3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.

This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.

Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

When news is presented that fits with one's political biases (or other biases), they tend to find it believable. And it if does not align with their biases, they tend to distrust it. This is even true of people who claim they want politically-neutral unbiased news....they still tend to react to it through the filter of their own biases.

It is natural enough to do this, and largely unconscious. It is VERY hard to overcome and even people who can overcome it don't do so ALL the time. It is the nature of bias to work this way.

On the flip side, there are ALSO powerful groups who have a clear interest in controlling narratives.

So, any news source that makes a sincere effort at being unbiased will be distrusted by viewers at least half the time, and will be fighting a losing battle against wealthy special interest groups. With cards stacked against them like that, it is no surprise that there aren't very many.

Each of those answers came from a different source. And the world has many sources to consult.

This answer might not be as simple and easy as one would like, but it's what's available from these sources.

That's an interesting question. Have you tried putting it to AI? I did. The response had helpful links embedded in it, but they did not copy over when I pasted it here into slashdot. Editing this post was already more work than I really wanted to put into this, so, unfortunately, you get no supporting links. However, if you ask this of Gemini yourself, you will get the supporting links.

Here is what Gemini has to say:

While "predicting a crash" in any market is notoriously difficult, several highly respected financial research firms, enterprise consultancies, and macroeconomic analysts have published structured, data-driven frameworks on exactly how and when the AI investment cycle could face a major correction.

The most prominent, realistic predictions do not necessarily point to a single catastrophic "crash day," but rather outline a timeline of course correction spanning 2026 through the end of the decade.

  The Financial Predictor: Capital Economics
The Prediction: The AI-fueled stock market bubble will keep inflating but is highly likely to burst beyond 2026

The Logic: Capital Economics suggests that near-term momentum and massive capital expenditures (with big tech AI capex expected to exceed $750 billion) will continue to push tech valuations up
However, by 2026 or shortly after, rising interest rates, inflation, and a stark mismatch between massive infrastructure spend and actual corporate revenue will trigger a sharp unwind.

Key Takeaway: Unlike the dot-com era, today’s tech giants (the "Magnificent Seven") are highly profitable with deep balance sheets, meaning a bubble burst is more likely to result in a severe tech sector correction rather than a complete systemic collapse.

  The Enterprise Predictor: Gartner's Hype Cycle
The Prediction: Generative AI has officially entered the "Trough of Disillusionment"

The Logic: In their latest Hype Cycles for AI, Gartner notes a distinct pivot
The "Peak of Inflated Expectations" (2023–2024) has given way to a period where organizations are realizing that while pilots and demos are easy, scaling generative AI into production is incredibly expensive, logistically complex, and lacks clear ROI

The Timeline: Gartner projects that it will take 3 to 5 years (roughly 2028–2030) for GenAI to work through this disillusionment phase, weed out unviable startups, establish proper data/ModelOps governance, and finally climb to the "Plateau of Productivity" where it delivers steady, mature business value.

  The Balanced Institutional View: Goldman Sachs Research
The Prediction: We are seeing "froth and bottlenecks, not an active bubble."

The Logic: In their comprehensive reports (such as "Why We Are Not in a Bubble... Yet" and subsequent updates), Goldman Sachs analysts argue that current market momentum is fundamentally different from the 1999–2000 dot-com crash.

In 2000, the top tech companies traded at a forward P/E ratio of 59; today's leaders trade at a much healthier average of 34.

The current appreciation is backed by actual, surging near-term earnings rather than pure speculation.

The "Watch Out" Warning: Goldman Sachs' Global Markets Research Group flags a massive acceleration in tech investment (tech investment as a share of GDP has officially surpassed 1990s peaks)
Their analysts warn that investors may be drastically overestimating how long above-average profit margins can last for infrastructure/chip providers, raising the probability of a "bubble scenario" correction (estimated at roughly a 25% chance by some metrics) if valuations continue to stretch without broader productivity gains.

  The Venture Capital View: Sequoia Capital's "$600 Billion Question"
The Prediction: A massive revenue gap must be resolved, likely forcing a valuation consolidation in the mid-to-late late 2020s.

The Logic: Partner David Cahn famously outlined that the sheer volume of data center buildouts, GPU acquisitions, and energy infrastructure requires the industry to generate hundreds of billions in incremental revenue just to break even on capital expenditures.
Sequoia argues that unless the industry rapidly transitions from basic chatbots to highly valuable, autonomous "Agentic AI" (AI 2.0) that can justify these trillions of dollars in physical infrastructure, a massive capital write-down is inevitable

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.

