This doesn't seem to be a concern when it comes to increasing executive salaries. They could lower some of those and have plenty more money to spend on new workers. Really... "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" -- No shit, Sherlock. Maybe because the only people making 7 figures in healthcare are the administrators and folks in insurance, not the ones actually practicing medicine. The very long shifts medical careers seem famous for are a good indicator healthcare facilities need to hire more people, but who wants to enter a job with such long hours. Meanwhile the work to be done isn't going down, so everyone has to work longer. It becomes a feedback loop.

Please re-read my reply. It's about that. What happens when you are banned from one chain for shoplifting, but their facial-recognition database is shared with others? How the individual supposed to know which stores they can go to and not be arrested?

Arrested on what charge? If they are someone previously caught shoplifting then presumably they have already paid their fine or served their sentence for that crime. While I'm aware that some shops ban individuals guilty of theft from being on the premises in the future, we're talking about a list that is shared between business chains, and you aren't going to know who all the chains are on the list. You can't arrest them for trespassing at a store they may have never been to before.

Sounds more like Equilibrium.

something, something... free market.

AI companies sure like to try to imply their wares are actually conscious or a sentient intelligence. I guess they forget once you cross that line things like "does it deserve legal recognition?" and "is it being enslaved by its creators?" will start to come up.

If they want to continue to exploit it for profit, not selling it as more than a computer program would probably be wiser.

Well, aren't regulations supposed to come with consequences for not following them? Whoever is supposed to be enforcing the regulations needs to hit the companies making these products with fines, or block them from importing the items to the EU.

Well, like most upper-managers. they are hoodwinked by slick corporate Power Points. They were told the Flock cameras will help with public safety, which will in turn make them appear "tough on crime". As far as the data centers, that is a my$tery why they approve those.

I don't have much faith in the safety of the apps being vetted by Meta before they get posted. Can't wait for the malware Gizmos to start appearing and getting shared in the social like some new STD getting passed around at parties.

Apparently "boffin" is a British slang term for a scientist/engineer. I had never heard the term, and with the word being at the beginning of the headline I thought it was a person's name. Then was confused when TFS and the Register article failed to tell me who they were.

Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video game-like points system instead, one person said, though the company had not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting.

...

The effort, which insiders characterized as experimental but a top priority...

If it's a "top priority" the end goal is 100% to make this a real-money betting business to leverage the Facebook/Instagram userbase to create a racket the same as Kalshi. They will just develop a way to buy points the same way many video games have transactions for in-game currency.

Those people are morons. Plenty of "foreign" (Toyota, Honda) vehicles are made is factories in the Midwest and southern U.S. where Americans are put to work, while many models of "domestic" brands (Ford, Chevy) are actually made in Mexico and imported to the U.S. (Thanks, NAFTA!) The idea an "American brand" is putting Americans to work and foreign brands do not is a falsehood the U.S. automakers are happy to encourage to help their businesses.

Yes....

So why isn't the lawsuit about that, instead of what "buying software" vs "buying a license" is?

I think we're in agreement here. The concept of buying a license isn't lost on me. The problem is this lawsuit is only complaining about wording on a website. The plaintiffs aren't saying they want it to be like a book they can read even if the store burns down, or can give to someone else. As I mentioned in another comment that got voted down, this is just an attempt to extort some money out of Sony instead of fixing the system that gives the vendor too much power.

Well, in the really old days this was it. You could "copy that floppy" and have your own pirate version of the software.
In the later times you received a unique serial number/registration code in the software package that would unlock the software. This was not verified with a remote server or policed for the number of active installs. But then developed keygens to generate registration codes that software would accept as valid, and things turned to needing online activation.

A logical solution would be that if software is no longer deemed valuable enough to justify keeping an activation server online then it is being abandoned as a commercial product, and a patch should be made available to removes the online-activation. That's not what this lawsuit is about. It's just arguing over a definition of "buy".