> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
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So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

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There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.

I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to some music on your phone's loudspeaker at a modest volume and broadcast invisible noise that fills any eavesdropping AI's buffer with junk or even malicious payloads.
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There was a plan to put a solar farm + batteries on that site but they were scrapped for reasons I'm sure you could guess.

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> I mean, it cannot be that wind and solar plus a few batteries are actually more expensive, could it?

Nope. The TL;DR version: It would actually be cheaper to build wind/solar and batteries, if not for the fact that the cost of building the plant was covered fifty years ago and they're getting another $1.9B in free money for it.

But of course this was never about you "missing something" - this is about you having an agenda. At least I hope it's about having an agenda, because the economics of the situation are so plainly evident you'd have to be an incredible moron to genuinely be "missing something."

For one, the plant is not owned or operated by Google. It's owned by NextEra Energy - a multibillion dollar, multinational energy company. Google's name only appears on this story in so far as they want to build data centers and that gives NextEra Energy a reason to get the plant going again. NextEra also does wind and solar power and if they had local projects that were on hold instead of a mothballed nuclear plant the story would probably be about them resuming those projects instead.

For two, the lion's share of the capital costs for the plant have already been spent long ago. The Duane Arnold Energy Center started operating in 1975. It makes a lot more sense to revive the plant that is actively losing money every day it's not operating (because NextEra still has expenses to pay on it) than to keep paying the upkeep and spend even more money building new infrastructure elsewhere.

For three, there's a lot more federal money available for NON-wind/solar power under the current administration, which is openly hostile to those technologies. $1.9B worth in this case. For the equivalent ~615MW the existing nuclear plant is expected to produce, that would be about $700M in new wind construction even if you triple it to add 24 hours worth of battery storage at 615MW (an absurd amount) you're still comparable at about $2.1B. That versus, $1.9B in basically free taxpayer loans, is not a hard decision to make.

So basically the only time it financially makes sense to go with nuclear power is when you already have the nuclear power plant and you can get a bunch of free money to put a fresh coat of paint on it.
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You're missing the point.

Leaks of personal information like this are only possible because some company decided to collect and store it all in one place. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked.

The age verification laws will create even more vast databases of personal information; names, addresses, financial information, various service accounts, even deep information about each person's habits and preferences. All in the hands private businesses who were the lowest (or at least most corrupt) bid. It's never a matter of if, but only when, a database will be breached and data leaked. It will be a prize sweeter than any criminal organization or malicious state actor could possibly have dreamed of.

Let's stop putting everyone's eggs in the same basket against their will, hmm? Especially when it doesn't even solve the problem it's championed to solve.
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Sure? I've had PV on my roof for the past year. 430W nominal panels. Problem is most of them point east and some of them point west, because the orientation of my house, and the ones that point west are shaded the later half of the afternoon due to trees. Despite the sub optimal orientation, they average about 2kwh daily when the sun is shining.

I'm in lower NY where we have like... weather and stuff, y;know? I'm sure they'd do a lot better in California with better orientation. Full sun for 5 hours a day on average is not unreasonable.
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Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

They will not work in a power outage, because that would mean it could feed power back into a downed electrical grid which is how people get killed. It's also extremely illegal for that reason.

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The payback for these types of systems is like 3-6 years depending on circumstances.

A single 400W panel with microinverter should handily average 2kwh daily as pong as it's pointed in vaguely the right direction. In California that's reducing our electric bill by over 60 cents a day just for power costs, not including avoided taxes and fees. Doesn't sound like much, but at $400 "installed" it's paid for itself in well under 2 years. After that, basically free money as savings to the tune of like $20/mo.

And you can take it with you.

I'd say it's a no-brainer if you have a place to put it, but if you're actually opposed to the concept you might actually not have a brain.
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I get paid for my excess solar. Not a lot, mind you, and only once a year, but they still cut me a check if my net balance is negative.

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I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

Who EVER cared about Dr. Dre?

> The numbers I saw suggested a 1% change in humanity's emissions, half the CO2 budget for the world, would solve the problem.

Where did you see that? Even the Paris Accords - which are kinda the minium effort - calls for 50% CO2 reduction by 2030.

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