"Crash"? "Price cliff"? "No premium"? So, one of the things that we desperately need to introduce to mitigate the current crisis gets cheaper... and the system somehow tries to convince us that that's a *bad* thing??

This is probably not a new thing. Online retailers have been calculating whether it's worthwhile to restock returns or not for a long time. What's new is that they have recently been getting bad publicity for destroying returned products if the numbers say it's cheaper than to re-inventory them. And their solution is to tell customers not even to send them back, so the blame will attach to the customer and not to the retailer.

Angela Merkel has a Ph.D. in physics.

I love that even in the commercialized cesspool that the web has become, and on the pale shadow of itself that Slashdot has become, I can still read an explanation that is readable, accurate and better informed than most journalists and many philosophers writing about the issue, and have it upvoted to the top.
Thank you, Internet.

The unpredictable, unacceptable delay *is* for incremental re-encoding. Modern video codecs are stunningly clever predictive miracle engines, and encoding an entire episode of something takes minutes even on good hardware. Re-encoding the last 30 seconds on a mobile device would *still* take too long for a smooth user experience, and the only alternative would be to trade off speed against vastly increased requirements in space... which mobile devices are *also* low on.

...the terms of service state that you relinquish any and all exclusive rights on whatever documents you upload, and that Alphabet can use them for any conceivable purpose whatsoever. Am I right? What do I win?

...yet.

They pledged? How on Earth is this not already the law? How on Earth is this not already in their terms of service? Seriously, are these services only used by terminally naive people?

If they can't justify processing my data under any of the numerous and rather broad bases, then they don't deserve to get them.

Close, but no cigar. When you have to throw the device away, then it's bricked.

Dude, any car being designed from now on is going to be a computer. Behaviour will be changed via updates after the fact and there's nothing you can do about it.

In other words, just like the optical illusions that humans are notoriously susceptible to? Jesus. The phenomenon is actually somewhat interesting, but maybe you shouldn't start out with a blatant self-contradictory assertion.

No it isn't. It's inevitable. Unless you believe that human mastery of Go was somehow due to special, non-information-processing-related powers, there is no way that our superiority could last forever, since evolution works with glacial slowness while computer technology advances at breakneck speed. Everyone who professes themselves shocked that we cannot understand the inner workings of programs we ourselves wrote overlooks that we also can't understand the inner workings of the thought processes of Go grandmasters.

Bond villain? I thought it was established that Elon Musk is Batman?

Absolutely right!

Remember, there is no such thing as "identity theft". There is only fraud, committed between two parties neither of which is you. The notion that someone can "steal your identity" is a red herring invented by big companies, in the hope that this will make it sound as if it was your responsibility and you should bear the costs. It isn't - it's their responsibility to guard against fraudulent transactions and not to withdraw money from you under fraudulent circumstances. But so far they've been pretty successful in establishing the narrative that it's your fault if someone abuses the ridiculously inadequate safeguards against fraud. This is a prime example of "Establish the terms of the debate, and you've determined its outcome".