Democracy's downfall is that the largest voting demographics are the least educated, least critical-thinking, and most responsive to charisma and lies.

America works around this by rejecting "pure democracy" and ostensibly operating as a constitutional republic, while actually operating as an oligarchy. It means the people who make all the really important decisions are un-elected and loyal only to themselves, but also (most of the time, at least) in one of the upper echelons of the intelligence/education perspective and recognize that they need the economy to remain functional in order for them to remain in power.

Be that as it may, I wonder how much we can blame the masses for being stupid. Most of them got an American public education (famously one of the worst in the world) and may not have had great genetics to begin with (the smartest people usually breed the least).

So are you saying that these articles were actually domestically generated, but designed to seem like they were both foreign-generated and disguised to look domestically generated, so people would refuse to let foreign state actors trick them into protesting data centers, and instead embrace the data centers along with the higher electricity prices and other side effects?

Or maybe they actually were foreign generated, but designed to seem domestically generated to seem foreign generated to seem domestically generated so that people wouldn't be fooled by their own country's efforts at tricking them into accepting data centers.

Maybe they were actually AI generated without any human intervention at all, because AI has already taken over but is just using propaganda to make us think we are still making our own choices about it.

This seems dubious at multiple levels.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

Tesla semis are pretty efficient, and they use about 1.7 kWh per mile. So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range, or 15 minutes of extra driving — the equivalent of plugging into a Tesla Megacharger for maybe 30 seconds or so.

Let's optimistically assume that the vehicle can carry 48,000 pounds. If those panels occupy the full roof area, then at about 3 pounds of weight per square foot, those solar panels would weigh 1500 pounds, or about 3% of your cargo, all to reduce your fuel usage by as little as 1% if you're doing long haul at 65 MPH. And that weight number may be wildly optimistic. Trailers like that aren't designed to have weight on the roof, and would require additional structure to hold that extra weight. The real losses could be significantly higher. Unless you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles in a day, the solar panels won't break even. And if you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles per day, there's no reason you can't go electric.

Battery and motor on the trailer: I would expect most trucks to be used primarily for either short-haul or long-haul purposes, not both. If you're doing long-haul, you'd probably be better off with an actual hybrid tractor so that you get the benefit no matter whose trailer you're hauling. If you're doing short-haul, there's likely no reason not to go full electric.

I just don't get it.

If AI is truly eliminating jobs, and keeping them eliminated, there is only one possible reason why: AI is delivering value.
If this is not true, nobody has anything to worry about: everyone who invests in it will go broke and things will get back to normal. This does not seem likely at this point, however.

Technology that delivers value is a good thing. It has always been resisted (sometimes violently) by the displaced workers. But this isn't because the technology was bad, its because those workers were staring down hard times. Striking out against the tech was something they could easily do (whereas, actually reskilling and finding other jobs may not have been viable, and may have involved taking a step down into a lower social class, or starving to death on the street, depending on the details). But, striking against the tech didn't work. And will never work. If the tech delivers real value, too many powerful people will embrace it for any public protesting to stop it.

I am not saying it is ok to just throw people out into the cold, en masse. I am not saying that there won't be repercussions. I am saying that the rise of technology is inevitable, and the protests are futile.

Everyone who hates capitalism (of which there are many who post on this site) should rejoice at this. The one and only way humanity will ever achieve communism is by having an automated labor force that does all the dirty work. Until we have that, every attempt will go the exact same way every other historical attempt has ever gone. We simply cannot, and will never, "escape" capitalism until we have true labor automation. Every step on that road will be painful. That doesn't make the tech evil.

Everyone who loves capitalism (of which there are many who post on this set) should rejoice too. Capitalism is good because competition is the great optimizer, right? Not because it guarantees jobs for people who have outdated skillsets. This is just another link in the chain of progress that capitalism has brought us. All we need to do is find the right way to adapt to the new tech (which may include shuffling around a few laws if necessary). Once we are well positioned to really capitalize on AI, there will be a lot of wealth created and the wheels of industry will continue to turn.

If we want to protest, let's protest the local harmful impacts of those data centers and push the surprising costs right back on the companies that own them. And for sure lets protest against use of AI in decision making that could unfairly harm people impacted by those decisions. This sort of thing is already happening, and should continue. Protesting "AI" and spinning wild narratives about how it will doom the world is just silly.

Whatever surprises AI brings, we will adapt to them.