I'm really hoping that occurs. But right now, Starship has run into a lot of delays, and we cannot rely on this turning to work out to be as cheap as we hope for our long-term planning. The expectation for the Space Shuttle was also that it would drastically reduce launch costs. It didn't for a wide variety of reasons. Starship incorporates a lot of lessons from that, including no use of solid fuel, much more improved heat shield, and using methane for the main liquid rocket engines rather than the harder to use hydrogen. (In general, one of the major insights the last few years has been that paying a small performance penalty in engines is worth it if it makes the engines cheaper and easier to reuse. This is essentially the design philosophy behind the Falcon 9's Merlin engines also, even as they did end up being pretty high performance engines even though they used kerosene. And the Raptor is going to be pretty high performance even though it uses methane.) And Starship doesn't have the engineering restraints being insisted upon to make the US military happy with weird orbital profiles. But whether that's enough is genuinely not easy to predict.

Huh. I had no idea that the prices had gone down that far. That's very neat.

I don't think that's correct? Possibly I'm misreading this, but it looks like the study involved giving two things, both the Keytruda, and a separate personalized vaccine.

Unfortunately, we've already seen people refuse to take treatments for deadly diseases even when they have them. In the 1980s and 1990s you had a very loud HIV-AIDS denial movement which often got people to refuse to take anti-HIV drugs, claiming that the drugs were what we're making people sick. See for example Continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(magazine) where the magazine ironically had to stop publication because all the editors and major contributors had died from AIDS. And one already sees a lot of people with cancer trying to use alternative treatments, often instead of chemotherapy or radiation. The more positive take here though is that since this treatment has fewer side-effects than chemo (which itself has fewer side-effects than older chemo treatments did) there may be less inclination for people to refuse it there.

If this works well, similar methods will likely work for other cancers also. Unfortunately, since it requires an individual design for a specific person, it likely is going to not benefit much from economies of scale, so it may remain very expensive. Also, given that it uses mRNA, it is likely that parts of the US right will either refuse to use it or will try to block it. Given RFK Jr. being in the Secretary of Health, what should be a slam dunk may end up becoming an uphill battle. On the bright side, some of the anti-vaxxers seem to be ok with mRNA systems once someone already has a disease.

A bunch of reasons. Although the OP's summary about instantaneous exchange is largely wrong, similar systems to this are useful for quantum key distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution and superdense coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdense_coding, the first which has obvious practical applications and the second which may have practical applications. This is also important because it pushes the limits of how quantum mechanics behaves. Some people have suggested that entanglement might change or break down over long-distances, which would be counter to what standard quantum mechanics predicts. So doing these sorts of experiments helps us become more confident that QM is essentially correct. In the same way how we do things like experiments to test other elements of physics, like general relativity, or using MICROSCOPE to test the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MICROSCOPE.

Oh, for crying out loud. Disagreement with you doesn't mean someone is trying to feed any misinformation. I'm pretty public about who I am. And I've talked before on Slashdot about some of the major negatives of LLMs, including high energy use. I've discussed also how my spouse has at her library job been one of many who has had trouble getting patrons to understand that books hallucinated by ChatGPT don't exist. There's a lot of negatives here. But that doesn't mean that every single thing has the answer of AI-companies-be-evil.

You are not reading the opinion correctly. See the above discussion with Smidge204. For a start note that the summary analysis on page 30 says ""On balance, as the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use." So they are explicitly using the destruction of the print copy. What is true is that it is possible that even if it had not been destroyed, it might have still been fair use. But that's not the situation here. So anyone relying on Bartz to protect their use is going to destroy the copy because that puts them in the legally strongest position.

At no point have I quoted Anthropic's arguments above.

You are misreading the part where you put it in on page 18. "This order disagrees" is referring to the sentence right before, about claiming that using it to train an LLM is inherently transformative. The next sentence then is relevant. That sentence which you quoted was "However, this order holds that the mere conversion of a print book to a digital file to save space and enable searchability was transformative for that reason alone."

