I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

As you can imagine I am 100% against communism and any form of socialism. Bezos and everyone else must have property rights not hindered by government, it is his business to run (or his board) and government must not be in position to dictate how any company hires and fires people, who they hire and fire, why, etc.

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

I fully expect Amazon to close this warehouse, maybe it will be contaminated with something radioactive for example, to make things easier and then it will shut down. Personally I root for the anarcho capitalist solution and wish Amazon to win this battle for its private property rights.

2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.

This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.

When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.

OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)

Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.

The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost .. a game?

"lossy compression"

Yes, just like human memory.

If I read a bunch of books from a series and extrapolate based on them to form something similar, it's not plagiarism.

If I read your book, then write a book using a similar voice, style, and plot, and do it in a different language - it's not plagiarism if I offer citation. Likewise, if I do so with a verbatim copy in another language. It's an independent effort.

Ultimately, it boils down to what you can get away with. Considering how trivial it is now to re-implement things, I'd say the chance of license enforcement is close to zero for anything open source except in extremely rare situations where there's a lot of money involved.

social engineering used in practice by the parent comment, now sitting at +4 Funny. Still waiting for that 1 autistic moderator.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

If you can't figure out for yourself what's wrong with ordering large numbers of men to their deaths, then I won't be able to explain it to you.

They could take that one step further: once your computer has compiled the appropriate shader for its particular combination of hardware/driver/etc, the game could upload that particular shader to a repository, so that the next install with the exact same combination of conditions could just download it instead of having to duplicate the work. I imagine there are a lot of people out there running functionally identical systems that would benefit.

I suppose they don't do that because they don't trust people not to repurpose the mechanism as a malware vector, or something.