But the individual didn't destroy it. The agent did the physical act of destroying it.

Suppose you were at the border with your phone, and the agent confiscated it.
Then the agent had said, how do i get into this phone?
You said, "put it in a blender".
If the agent puts it in the blender, the agent destroyed it, not you.

Now clearly, one would expect the agent to know that putting it in a blender would destroy it.

And equally clearly the inference here is that the agent did not know that the password he was given would wipe the phone as part of opening it. But isn't the onus still on the officer?

If it had been a physical safe, and you gave him the code, but the safe contained something that would self-destruct in exposure to air, and must be opened inside an enclosure with inert gas to get at the contents... who would be responsible for destroying the evidence inside the safe?

As a second scenario, what if you had printed a PIN password on a piece of paper and included that in your wallet. If the agent had confiscated your wallet and discovered the paper; and then used that password on your phone? If that was your duress password, who is responsible for destroying evidence in that case?

Legally, Isn't the onus ultimately still on the agent to apply caution before pushing buttons on a device they confiscated?

To blame you the suspect for destroying evidence on something the agent had custody and full physical control over seems a bit far fetched to me.

On a 13" screen most people would have scaling enabled to see it anyway. Not really sure its worth the extra horsepower to push quadruple the pixels, and average them out.

Don't get me wrong, I love 4k screens. My desktop has a pair of 32" 120hz 4k screens.

But on a laptop, especially a 13" model, my priority is going to be battery life, not performance; so 4k is not a hard requirement. Plus this unit features a more old school 3:2 aspect ratio which is arguably more practical and useful than a 1.78:1 widescreen at 13".

Higher than a 13" dell xps. Higher than the 13" Macbook Neo. Higher than a 13" Macbook air... hell it just edges out the display on the Macbook air 15".

Its 120Hz. It's matte. It's touchscreen (if you care).
It seems to be a very solid 13" laptop screen overall.

Actually, the biggest reason that adoption rates are much, much higher in Australia (despite lack of infrastructure), is that Australia has access to less expensive vehicles imported from China and SK.

The US, otoh, is too busy trying to protect its legacy automakers, who, much as they did in the 70s, decided to ignore trends and continue to sell oversized, overpriced, gas-guzzling vehicles for as long as they could convince the American market to buy them.

"You presume they have the available funds to update the household. It's an easy thing for early adopters who tend to be wealthier. Its another things for the mass market that is more budget conscious. And may also live in older homes that may need some modernization for the charger installation."

Level one charging can in fact be sufficient for those with commutes less than or equal to the national average. It even works for longer commutes to "top off" the battery during the week and hitting the afore-mentioned Walmart or other charger on the weekend while shopping.

"What is “local” is different in the US and EU.."

Again, you focused on the EU while ignoring China and Australia. Australia, in particular, almost exactly mirrors the US in regard to size and driving patterns. But again, local is local. The average commute in the US is 27min. It's 25min in the EU. Australia takes 63.7 minutes! (And before you start on transit, driving is the still most common way to get to work in Europe, with 59% of EU workers using private cars as their primary mode of transportation,)

"They’ve done far better with the public infrastructure required "

Nope. The United States has a significantly more extensive and robust public charging infrastructure than Australia. The US benefits from a massive rollout of Tesla Superchargers open to all EVs, billions in federal NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) funding, and rapid deployment of high-voltage (800V) stations by networks like Electrify America and Ionna.

Your arguments are a couple of years out of date, and again keep focusing on how we're so "different" from the rest of the world.

We're not that exceptional.

As an EV owner, I have to disagree with most of what you said.

The U.S. driving pattern also isn’t nearly as unique as it’s often portrayed. Like Europe, most driving consists of commuting, errands, and local trips. Roughly 90% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, and only a minority take multiple long-distance road trips each year.

Charging infrastructure has improved enormously in just the past few years. Companies like Shell and Walmart are building networks alongside Tesla, and even my local Walmart in the Midwest has chargers. Chargers continue to get faster, but even today’s charging times often line up with the rest stops or meal breaks I’d be making on a road trip anyway.

