I live in southeastern Colorado. Here, Halloween is observed in the late afternoon, after school if it's on a school day and only in the business district. All of the businesses give out candy, and nobody has to worry about kids being out after dark.

The world is a complicated place. Broad categories like the ones I gave will cover a lot of common things, but can't cover everything. Nothing is black-and-white, there are always shades of gray.

Futures and Options qualify as "derivatives" from real assets. They DO sit in a middle ground so they get classified as "speculation" which isn't quite investing and isn't quite gambling. Most of the time for most people, it doesn't matter. Investing is how people come to own the means of production, which is a foundation of wealth-building in a capitalist society. Someone who never invests (in good old-fashioned stocks) because they think it is "gambling" is seriously mismanaging their money and may remain trapped in poverty their entire lives because of it. Someone who spends a lot of money on lottery tickets regularly and considers that "investing" is going to wind up in a similar position.

The world of Futures and Options and other fanciness is for people who want to take their financial knowledge and engagement to the next level. It's a whole step beyond the distinction and advice that I was originally talking about. A veritable subject change.

Incidentally, CFDs and hedge betting have little-to-no institutional hedging, so they function a lot more like gambling (even more so than derivatives). These are generally private contracts with a broker, making them structurally more similar to the operation of a casino. I read that in UK and Ireland, they ARE legally classified as gambling, and generally not legal in the USA. So, despite their unique structure, they fall pretty firmly into the "gambling" category. And, as I said before, they are simply not relevant to ordinary people who just want to be financially healthy, put their kids through school and save up for retirement, so they don't need to complicate the conversation.

No its not. AI is a significant element of achieving technological singularity. Its a huge part of how we get there. It couldn't possibly be MORE relevant.

Clearly we haven't achieved AGI or "other big promises" yet. But the LLMs we now have are totally new and way better than the sorts of AI techniques we have had before. It's a step forward.

Is he still dead?

That's a problem? As someone from a northern climate, it baffles me that the fear of the dark is this powerful. I doubt predators lurking in the shadows are put out by a difference of 60 minutes. "Oh drat! My abduction is foiled by a clock adjustment. Curses!"

Put the tax on the ad providers since they generate most of the junk traffic.

Thank you, that was very interesting, and looking up Duty Solicitor in Wikipedia filled out the explanation, including some limitations and exceptions that weren't explained but seemed fairly reasonable. I can see why this doesn't appear in the various mystery programs: it would get in the way of the protagonist's solving the case and that Just Wouldn't Do.

Enjoy your 320x200 streams.

It might be too soon but the Exodus Technologies third-order Coulomb devices (IIRC) are built for this kind of very low impulse long duration lifiting.

Getting a rig up there to clamp on to the Hubble is probably the hard part of the project.

High-impulse propulsion is more likely to damage it than low and slow.

This was during the "NJ Drone Flap".

Trump was on TV saying he'd been briefed on them and the drones were "tracked back to their garage".

Last thing he said about it before his FAA said "they were authorized, we're not explaining, stop asking".

Matthew Livelsberger said they were of Chinese origin.

Robert Hastings wrote an entire book on unidentified craft over nuclear facilities covering four decades of documented incursions.

The FoIA request sounds like good data but nothing new.

And here in the USA, you have the right to an attorney, and if you can't afford one, one will be provided at government expense. Judging only by what I've seen on various TV programs produced in England, you don't have that right in Blighty. Do you have it in Germany? I'm not trying to put you down, I'm just looking for information here.

I am not an alarmist, and I don't reach for the regulatory hammer on a whim - or, actually ever - but I can't think of more objectionable, destructive behaviour. Build an empire on the backs of the output of the masses, then systematically destroy the value of that world for everybody but themselves. How is this not hijacking click through en masse?

I think Google needs to be stopped. And since the moat is so vast, I think it should be done by government intervention.

Good luck with that, though, on the American front.

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.