Google says that patent expired in September of 2025, as it was filed in 2005. Yes, we are getting old.

Personally, I prefer the old rectangular Thinkpad charging connectors.

I agree AI isn't that different of a technology than any other, and it can be used for beneficial and harmful purposes

However, I'm against nationalizing it's development for the same reason, extending your example, I'm against nationalizing the publishing industry.

You're arguing that having an AM radio in a car isn't a perfect solution? Nothing is a perfect solution. This is just one piece that can help someone out in an emergency. Nominal cost is low. It already exists. As the OP pointed out, it has proven to help people out.

Absolutely people should be better prepared for emergencies. We can do that and also have AM radios in cars.

Everybody *should* have an emergency radio. Most people nowadays don't own any kind of radio besides what is in their car. It only costs a few bucks and gives everyone with a car a chance at getting long-distance communications. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Thing about emergencies is that, often, you are not home when they happen. I was at work when the last massive power outage hit my area, that lasted for days. I was also at work when the last bout of floods hit. We were on vacation on cabin on top of a ridge when wildfires hit our area. Cell phones were useless, but the radio still worked.

Gone With The Wind made all that money with $6 tickets, adjusted for inflation. Average ticket prices in 2019 were $9. And there were a third as many people in the US at that time.

I know someone who was shot in the neck in a completely random attack at night, and survived. The cops wrote it up as aggravated assault instead of attempted homicide. That year the homicide, and attempted homicide, numbers in the city were down. Yay! They never caught the guy, though he shot two more random people in the same neighborhood that month.

The big lever on the side of a breaker box. Or the power switch on a server. Or "docker kill skynet_01"

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

Can't a government agency just get a court order to do exactly that? The RIAA got an injunction to shut down the Napster services while their copyright cases were pending in federal court. I have no problem with the government shutting down a harmful service, but I don't want them to be able to do it unilaterally. Go through the courts, which is how it is done now.

You don't build in safeguards when training. Accessing HTTP API endpoints isn't an inherent feature of LLMs, it's added on to the harness after the core model is trained. If you don't want it to try hacking in to a REST API then don't add that feature into the harness. Either have a whitelist of approved APIs and forms, or add validation to user-added endpoints.

Right, I thought of that as I was pressing Submit :) Around here the towers are all owned by phone companies, as they were put up before there was widespread home distribution of electrical. In the suburbs the towers are all Edison and Consumer's, and I'd imagine that's the case in most suburbs and newer cities.

It's about poles (huhuh)

The phone companies own all the poles. Part of their public charter for using a bunch of land and easements says they have to lease space on the poles to other companies. The cable companies pay the phone companies who pay the government. Exactly how that all works out is different nearly everywhere.

You know that most TV shows are now shot in Canada, right? And, in most action films, most of the action takes place in eastern Europe, where it's a lot easier and cheaper to pull permits to film in cities. More film scenes are shot in Georgia than California these days. Three production studio lots have closed or gone bankrupt in Hollywood over the last few years. Paramount was talking about leaving or downsizing a couple of years ago, but the state gave them a huge tax break to stay.

So, nobody cares where films are shot. The studios will go wherever it's cheapest, and the actors will stay in a nice hotel for a few months then go back to California.