Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Aside from Onedrive, there are people out there who "store" all their photos on Facebook. Then they wonder why they are all messed up when they want to say, make a print. For myself, I have a couple Time Machine backups, so even if one of the drives fails, I have the other, backups of backups.

They probably need to keep the data around for a while, for legal reasons. They might get sued, and if it was deleted it will be worse for them. They might get a law enforcement request for the data, and it would look bad if they deleted it.

The bigger issue is that unless you get lucky and go viral, there is no way to get this kind of thing resolved and all you can do is sue to get your costs covered.

Speaking of workflows, on my W11 laptop, I have scripts for launching some programs that need launched in a particular sequence. Somehow an update changed the sequence and required everything be changed - didn't take much time to change, took time to troubleshoot though. Knocked out a USB trackpad, and where the hell did Bluetooth go? Changed the audio settings, more troubleshooting, more wasted time, more downtime.

I think the Einsteins at Microsoft actually came to understand they FUBAR'd, as the next day another update came in, and I at least got Bluetooth back.

Not to mention the system instabilities that happen when a downloaded update is ready to be installed. More wasted time.

Windows is not functional IMO.

I still need the laptop for the classes I teach, and there is one program that is only on Windows, but I'm experimenting now with a VM that might be able to run it on my Mac (UTM). So far, it's all good except for the SDR radio, it needed to connect to, but I think I have that worked out.

And also diver's watches, so there is no excuse for smart watches not having a replaceable battery either. People understand perfectly well that they need to have the gasket properly replaced if they want to maintain water resistance. Not that anyone would warranty a smart watch by the time the battery needs replacing.

It's almost impossible to anonymize search data. Google can do it internally and simply avoid processing it in a way that could reveal identities, to comply with GDPR, but other companies will not be so limited. In theory GDPR applies to them too, but the danger is that we end up in a Facebook like situation with shadow profiles on people who have never used their services.

Ours doesn't like being picked up either, although he is slowly coming around to it. Something traumatic happened to him, and I wonder if it involved being picked up.

It's not just up to them, it's up to copyright law.
And why do you think you speak for all book authors over all time?

People like you think libraries should be shut down, fair use removed, and no one allowed to resell a book they read.
Literally the logical conclusion to your post.

I suppose I need to pay you every time I point someone to you works to?
Do I have to pay you when I finish you book and give it to someone else?

Did they ever mention copyrights on Star Trek???

Why would that even come up?
We would absolutely have a form of copyright post scarcity. Because post scarcity one of the thing that differentiate people is what they created.

Any you got your law degree from...? and you have read all the contracts.. when? and where in these contract violation in the contract?

Don't tell me you are some ignorant blowhard spewing nonsense that fits your bias?

Yes, it does in America. Please read US copyright code. fair use is a things. I can give you a used book for free, and you can read it and give it to someone else for free and so on. No copyright violation. Yu can access works for free through Libraries.
Copyright expires.

"It is not a court case you'd win; the details taken from the Disney version are beyond excessive."
We have decades of court cases that show you are wrong. STFU.

"beyond excessive."
based on what?

"f downloading massive torrents of pirated copies of books and processing them."
Downloading isn't piracy, please read copyright code.

" to generate new content, "
What a misleading phrase.

" much of which non-factual in nature,"
It's called Fiction. Your library has a whole section.

"and often very arguably explicitly creatively derivative."
Not really.. or no more then people who write.

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!

Make a story based on open content. that's bad.. why?

" just self-publish that on Amazon"
And that's bad, why?

"boom I'm an author!"
correct. and? also, you are the author of a work that can't be copyrighted.

"You seriously telling me this is NOT copyright infringement? "
It is not. Not be any definition is the infringement. It's a different telling. You are letting your hate of AI suppress your critical thinking.

"the prose above is a pretty blatant Disney ripoff."
No, it isn't. but guess what? people write is style similar all the time. It's not copyright infringement.

People are trained by reading all the time. People saying otherwise is just simply dumb.