subjective based on perspective and values. There are sets of facts. What they mean, how we think about them, comes down to values and perspective.

Ants exist. Birthday cake exists. Ants are on the birthday cake. Is that OK? From ant's perspective - hell yeah! From my perspective - I don't care. From someone attending party - ant's must die! Truth is malleable.

It is only 48 days until Biden is President. Let him bluster and threaten and veto. Run the same bill past Biden.

"Understand this is pure conjecture here" this is the only true part of this piece. This is all made up. It's a technology decision many years in the making if you've paid attention. Blogged about, speeches made, etc. Nothing out of the blue about it.

Considering that phone companies stop pushing updated OS to their devices within 18 months, there will be a huge incentive to hack old phones. I mean there already is due to banking by phone. But this just adds an incentive for state actors. If they were able to get mobile operators to push security updates longer than the 18 months after release, then maybe consider it.

> A genius in the tech industry "can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives

A genius in one field may not be fully immersed in another field. Meaning, the people that cross boundaries are likely to have 2 degrees. I may be great at hammering out C code for databases, but doing genomic matching or analyzing fluids and determining drug interactions is a whole other discipline. To make the breakthroughs the world needs means primarily having a degree in another field and knowing how to program. A person well versed in data structures can make your program faster, but cannot determine what the data means and how to act upon it. So, don't pick on programmers...we're good at what we do. Instead, encourage non-programmers like doctors/researchers to learn how to code. Others can refine their ideas from the prototype.

Suppose an employee at a recording label run across an old Beatles tape. Suppose they listened to it and thought everyone should hear it. Their employer said no because the band did not want it published. So, does this hypothetical employee have the right to go to the Rolling Stone or Spin magazine and have them publish the music and do a review? The tapes would have been a source of journalistic material. But at the end of the day it is theft of private property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedia,_Inc.

Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, trivago, Venere.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway. This may explain why the prices are stagnant. Also, when they actually were cheaper it was before the big hotel chains/airlines had a decent web interface that was hooked up the reservation system. Now, its generally cheaper to go direct since there is no middleman.

I would like to predict that eventually robbing a drone in mid-flight will occur. Have you ever seen seagulls trying to steal a piece of food from each other mid-flight?

More updates, more often...

You can be tracked and identified by a large number of ways. Its not just cookies, its anything you click on, its hidden variables, its the URL, applets, javascript, and even your IP address. Have you heard of a Firefox plugin called Ghostery? Look at all the things it blocks. That will give you more clues about how you are being tracked. Cookies are not in themselves bad. They were designed for developers to cache information so that they could remember what the user was doing when they clicked. Advertisers decided to use them for different purposes. Then agains, the web sites are partly to blame. They want to know what you were doing, what pages you liked, where you spend time. It lets them know what interests people. But the sites have found that by signing up for programs that track users across multiple sites, they can get a deeper understanding of their customer. So, they deploy tracking code/cookies/pictures so that the companies who track across multiple sites can get info to share with them. Its really complicated.

This is on the heels of an announcement by NIAP that common criteria evaluation of operating systems is too hard:
https://www.niap-ccevs.org/Documents_and_Guidance/ccevs/GPOS%20Position%20Statement.pdf

It was in a paper I read not too long ago that thieves use a radio jammer so that the car never gets the signal to lock. Some cars lock the doors silently and some do it with a short honk of the horn. So, if its the type that is silent, then most people never notice the car did not lock when they pushed the button and walked away.

> Checking against a particular table to see the sales tax rate and then calculating it and adding it to a particular line item wouldn't be all that complicated.

Each state has a table. You have to look up the zip code to cross to a county to see what the county's tax rate is because some county's add 0.5 to 1% above the state's. Some cities have a tax, too, so this has to be taken into account. These tables change all the time. Then you have some goods that are taxable and some that are not. Florida, for example, does not tax foods. Then you also have "tax free" periods like back to school. Which state is doing that which weekend or week? Its a huge mess for any small company to deal with. Only the big companies can navigate this.

It would be a wise business strategy for the incumbents to back this idea/bill as a way of sealing off any new comers.