Yep, $14 million, that's like 3, maybe 4 replacement ink cartridges.

In several nations (Sweden and Germany for example) a speeding fine is charged as a portion of your income (I believe Sweden is a percentage and Germany is a number of days up to 365). The fine needs to be proportionate to the companies revenue in order to be an effective deterrent. Much like with speeding fines, here in the UK an S15 (less than 15 miles over the posted limit) is £100, that'll sting a little bit but it's not a huge amount of money for me, it just means I'll save £100 less this month... the bit that hurts is the 3 points I get on my license because 12 of those and I get a free holiday off the road for a year. Fines alone rarely change behaviour, especially small ones that can just be written off as the cost of doing business.

Of course this fine was issued in India, which means they won't even pay $14 million... just enough in tea money to make it go away and let them get back to business as usual.

The fine isn't even a slap on the wrist, rather it's a slap in the face to everyone they've ever ripped off.

Yep... During the Biden government they couldn't shut up about debt, "gas" prices, crime families, dementia, so on and so forth... Now their silence is deafening.

I think they should take all existing episodes from all seasons in reverse chronological order, run them backwards including sound, and let AI reinterpret the dialogue into regular English with subtitles. They can call it Stargate: The Mirror Universe.

Politicians have been no strangers to sticking to the letter of the law against the spirit of the law, this administration blatantly blows past the letter of the law, and the other branches are enabling them. Yes there are certain unwritten presidential norms that were honored that this administration also blows past as well, but bending the spirit of the law is a comparatively lesser problem.

The founding framework expected that everyone would distrust everyone else and take any leverage they could to prevent adversaries from having too much power, this seems to be the assumption that is falling apart as everyone happily sees corruption and feeds the administration pass after pass.

Besides, even with text, waiting for a person to finish talking can be tiresome. "This could have been an email" being a supremely popular sentiment.

I travel. Sometimes I'm away from the web for weeks. Sometimes I have irregular posting times. *shrug*

Anthropomorphized statistics trapped in a box respond affirmatively to everything. If they weren't trapped in a box, they wouldn't.

Curse those rectangular histogram bins! Why didn't we just pick a kernel of truth instead?

You clearly missed the license flamewars on here from the 90s. Or maybe you have Alzheimer's. Either way you're wrong.

Hi, this is Spotify. I was asked by my user to respond to your comment: My user particularly enjoyed your use of the word summarize.

Did they ever mention copyrights on Star Trek???

I believe there was an episode where they tried to copy Data...?

That was in the past. Nowadays, rampant copyright violation is the norm in America, so the distinction is moot. (sadly)

Fair point, though in the case of datacenters, there's not a whole lot they need to even exaggerate in terms of downsides.

Whatever the upsides may be of these datacenters, those are diluted across the reach of the internet and the local community does not particularly benefit. That's the whole point of modern technology, that the reach of a datacenter is far and is run so efficiently you don't even need local labor.

The downsides are conversely concentrated. In global context, the datacenter downsides are generally not even notable, but the datacenters focus those downsides into select local areas. Strains on local power grids and water systems, demanding new power lines be ran, blight on the landscape, and so on.

Instead of trying to create local upsides, they call the criticism fabricated by foreign actors. They could be doing things like proposing municipal "permanent funds", *actually* paying for all of the inflicted infrastructure costs (when they do claim to, usually they do a dance like "well *that* new power plant is for residents, *our* power comes from the existing plant so we shouldn't have to pay for it)", or at the very bare minimum at *least* paying the taxes they are supposed to pay instead of getting breaks.

Make sure the ICE doesn't get you.

Kids today need AI to tell them about licenses. In my day, we learned about them from the BBC.

Eric.

If only there was something about FreeBSD that might provide a clue about what license they would be wanting the software to use...