So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

D'oh. Mod me down; I deserve it for my fuckup.

the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

No it isn't. Your phone is a supercomputer by 1980s standards, and seeded generation (whether from a PRNG or hashing coordinates or whatever) goes back to at least then (and probably '60s/'70s). I'm not slamming the game, and seeded generation is often a good idea, but the idea that you can do it on handheld supercomputers is not remarkable, even the tiniest little bit.

You wanna see something super-fucking-impressive on an iPhone? Go back to the very first model and behold that it runs a truly-remarkably decent web browser. That was way more futuristic than this.

Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.

I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.

That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

What's next? If we accept this, then the next thing will be that public officials won't be allowed to sell Amway/Herbalife, heroin, or fake patents? This is viciously partisan, clearly intended to keep a certain major political party from running for office.