I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

The floppy disk ("diskette") was originally developed as a microcode load device for the 370/145.

We are obligated to ignore stupid laws. To mock them, to flaunt them and ultimately get them removed.

We are not sheep.

At the same time, "but I don't like this law" isn't going to protect you from punishment if you break it.

Fight unethical laws with every fiber but you're going to be far more effective if you Chesterton's Fence than if you just stomp your feet and whine.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Windows has been pretty damned stable since Windows 7 was released, that's 2009 for anyone not paying attention. Microsoft changed it so that one bad driver can't crash the entire OS.

Seems Apple is going all out with the paid propaganda of late... Because there's no way they're cheaper. If anything keeping hardware for longer makes it more expensive as you have to deal with more hardware failures, extended warranties, outages, et al. I suspect Apple is using very, very funny maths.

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

*ow!*

uh, found it...

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

It's also possible that Dolby is twisting logic into a pretzel in order to make this claim. It wouldn't be the first far-fetched theory of infringement to go through court.

or maybe it's that it took longer for the majority of people who would be unable to resolve these kinds of problems to get to the point where they relied on the system enough to notice them, and now they're aware they're stranded.

I agree that attention is likely to be a factor (it's a sampling issue, for sure) but that doesn't mean the systems are the ones getting worse (or better. It may be completely orthogonal to them but a common experience of expectations not being met).

It's harder to be exhaustive about the problems than it is to describe instances...

One type of problem has to do with definition of terms... this is sort of relevant to the way current systems work, but only sort of. If one was to redefine (via say, a natural process like semantic drift... note that it doesn't need to be the robot that gets this wrong, so to speak) any of the key terms (like "harm" or "human"), the rule would effectively be meaningless for its intended purpose and instead create undefined behavior.

This assumes the robot is doing any kind of deductive reasoning, which is simply not how they work. When I say it's sort of relevant... it's more relevant than most other objections to the 3 laws, because well...it's a problem that might be affected by the definition of semantic relationships. The AI we have is not the kind of reasoning AI that Asimov imagined... So it's still not actually relevant because LLM chatbots are completely inductive and can't magically give rise to actual deductive processes just by having a developer suspend disbelief and comprehension... but it's more relevant than some of the identified problems that the rules would have with a system that actually did act in the way Asimov expected.

In case you were looking to work towards some kind of better set of rules... don't bother. It's not currently meaningful.