That raises an interesting point. Only a card owner is allowed to use a credit card. There are schemes whereby an "authorized user" can be added to a card, but generally speaking, you can't use someone else's card, even with their permission.

Vendors are not responsible for checking the identity of the card user. I think it is assumed that the security measures covering card use (signature, PIN, etc.) are sufficient to ensure that the user is the owner.

Perhaps AI agents could be deemed illegal on these grounds - An AI agents is not the owner of the card, even if the owner has given permission.

IANAA but is this system of litigation the best way America can come up with to keep people and organisations on the straight and narrow?

This is a genuine question - I don't know of an obviously better system myself, although I have a sense that this system of bringing others to justice with lawsuits has degraded in the modern era. Is there perhaps a way to keep the essence of the system, but "dial it back" a bit, to the age when the assumption of common sense was stronger... while somehow still avoiding the genuine exploitation that came with that bygone age.

Problems with an overly litigious society:
It makes justice something to the wealthy have greater access.
It can be used as a bullying tool - not a means of achieving fair play.
It means companies try to protect themselves with vast screeds of small print which those it is ostensibly intended to warn, never read.
It creates an enormous overhead cost of lawyers and courts, which may be worth it in some cases, but I suspect is not in many.

(1) The damage to America's reputation is deep. She is no longer seen as a nation you can trust, or as a nation on the side of good.
(2) By all accounts, the reason for this "blue wave" is the cost of living. You get the impression that if gas was still cheap, people wouldn't mind the moral vacuity.

This is not a troll. The feelings about America over the past 10 years have changed. And this accelerated over the last 18 months.

More creative content will be generated by AI, and at first we might deride it, and reject it, but we will probably eventually come to accept it.

An equivalent is with clothing. We used to have our clothes tailored. A craftsman would create custom clothing for us. But this was quite costly, and when the option came to have mass produced lower quality clothing for a much cheaper price, this became the norm.

I can imagine the same happening with something like animated films. We will remember the old days with misty eyes, but will accept the lower quality AI generated animation, and watch it wearing our jeans and t-shirt.

If a slashdot user becomes frustrated, they are more likely to retrench to a binary stance - A is the only possible way, or conversely, A is utterly evil. It is exaggeration used as emphasis.

The most compelling criticism of this blanket tariff on incoming internet data, is that it might give the US president ideas.

I wouldn't be so harsh.

Although New Zealand was not part of its normal set of routes. A Concorde aircraft once visited NZ - I think as a sort of exhibition. Lots of people went to the airport just to see it, including me. It came down, approaching the runway, with its nose pointed down in that unique fashion, but just before it landed, with a burst of power, it rose back up into the sky. This was part of the demonstration. But it left an impression on me. Rather than the usual slow pull up into the sky that we are used to with large jumbo jets, this plane seemed to lift effortlessly up. It looked modern, and flew faster than sound.

So while you can say that all in all, it was not a venture in which you would choose to invest over the long term, it can still be something you look back on with admiration.

Any one claiming to have a "passion" for this or that...

In fact a CV that refrains from gilding the lily stands out these days. And it probably comes from the type of person that values accuracy, precision, and honesty. Just the sort of person you probably want for a technical position.

You might be right, but I wonder if it is not due to the ultra-partisan culture that has developed in the last few years. It could be that any ability to think, question, analyze, and synthesize that we might thank the schools for, is subsequently drummed out of young people but the relentless culture wars.

Sometimes I wonder if the best way to determine a good path forward is to take all the Slashdot comments, knock off all the sharp corners, and find a sort of average.

The comments on their own tend to be extremist ("Grading homework is kind of silly anyway", "There's no point to homework", ...). I understand that in modern discourse we use exaggeration as a form of emphasis, but the truth is surely a more moderate expression of the same point.

If a student uses AI to do their homework for them, and remains oblivious to the answers they hand in, then yes, not much learning is achieved. But if a student uses AI as a tutor, to help point them in the right direction then this is helping them to learn, much like referring to a text book while doing the homework.

It's because they are doing more than simply assembling template code. As you say, that would indeed be achievable with modules and functions. But AI generated code is doing something a lot more complex.

There are people who dismiss AI as a "glorified auto-complete". To me, that just betrays a lack of knowledge about the AI of the past 5 years. It is like saying "The Large Hadron Collider is just a glorified slingshot", or "humans are just glorified protein factories". It is an application of neural networks, which has been around for many decades, but with the vastly improved hardware and improved algorithms, this has can now be done at immense scale. And the results are surprising - There is unexpected "emergent" capability, that researchers didn't expect.

Our instinct is to be protective of our own kind, and say that they are just machines, and they can never be creative like humans, or never have true feelings, or show love. And this may be true, but it challenges our notion of the essential difference between humans and machines. Are humans just complex machines, or do we have something magical (like a soul) which could never be replicated. The latest generation of AI feels like science fiction to anyone who was involved in AI in the 1980s.

It might be time for an update of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt).

It currently lets automated crawlers know what they can access in the site. But it might be appropriate to have a finer tuned protocol which makes this determination based on purpose. e.g. I might be happy with a bot accessing my site for the purpose of search engine indexing, but not for the purpose of AI training... Or vice versa.

It would still be essentially a request rather than a physical restriction, but that's not nothing. A company can be asked whether they abide by this protocol or not. And large companies generally want to be seen as good "citizens".

Our history is littered with instances of technology ruining the previous world. The technology may actually be a net positive, but we can still acknowledge the negative side-effects.

We used to cook food from basic ingredients. It would take time and knowledge, but tasted wonderful. We now more commonly microwave frozen meals, which is quick, and requires next to no knowledge. But it has arguably ruined the culinary world. And yes, you can still find properly prepared meals, in the same way as you can still find properly written literature.

I think you make a good, albeit uncomfortable point.

If we accept that point - that a military is a necessity, and that it must not simply exist, but be effective - then we have to support the building and upkeep of such a military. But I still think there is a bit of leeway for the attitude in which we do that.

We can have an Eisenhower-like attitude, which I think achieves what you say, but in a sort of measured manner, alway cautious. Or we can do it in a bellicose, gung-ho sort of manner. Both might achieve an effective military, but somehow the former seems more appropriate, and dare I say, moral.

And the former approach often seems to be taken by those who have actually had experience in wars.

There are options which reduce the risk of this whole category of attack.
Two examples are (a) automatic zeroing of freed memory, and (b) inspecting and filtering suspicious HTTP requests.
These are not foolproof, but they reduce the risk of being attacked by an exploit of the next vulnerability.

The major reason they are not used is that they tend to come with a performance hit. But you'd think they might be useful as a temporary "switch on" option, when the alternative the company is considering is taking down the website.