Just creepy crawlies looking for their 5 minutes in the spotlight while the audience is ooh-ing and aah-ing the destruction and opening their wallets to buy trinkets.

Them's there alternative facts meester! I gots plenty! It's see-ent-tuffic, y'see!

obligatory gravity well explainer

There's no overarching EU law. There are EU regulations and directives, and the member states (who each have their own state laws) must fold those directives into their own state laws in a way that fits. The regulations tend to be very targeted.

So in a manner of speaking, it's all state laws, no "federal" law, just local interpretations of "federal" directives and some common standards. And contracts in each state have to follow state law. If someone objects that a "federal" directive is broken, then they can sue the state in an EU court, etc.

A big difference with America is that a legal precedent in one state doesn't mean anything in another state. It often doesn't mean anything in the same state either. The judges interpret the legal texts, but do not create new case law. You can't refer back to some judge such-and-such who said something was ok in a similar lawsuit, so therefore it must be ok going forward in all future lawsuits.

That's a meaningless statement. The politicians frame the engagement, but that has always been the case in all wars everywhere. Read Clausewitz. There are parameters and objectives. If a general can't deliver within these parameters, it means he's not good enough.

Same if your boss is telling you to build some accounting software, and you complain that it's impossible and he should let you build a flight simulator instead.

The US is not the best military in the world. It's the best *on paper*, if the metric used is heavy on equipment and light on strategy/tactics. There's a reason the US has been losing most wars since WWII. It's not the politicians. It's guerilla warfare, which the US military is not nimble enough to handle, with its heavy emphasis on equipment and process.

Go back through history and you'll find that the generals we remember and celebrate are those who thought out of the box, it's never been a pure game of technology.

10B/1M = 10,000 per "engineer" (*). I don't know about you, but I don't get out of bed for that kind of value. Moreover, it's Microsoft money, meaning it's probably just vouchers for time on the cloud, as if that's real money.

(*) it's actually less, the budget is likely going to pay for advertising and events etc.

How do you think the AI-embracing businesses must feel, when the three employees who are left realize that their AI collaborators are all offline?

Contract law works differently in Italy. American companies who decide to do business in Europe (any country) often get caught up because they don't do their research. The only exception is the UK, whose legal system is pretty close to the American one. It used to be that the UK was the gateway to Europe, the Brits were able to translate American ideas into the local business equivalent. But they are no longer European, and they've been shut out of the common market for several years now. Ireland is now the closest equivalent for Americans.

Not even close. First, ignore the totally optional, extremely easy to cancel, no contract required part, it's irrelevant. There is a contract, it was agreed by two parties, and the terms must meet the standards of Italian law.

(for Americans who have never visited Italy, the laws over there are highly codified and complex. Italy doesn't follow the English/American Common Law, it follows the modern European standard based on Napoleonic Law. Anything you think you know about the law based on American customs, you should unlearn).

The issue for Netflix HQ is simple: 1) stop telling the Italian subsidiary what to do, they know better than you. 2) pay the fines, unless you want to leave money on the table by leaving the country. 3) if you leave Italy, you will have to leave all of the EU countries too, because the way that the common market works it's all mixed up.

(But finally I can buy PC parts.)

If these are Chinese made PC parts, you'll have to work out a deal with tariff-boy first.

I think it should be a barf vacuum cleaner, not a bag. Basically, when you feel the urge to retch, you stick a tube in your mouth and suck up all the goodness into a tiny collection device, then eject it into a parabolic trajectory towards the sun.

Maybe you should stop calling it wrong, as if there's some kind of invisible sky giant who frowns upon that kind of thing and will do something about it any minute now?

It's not usefully wrong: it's an inevitable consequence of the choices you make. Eg if you're worried that your house is on fire, why aren't you putting out the fire? The longer you wait, the bigger the consequences get, and the more effort it will take. Inevitably.

What's wrong with that? If people aren't willing to stand up for themselves and refuse to be drafted when the man calls, maybe they need to learn a forgotten lesson...

There used to be radio "talk" shows in the 50s bought by fridge companies. Why wouldn't an "AI" company buy a talk show in the 20s?

(sorry, propaganda is not new)