A warrant is required for them to violate your privacy, but are they really violating it? If your location data were private, then I'd think it wouldn't be for sale to the public. There wouldn't be anyone to buy it from, or at least not on a consistent basis.

I think if We The People are ok with our location being constantly available to the public, then it's ok for government to be one of the dozens of consumers of that data. OTOH if we're not ok with the government being one of the dozens of consumers of that data, then maybe those dozens of other consumers are a problem too. Indeed, if it's truly private, then the data-eating consumers aren't even the real problem, the leakage is.

We wouldn't even have a 4th Amendment, if the limey colonial governor could just search the contents of Samuel Adams' desk by looking up the mirrored data on a bulletin board in the town square. We're leaking data and then blaming potential adversaries for paying attention to it, when we ought to be plugging the leak.

We all cashed in on fossil fuels together

Yes, we did. As an older-than-average person, I've done more of it than average, and I'm still doing it!

What I find most interesting, is that there's a group of people who advocate I shouldn't have to pay for any of the consequences of my decision to cash in, even consequences and costs that are born by other people, who didn't cash in as much as I did.

I am grateful to these advocates, and would like to find one, and take a big, dirty, stinky, mystery-microbe-infested, runny, absolutely harmless shit on their pillow, for free, as is my right!

People want Android to be free, but then, those who profit off of Android should somehow not have to pay in some way, shape, or form?

From a user point of view, that question is irrelevant, and IMHO it's even hard to have an opinion about.

I don't care who pays what (even if it's me), as long as:

1. The software I run is maintainable. (so in practice, that's nearly equivalent to "must be Open Source")

2. Nobody who isn't me, has any say whatsoever about what I'm allowed to run on my computer. (so in practice, that's nearly equivalent to "The OS and all common dependencies/runtimes must be Free Software"). This requirement was already getting pretty compromised by Google Play Services on Android, but it's now clear Google wants their platform to become completely ineligible.

I don't really care whether or not parties that profit from Android pay Google, or if Google pays them, but I know that Google has immense financial incentive for the parties who profit off Android, to continue to use Android. So maybe Samsung should pay Google or maybe Google should pay Samsung, but that's between them.

shouldn't Google get SOMETHING for the work that goes into new versions of Android?

They already do. I can't think of a single Google application which isn't spyware. (Can you?) To an ad company, surveillance data is valuable and let's face it: it's the whole reason Android exists at all. Android's entire purpose, from Google's PoV, is to make opting into Google Surveillance the most convenient thing to do.

And I'm fine if they keep trying to make spyware-optin most convenient, but making moves like this suggest they intend to obstruct competition, and from a user PoV, that's an extremely hostile act. (If you wanna be the biggest tree, grow, instead of chopping down others.)

It's not realistic to expect phones to come as just an electronic device and for the public to treat it like Linux and install their own OS on it

Regardless of whether or not it is "realistic," being able to do that would definitely be ideal. That type of approach has certainly proven itself to be best for all larger form factors, so why wouldn't it also be the best for handheld computers too? I am super-skeptical of the position that handheld PCs are somehow a magical special case. Society lost its mind, memory, and all its common sense when handhelds got popular, but it's never too late to stop and think "wait, why did I forget everything I knew about computers and abusive network effects?" We actually don't have to repeat the obvious mistakes and horrors of the past.

Nintendo-izing Android will make it as worthless as iOS.

>>> import math
>>> 314*math.log(10)/math.log(256)
130.38567772432899

130TB for 314T decimal digits sounds about right!

I'd just use a plain arithmetic encoder (where all 10 symbols are equally weighted) with no dictionary pass (since the next digit can't be predicted from any or all of the previous digits).

Its just a better experience at home.

I think this is the essential truth.

But even so, that still leaves theaters a niche: they're an out-of-the-house activity, when you explicitly want to leave the house for some reason. (e.g. house AC ain't keeping up with the summer temps, going stir-crazy from always being at home (especially if you WFH), or even just needing to get the fuck away from That Other Person for a while even though you love them.)