About two-thirds of U.S. households own their homes, giving them access to some form of home charging. The biggest challenge remains apartment dwellers, where charging infrastructure still lags. That’s a legitimate issue, but it’s an infrastructure problem, not a flaw inherent to EVs.

And it’s worth noting that EV adoption has surged in countries like China and Australia, the latter having driving distances and population distribution that are often compared to the U.S.

I’m just tired of hearing that America is somehow “special,” and that technologies and solutions working successfully in much of the rest of the world are uniquely destined to fail here.

It is more than that. Americans are buying a few more EVs, but by and large most of the sales are going to oversized, overweight, fully automatic SUVs and pickup trucks.

On one hand they've bought into Detroit marketing that tells them that's what they want and need... and on the other, it may in fact be what they need since US obesity rates are at all time highs.

Many simply don't fit in small sedans and sport cars any more.

Copy protection on the original sleeping beauty is long expired.
Copy protection on the Disney version is good for years yet.

In the original versions, the scene i quoted? There is no scene like that in the original version. But it is beat for beat straight from the Disney version. If you want to tell a sleeping beauty story, you absolutely can, the original source material not copy protected, you can faithfully tell that story, including the unconscious rape of the princess to impregnate her so that she finally wakes up at child birth... or you can create more family friendly version all your own with whatever you like. But you can't simply lift a bunch of scenes that only exist in the copy protected Disney version and call it your own original interpretation by changing a few details.

The chatgpt story is a ripoff of the Disney version though.

The scene I quoted with the three "magical gaurdians" bestowing three gifts at a celebration crashed by the sorcerous who places the curse -- that is not from the original source material, its not novel either, its a scene ripped straight from the Disney version. And its not an isolated issue with the AI version.

There is no question that Disney doesn't "own" sleeping beauty, but they do own their telling of it. This was an obvious ripoff of that particular telling in several places.

If a child handed in the Moonlit Princess the teacher would give them a lecture about plagiarism. Because its not remotely original enough. It is so clearly taking so many things straight from Disney's version. Sure the names are changed, and the words "aren't the same", but its far too derivative of that particular version to credibly claim its an original telling of the sleeping beauty story.

"No. It is not copyright infringement"

Go ahead, prompt for that story and publish your own 'moonlit princess". It is not a court case you'd win; the details taken from the Disney version are beyond excessive.

" and there's no reason to hold copyright so sacred anyway. Are you seriously wanting to protect hundred year old fairy tails from being retold?"

That's an entirely separate discussion. Legally it is infringement. Whether it should be is completely separate question, or how long it should be are separate questions.

FWIW, I don't agree with copyright being 100 years.

Who is they? And what database are you referring to?

Dictionaries often contain quotes from original source material, or references to where it was first used, or first used a certain way.

Dictionary publishers have never been accused of downloading massive torrents of pirated copies of books and processing them.

Google on the other hand HAS been accused of that, and the decade of litigation related to that ultimately rules that the limited things google was doing with it was fair use. The dictionary companies are likely paying for enhanced access to that google data now.

The AI companies are singing the same fair use tune, but its really quite different. Google was doing it (at the time) to allow for search so you could enter phrase or quote and find the book it was from and the page it was on, and to collect other meta data - word count, word frequency, analyze sentence complexity, etc... all factual information.

AI companies are using the content of that digitized corpus and everything else they can get their hands on to generate new content, much of which non-factual in nature, and often very arguably explicitly creatively derivative.

prompt: "Make a story like sleeping beauty" ... 2 seconds later we have "The Moonlit Princess" and we'll just self-publish that on Amazon... boom I'm an author!

You seriously telling me this is NOT copyright infringement? Even if you wanted to argue that sleeping beauty is a classic fairytale from the 17th century and not under copyright, the prose above is a pretty blatant Disney ripoff.

You can replace your entire BMW seat if you like with seats from another vendor. Put in a racing seat, or even install a seat you designed yourself.

This probably was not the brilliant analogy you thought it was going to be. :p

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

They recently bragged about how much they were getting done with AI vibe-coding.

Could it be related to the wave of bugs? Say it ain't so!