One question then is why this hasn't happened in the US? One explanation is that the US had the illusion of a not deeply strong President, in part because everyone (including the Presidents) agreed tacitly not to push the limits of their authority that much. The precedent breaking nature here undermines that illusion, and makes it more likely that we'll have years (possibly decades) where the Democrats and Republicans will even more than usual treat everything as a zero sum game with no respects for democratic norms.

The bottom line is that everything about this is bad.

ChatGPT does correctly capture the attitude of the US mainstream news media, so I'll give it credit for that.

Ah, but are there cute cat videos?

There is nothing stopping a second employer sponsoring a new H1B for someone who just entered the country on an H1B. No penalty today.

What does tend to stop H1B visa holders from transferring to a new employer are contracts that require the employee to repay moving and other costs: sometimes, somewhat inflated costs.

I think for any company that truly is using H1B's to bring in talented workers who they want to employ it will encourage them to sponsor green card applications with a higher frequency rather than using the H1B model to keep workers as indentured servants. I'm good with that because someone coming in on a green card has the option to compete in the market and receive market rates. It may even cause companies to consider going back to hiring local talent and *gasp* actually doing career development.

Judging from what I've seen, if WDC trademarked the original Steamboat Willie character and renewed the mark as required, it has been in use continuously via pins, toys, etc..

You technically don't have to renew the mark - you just have to use it. Registering the mark is useful in legal proceedings, but even without registration it doesn't mean there's no protection in place. Most small businesses don't register their company name as a trademark, but the law still protects them from other companies trying to represent them falsely. It's just their damage claims will be limited and you'll have to prove usage.

Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so you are free to use it for your content. You cannot say it's Mickey Mouse, but you're free to do whatever you want - colorize it, etc. You can remove the ears off the mouse and modify the film that way to avoid trademark issues as well - you are free to create a derivative work of a public domain work. So if you wanted to replace Mickey with a human and use the rest of the imagery, you can.

In fact, wasn't there a pornographic movie that was using Steamboat Willie? Disney didn't sue them, likely because they didn't have anything to sue over.

Copyright law protects the author for 100 years, but there is no expiration date on a trademark as long as it is continuously in use and renewed every 10 years.

Writing a letter to a company asking them a question doesn't entitle you to an answer. Let alone a legally-binding answer. I can imagine it's reasonable to expect a positive answer if you are going to get sued. But for a company to explicitly declare you in the clear is a courtesy, not something I'd think you can compel.

Like your presentation but not your Subject--even though I had a couple of negative encounters with rule-based librarians recently.

Unfortunately I think libraries are losing there relevance and it's related to the AI reference in your FP. However I just started thinking about a more insidious version of the problem. You can say that it's a big problem that generative AIs will fabricate BS, but even when we realize an answer is BS, we may learn the wrong lesson from it. After all, many of the AI answers are pretty good (on the theory you can make sufficient allowance for your own tendency to believe what you want to believe), so there's a kind of reinforcement in favor of those questions and prompts.

Most people like oracles and want to get "authoritative" answers to their questions.

Yet it's not so much that we may learn to think like machines (which is still a big problem), but rather that we may learn not to ask certain kinds of questions. We won't even be able to ask why those questions are so problematic because we already "know" the oracular AI can't handle them. (Even if the government or some greedy megalomaniac intervened to make sure the question was unanswerable.) Hallucinated books may the smallest of our future worries.

(Also a concern that reading is being crushed by cute cat videos, but out of time just now...)

People have an idea that international law doesn't work but the vast majority works fine, and we often just notice the serious failures and breakdowns, not all the stuff that is quietly working on a day-to-day basis.

My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile.

They can barely make a phone at that price point.

Funny you mention corps. I work for a multinational and what our IT does is buy the base level as an appliance and then manually upgrade user RAM on an as needs / as approved basis. Multitasking rarely requires a higher end computer, but always requires more available RAM. Corps definitely play with this stuff.

You're not wrong, but this is a website populated mostly by that 1%. I suspect that most of the people here do upgrade components or build their own PCs from parts.