I looked it up. Asus's fiscal year is January through December (same as the calendar year).

Problem is: We don't even know what consciousness is.

So the best we can say is if something creates the impression of having one, based on whom we attribute consciousness to, i.e. other humans. Well, big surprise that a model explicitly trained on human language and texts creates that impression. It does show just how good the models are. At pretending to be human because they have a shitload of examples on what humans would say.

For all we know, the gas clouds on Jupiter could be conscious, just in a way that is completely baffling to us. We can't rule it out because we don't know what consciousness is, so we can't test for it.

Not true.

An attacker may have a limited window. He might exploit some other vulnerability to do some operation with privileged access rights, but not have an admin shell.

You're not saying?

But they take security so seriously. They said. They promised. This time for real. No, this time. Ok, next time.

They got bought by EMC, which at the time was a Dell company. Then they got acquired by Dell directly. Then they got spun off as their own company, which lasted a year or two before Broadcom snapped them up. Through the whole ordeal, they were sustained mainly by a combination of legit vendor lock-in and people just drinking the Kool-Aid.

COO: "I'm fed up with Broadcom's ridiculous price hikes! We need to get off VMware like yesterday!"

CTO: "But where will I get my headaches, proprietary tools, and vendor lock-in? Hmmmmmm...."

Sure, but we're talking about organizations that have already successfully deployed on VMware. If they didn't need all this massive transactional integrity and twelve-nines uptime back then, they don't now.

But knowing the industry-standard tools might make the education pay off a little better.

On the other hand, suppose you just stole somebody's wallet. Bet you could get that $1 charge through before they canceled it, and they wouldn't notice.

This.

Whenever a politician claims that something is "to protect the children", you can be 100%, absolutely certain that it is not about the children.

Oh, that's trivial: a) it's made-up nonsense, b) it tells people how to live their lives and c) it's been around for so long that people forgot that it's made-up nonsense.

None of that or the rest of your answer has anything to do with the point I was making: That "accepted as a religion in the USA" isn't much of an argument. If people can get Jedi accepted as a religion, it just proves how meaningless all of that is. Other countries have correctly identified Scientology as a pyramid scheme and a scam.

The fact that other religions would qualify for that as well doesn't make it any less true.

Yeah, but isn't the bar for that ridiculously low in the US? Like the Jedi "religion" being tax-exempt on religious grounds? And there's no discussion that that one is based purely on fiction.

No, I did not. These are features that exist for my convenience, not as mass surveillance tools. The government is abusing them.

Yes, if you have control of the cell towers. Or run an IMSI catcher. But the technological solution applied is not the question. The question is if we want someone as untrustworthy as our governments to be able to constantly track us.

The fact that you personally maybe don't care doesn't give you the right to opt-in all of us who might care. The problem is that once the technology exists, it will be abused. It already is. If we explicitly allow it, abuse will run rampant. We already have examples of cops using surveillance tech to spy on their spouses, or to stalk that cute girl from the bar. We have tons of examples of surveillance permissions granted for one purpose being used for another one. When the government wants these laws it's always to find child abusers and terrorists. But that is never what they actually have in mind.

And that should tell you all you need to know about how much your "doctor" degree will be worth.

Correct. They are also not Italian and not Romani. But they do speak Swiss German, Swiss Italian, Swiss French, and Romansh. What they are not (apparently unlike you) are racist-nationalist ideologues. Their Confederation has a longstanding tradition of diversity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism. In that, they are very unlike you, who seem to want to tell them to run their country like a racist ethno-state.

You also don't seem to want to fucking educate yourself before you tell others how to live their lives.