The lawyers (and IANAL) already understand that, which is why they're stressing the "potential damage to these IPs" angle.

Fair use as it applies to a political campaign has four main tests:
The purpose of the infringing use (must be transformative, which this is);
The nature of the work (creative, which this is, receives less protection than factual);
The amount of material and its importance in the original context (each infringement here is tiny); and
The impact on the market for the original work.

IMO, that last point would be the key issue in this situation. It honestly passes the first three tests with flying colors, but it also very likely adversely affects the market for the original content. A third of the country actively avoids anything and everything related to the current administration. If people are plausibly likely to believe Nintendo / Shueisha / Publisher-X don't object to these uses of their material - And the general public have no clue this battle is even going on - They will stop buying it.

We can supplement human vision with those technologies. Currently less than 1% of US cars have any LIDAR capabilities whatsoever, and you'll find a substantial number don't even have backup cameras (only required since 2018).

As for how useful they are, I respectfully disagree. The first thing I, and many others, do when driving a car with a million and one distracting "safety" features is disable most of them. Yes, I know perfectly well I'm drifting out of my lane, now stop nagging me so I can focus on avoiding the real danger a quarter mile ahead!

At face value, very much so. I'm not going to panic until the next decade of appeals plays out, though.

This first round was against defendants who didn't even bother showing up to court (and let's be honest, there really wasn't any viable defense they could have offered here). Thanks to this overly broad injunction, the deep pockets of every ISP and cloud hosting provider in the US now has standing to get involved - And they will, since the precedent this sets could cost them real money in the future.

"Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence"

If Waymo's argument is valid, then humans shouldn't be allowed to drive.

The problem is therefore either solvable purely via optical methods, or this is merely a prelude to banning all of us from driving. And if that's the real end goal, why are we messing around with self-driving single- (or low-) occupancy vehicles rather than investing in viable mass transit?

Not the GP, but I suspect an awfully lot of us have zero interest in "owning" the second most expensive possession most of us have, if we're not allowed to operate them ourselves.

This post is titled "The Days of Walking Into a T-Mobile Store May Be Numbered". I'm not moving the goalposts to ask what the technologically illiterate are going to without "a shop that is literally there to hold grandma's hand" - You're effectively reiterating my premise, if not my conclusion, and calling that out?

As for "telecom shop", I notice you didn't deny not being in the US. Unless you're intentionally speaking with an affectation, Americans wouldn't use either of those words in this context. And look, I'll readily admit you guys are way better off when it comes to phones and service than Americans are. I'm jealous! You have a device and carrier agnostic marketplace that simply doesn't exist in the US.

Could we do the same? Sure - Just convince the FTC and FCC to do their damned jobs rather than protecting corporate profitability.

"Telecom shop" is an important choice of words here. What you describe is not the norm in the US by a long shot.

That said, yes, we're all geeks here on Slashdot. Most of us could figure out how to find a version of phone-X compatible with carrier-Y.

Now have Grandma do it without any hand-holding - Oh, sorry, the cheapest option was carrier locked to the wrong carrier, try again. Oops, this time she grabbed the GSM version when she needed CDMA. Third time's the charm, right? Oh damn, she managed to find a Windows phone? Is she even trying?

I'd love an apartment that has 480V service and a sub-floor plenum!

Might be tough to meet egress though, unless you're splitting each floor into "apartments" the size of a small grocery store (or insanely long and narrow).

The GP is splitting hairs. The key detail here is that Private Relay isn't a VPN, it's basically just a two-hop anonymizing web proxy. Now ask any non-geek to explain the difference.

There are really two separate problems here, one of which very much is Apple's problem, and the other... I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself.

First and most importantly, this isn't limited only to people using passkey; the remote site can ask for it regardless and the response will include the device's true IP.

And second - Private Relay is primarily targeted at people who:
1) Don't understand the difference between a relay and a VPN;
2) Want to browse the web anonymously;
3) The limit of their technical ability is going into settings and hitting a toggle;
4) Have an iCloud+ Subscription (meaning they're paying for this fake anonymity).

Is that Apple's "bug" in the technical sense? Of course not. But they're effectively selling pigs in pokes to customers that can't tell the difference.

I don't disagree in spirit, but not everyone is a middle-class geek. Per the 2024 US ACS, one in seven US households lacked access to a PC at home. And the "have-nots" here are disproportionately members of various under-served demographics (young, old, poor, uneducated, minority).

Here's where it gets crazy, though - Only one in three Gen-Z'ers have (not lack) home access to a PC - And they largely don't want one.

Assuming everyone can just do it from another device is chasing a trend that's already peaked and started to reverse.

I've been on google fi for... I dunno, probably at least a decade now? Maybe more. They just mail me a phone, I turn it on, and it figures everything out. I get a new phone ever 2 years or so. I couldn't tell you what the inside of a phone store looks like because I've never needed to go into one.

PG&E thanks you for your loyalty.

That said, I'm not seriously challenging your assertion - Rather, if we presume you're primarily correct, that's been the case absent financial motivation up until now. Pyros aren't in it for the money, they're in it for the show.

If nothing else, I'm sure investigators would love the short list of who bet on fire-X.

Let's ignore for now the obvious issue of how you solve a problem with an app that requires the very device you have a problem with.

How do they expect people to become new customers in the first place? The #1 reason I go to a cell provider's physical stores is to pick out a new phone, have it activated, and my current phone (if still functional) cloned to it. Are they seriously expecting 100% of new customers to be BYOD Verizon defectors?

I have to suspect this is the "anchoring" opening bid in trying to sneak through a far less obnoxious change, hoping we'll all thank them rather than reaching for the tar and feathers when they announce whatever real change they're aiming for.

This isn't about gambling in general, or even the risk of arsonists making good on their bets.

This is about not making the geriatric scientophobic morons in charge of the country look bad. Their go-to response is always that disasters are unpredictable and there's nothing to be done for it. Meanwhile, the actual experts can all predict wildfire patterns pretty well.

Tough for the degenerates in congress to keep feigning ignorance if the experts are allowed to start raking in $$$ calling their bluff.

No doubt it's the rounded corners on their standalone pocket-GPT appliance.

And given the explicit mention of Jony Ive, that's most likely in the right ballpark rather than purely a joke.

You're entirely right, but Fixed vs Variable costs are a well understood distinction that OpenAI's bean counters aren't merely glossing over here.

If your up-front investment is $1M, each unit of output sells for $2000, and costs $1900 in operational expenses - Your profit is $100 per unit. Once you sell 10000 units, you've broken even and every additional sale is $100 in pure profit. Presuming you expect to sell significantly more than 10000 units, the initial cost is literally irrelevant over the long term.

For a more physical-manufacturing analogy, consider a modern chip fab costing double-digit billions of dollars to build, just to sell fancy chunks of melted sand for a few hundred bucks each. Yet TSMC is one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with net margins slightly over 50%.