Note the word used there; "conversion." Not scanning, but conversion. Similarly, where you quote "Anthropic was entitled to retain a copy of these works in a print format" does not mean what you think it means. That sentence is referring to if Anthropic had format shifted to a still printed version but had destroyed the original. The judge further makes this clear when at the end of the opinion, when the analysis is summarized on page 30 and 31, they write "On balance, as the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use." If that we're not an important part of their reasoning it wouldn't end up in that summary.

The important context here you may be missing is that this entire opinion is in the context of Hachette v. Internet Archive where non-destructive digitization was ruled not fair use. This opinion is carving out that what Anthropic did in that broader context. So if Anthropic had not engaged in the destruction, they might have won still on that, but that's not the situation that was in front of the court. So now, unless someone wants to risk relitigating, they are going to follow exactly what Anthropic did, so this essentially forces it in practice. See if it helps also the comment by AleRunner above which makes functionally the same point phrased a bit differently.

Or you could read the whole case, including other elements such as on page 14 where they say "On the facts here, that format change itself added no new copies, eased storage and enabled, searchability, and was not done for purposes trenching upon the copyright owner’s rightful interests — it was transformative." The upshot should be clear here; there's little protection for fair use in general from scanning, but the protection is much higher if the scanned works are destroyed.

So, let me suggest tentatively that given that you weren't even aware this order existed until a few minutes ago, and thought that there was just a settlement should make you slightly less confident about this conclusion. And no, it isn't "basically of no consequence," the central point here is that they got it to be at least as transformative in those cases because they had destroyed the original. That amounts to saying that they were reasonably safe here in part because they destroyed the work. And other parts of the ruling rely on this same point. See for example, page 14 where it says " On the facts here, that format change itself added no new copies, eased storage and enabled, searchability, and was not done for purposes trenching upon the copyright owner’s rightful interests — it was transformative." This is a major fact element to the decision.

No. Their point is that how rare a book is matters, and also what the book is also matters. A First Folio of Shakespeare is not a 1985 car manual. And even when it is rare, that's not by itself enough. So what books are in question matters.

You are confusing different elements. There was a settlement, and there were also connected rulings. See https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v.-Anthropic-Order.pdf From that order pg 16:

There are some prior other rulings which did go the other way about format shifting, with Capitol Records v. ReDigi being one example, but in this case, the ruling is explicit. Now, what did happen with the settlement is that there was some question of whether this would get overturned on appeal, and some experts suggested it would. Due to the settlement happening, the degree to which this stands as a precedent is more complicated since it never got past a district court ruling.

No. 2 is about complying with 1. See Bartz v. Anthropic; copying a book to train an AI is transformative, but one of the major reasons for that ruling was that the books are being destroyed when they are scanned. So the companies are being legally required to do this to comply with copyright rules. The other issue is that scanning a book without destroying the content is about an order of magnitude more expensive and slower. One doesn't need any malice or deception here. Just the normal incentives.

One of the obvious issues here is what does "rare" mean. Do they mean genuinely rare books in the sense of old, unique books? The last time this sort of claim was being made it turned out that all the books were books being ordered with specific ISBN numbers. If a book is modern enough to have an ISBN, it is hard to see it as meaningfully rare for this purpose. These are at worse going to be things like a random sword-and-sorcery novel from 1975 or a car maintenance manual. These things end up with book sellers all the time, and are frequently thrown out. People seem to assign a special sacredness to books, which I totally get; I hate throwing out a book, even when it is bad shape. But my wife works in a library, and they throw books out all the time; often books that are in bad shape, or books that no one has checked out in 20 years and have no resale value. Not too long ago, they threw out a whole bunch of test prep books (SAT, AP, and LSAT if I recall correctly) for versions of the tests from 2015ish. Book sellers do the same thing all the time.

So is there a real issue here or is just another "Get angry at the big tech companies" talking point, even before we get to the point that under Bartz v. Anthropic and other court rulings, these companies essentially have to destroy the books they scan in order to be legally protected?

There are some pretty criticisms of Amazon, and of all the major AI companies right now. But I'm failing to see why of all the concerns, this should be getting a lot of attention.