You've decided to leave the house: now what? There are lots of options, and seeing a movie at a theater is one of them. A competitive choice? Depends.

Date tip: dinner first, then a movie.

How would they do that?

And then if someone did invent a magic "I can figure out how any video was made" algorithm, couldn't we just run that in our own clients?

Unless it's found unconstitutional, enforcing it is going to be super-easy. CA sues Ubuntu, Ubuntu becomes liable for infinite money. Business destroyed. Goal achieved.

The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over. It's a similar technique to installing a VPN to get around the Great Firewall of China (just consider that for a moment). Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.

Sure, but why would a child bother?

I haven't read the NY one yet, but I've looked at the CA and CO laws, and while they say admins are required to have a way to set a user's age at account creation time, I didn't see anything in there about users being prohibited from maintaining that information.

It even makes sense to let users correct their information. I don't think the lack of prohibition is an oversight.

Code may not be subject to copyright if the function can only be implemented in a particular way.

Yeah, that's what patents are for!

I loved that part of Attenborough's Life of Programs! But my favorite scene was when the batch pipelines were crossing the network at night, and they had to dodge all the traffic from the backups.

I think liability law should be that we can trust people to know that fiction and reality are different things, even though sometimes it's not true!!

I would prefer to live in a fantasy world where

• A computer program can obey a command like "tell me an exciting story" without the program's creators facing liability. They don't face liability even if/when someone reads the resulting story, decides that the fictional evil sorcerer in the story really is resurrecting, interrogating, and raping their dead relatives, and so he goes out to a cemetery, murders a completely innocent security guard, and digs up a dozen graves to "save" them, and then fucks the corpses so the sorcerer can't impregnate them with his demon seed. Doing those things might actually be the right thing to do if a sorcerer really is resurrecting and torturing dead people, and using them to grow his undead army that is going to kill every human if not stopped, but surprise surprise: that's just fiction. And in my fantasy world, everyone knows it's fiction and therefore, we reasonably expect them to know it's fiction.
• In my fantasy world, the makers of Magic 8 Ball don't face liability if/when someone uses Magic 8 Ball to pick stocks in which to invest their life's savings.
• Fox entertainment is free of liability if/when they pretend pedophiles are partying in the basement of a pizza restaurant and dress it up as though it's a news stor-- shit. Ok, maybe not this one. But isn't it the same as the above two examples?

I'm concerned that we're going to make^H^H^H^H continue making policy where nobody can play make-believe, due to (real!) risk of a small fraction of the public being mentally unequipped to be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

It would be great if we could read the transcript between Gemini and this user, but I guess we can't. I suspect, though, that if we could read it, over 99% of us would find Gemini's story to be completely unpersuasive, and what it said would clearly look like fiction instead of reality. But "over 99%" really isn't quite 100.0%, is it?

Fuckwits and nutcases are a real thing, they have real downsides for the rest of society, and .. they deserve our sympathy, depending on how empathetic I'm feeling today. ;-) But seriously: whose problem are they?

Are fuckwits and nutcases everyone's problem, that we're all responsible for trying to both help and protect others from?

Or should they only be a problem for toymakers and fiction creators? Apparently every fictional idea is a ticking time bomb, waiting to seized on by a nutcase whose inscrutable brain is looking for just the right flavor of fiction to click into place as truth. Call your representative and outlaw fiction today!

The dressify AI filter already decided that you look stunning in SpongeBob SquarePants boxers.

I'm working on a program called AlertBeGone, to make the presence of computers less distracting to the unfortunate people who are carrying them, wearing them, or even just around them. The PortScanThrough EULA begins with "By entering to within 300 feet of an AlertBeGone user, you have already retroactively agreed..."

"A sixth camera is one too many!"

This is what happens when the government lets people pick which hand gets the sex-monitoring chip. In hindsight, we shouldn't have left it to them.