Paying the publishers, not the authors. Whoever actually wrote it, researched it, invented it, or created it still gets squat.

From TFA and quoted in the story, it wasn't the convention floor.

Yes, and the point you quoted still stands, they are a starting point.

The always relevant XKCD comic explains it well enough: those laws in that order are essential as the starting point. Different order or missing entirely is guaranteed bad. But as pointed out through all kinds of science fiction writing, there are many ways we can understand they are insufficient.

Right now I'd agree they're exactly backwards, or as the XKCD comic described, on track to become a "killbot hellscape". We need even more rules and regulations than that, but as a set of fairly obvious first steps penned 80 years ago, they're pretty blatantly an essential first draft of baseline rules that are missing today.

Yes but also no.

The regulation isn't about "taking a cut", but primarily about financial crimes like money laundering and insider trading. Generally there are age requirements, as minors can't buy stocks or enter into futures contracts, though custodial accounts where the minor is authorized to use it are allowed. Every transaction is also associated with registered brokerage companies, every transaction tied to a taxpayer ID and account information. To participate the government requires documentation with a full legal name and government issued ID, and assorted other information to verify the person's identity.

In regulated markets every step has a paper trail can be tied back to a responsible human, the person who could potentially be jailed or fined for financial crimes.

There needs to be accountablity, but there almost never is.

The police and prosecution tend to get consequences casually dismissed, "you win some, you lose some", or "mistakes are human, live and learn." Sometimes lawyers have a professional repremand, very rarely fines, but not time behind bars.

If the man is lucky, he might get compensation for the time locked up, and maybe some of the legal costs. Most likely it will be only a small portion, if at all.

If there is any compensation it won't restore his job, his relationships with friends and family, it won't compensate for the negative experiences in the legal system nor behind bars, it won't compensate for the lost opportunities and missed experience in the time he was detained, and it probably won't be enough for the lifetime of therapy he'll need, and that his family may need.

Yeah, on reading the links, it looks like his lawyers already have a lot of that covered.

The law they are using is 18 U.S. Code 2232, and it's on pretty shaky ground. If you're reading it at non-lawyer eyes, sure the law uses words that seem to fit.

For the current administration, that's all they need to make the accusations.

For the defense lawyers there's going to be a long list of reasons that law doesn't apply, and it's got all kinds of reasons the judge is going to dismiss it. The "Terrorism Response Team" has a rather high burden of proof.

The laws are simple enough. The landline companies are given enormous public benefits, right-of-way access, monopoly access to customers, and more. They're also told as a responsibility they must provide services to certain groups, a relatively small cost in comparison to the tremendous benefits.

They're might quick to back out of the responsibilities when it has a tiny cost.

It would be interesting if the state were to counter-offer, yes they can cut off the few thousand customers, in exchange for being charged for every square inch of that is currently a free or low-cost easement for their cables, wires, boxes, conduits, poles, and towers, plus the adjacent ground cleared for them. And bills for billions of dollars in property repairs and damages done in the process, and an escrow account with funds to remove all the lines, conduits, poles, and towers when that eventual day comes.

The simple rules for EMS are that if they have to drive dangerously or race to the victim, then they are dead already.

Yes the prompt treatment will help, and in a few cases those extra minutes are crucial, but typically the difference is minor.

Location matters. In the article the cities are Los Angeles and Austin. A drive to the nearest EMS facility, ambulance station, fire station, hospital, or similar is likely under three minutes, at least one will be nearby, as fire stations particularly are placed based on short travel times. Also in the article, these are people who they are trying to wake for a long time, in the opening story "nearly an hour".

Driving to any of a variety of EMS locations would be straightforward and faster than the nearly hour long wait for the story.

There are plenty of other rural areas where the nearest EMS facilities really are an hour away, but that's not where robotaxis are getting deployed. When that does eventually happen, it will be best to coordinate with an ambulance and have the vehicle drive towards the ambulance, meeting somewhere in the middle which still would save time for the potential patients, or more likely, the passed out drunks, but it is still a faster option for getting them to a qualified human.

Unregulated gambling is a long-established haven for criminal enterprise.

Money laundering is the most likely, and historically it is trivially easy when they're unregulated. Criminal enterprises, anything from scam call centers to major white-collar crimes, they don't care if they lose a high percent, as long as the money is laundered in the end. Wash a bunch of money betting on both sides of the bet, they'll lose half but still the money comes out clean.

Insider trading is hard to catch, and we're seeing a lot of people connected to influence, like the teleprompter guy and assorted military folk who are getting caught. They almost never are caught, especially the highly skilled ones.

Hiding fraud, hiding embezzlement, racketeering, extortion systems, they're all havens in unregulated gambling.

Kalshi and Polymarket are the big ones and given their nature of distributed unregulated gambling, they're absolutely major elements in both organized crime and casual financial crimes.

He's typically pragmatic about it, and the attitude serves well.

Is it a real bug? Are POSIX standards violated, or user code broken by a operating system's promise? If yes, it needs to be fixed. If no, it has already wasted too much time.

Unfortunately, it's complicated.

For large companies, yes, there are enough lawsuits all the time that retention rules are to keep everything.

For small companies and individuals, generally there are minimal retention policies in place. That's the big reason for sending out the notices, so they have legal notice not to delete anything that might be evidence in the lawsuit. Even if they casually or unwittingly deleted it before, they're on notice now to preserve it.

The allegations are pretty serious, and digital paper trails through emails could be quite damning if people were specifically asked to bring along intellectual property from a past job. Assuming news reports are accurate, at least a few of those requests came through emails and text messages, so it would be a big deal if anyone deleted them.

Yes but no.

They could have left support for old drivers. They're dropping support for the encrypted drivers they used to support.

For your comparison, the thing about encrypted overlays on file systems is that the encrypted overlay works independently. People will move simply by virtue of using a natively-encrypted file system is easier and more convenient than an overlay system. But nothing precludes the use of an overlay if people want to do it themselves.

In this case there is no more support. It's a migration at gunpoint: "migrate or lose your data".

For lots of users it's a whole lot of nothing. Lots of people have already moved over years ago. For old archives and legacy systems, it's brutal. Re-encrypt the old archives, re-encrypt the old systems, or lose them.

There are still low-volume subs that are worthwhile, and good communities that use it. I've got an account, and interact with mostly friends in a few subs, most are in the low hundred users, but a few like /r/cooking and /r/photography are higher traffic.

I understand requiring accounts for the interface, anonymous use is unfortunately abused.

That said, the day they kill off old reddit or subvert my ad blockers is the day I stop going back. The endless scroll design and ad-powered updates are unbearable for me.

This is great fodder for lawsuits around competition / anticompetitive business practices, and consumer protection lawsuits.

On their face, individual agreements that lock in prices as a voluntary agreement are enforceable. However, an awful lot of laws kick in when they are more than an individual contract and from the story they're hitting 16 of the biggest ones, and therefore a lot of the market.

Depending on the market such as the country or the state, there are potentially enormous penalties that can be applied. For some laws, the fines can be 2x the gains. If these account for 40% of the company's revenue, the massive fines would mean 80% of their revenue for as long as the profiteering was on the books. In the short term while they grind through the courts they'll look like a windfall, in the long term when court rulings come down they'll look like bankruptcy, as potentially years of revenue get charged to massive fines.

And that's the core of the issue.

If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.

If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.

As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.

A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.

I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.