On the one hand, yes, people must be paid for their work.

But on the other hand, the people who actually -did- the work in this case are not the ones setting the price, and they are not the ones getting the money. Music creators don't see a nickle of licensing, most of the time.

If an Applebees in Podunk Nebraska plays a Hendrix song, does his estate or his heirs get the money? Or is it some conglomerate that acquired the rights in a hostile takeover 20 years ago? Yep, the conglomerate.

And a quick reminder, the owner of the Podunk Applebees is not the one who ultimately pays for that license fee. YOU are. Because costs are passed on to the customer.

Thus we have a situation where people are being gouged for license fees and the musicians are still getting nothing.

Things are never as easy as one might hope.

The drive to the bottom line (see what I did there?) is a slippery slope. A good CEO will balance profitability with employee satisfaction. Why? Because a company's employees should be their best customers. If you have "half" as many customers right out of the gate, the company is going to do worse as a result. People who talk about AI eliminating jobs forget that their business model relies on a base of customers willing to spend their money on the product. If people are out of work, they aren't going to buy a shiny new car.

MCP may very well stand for "Model Context Protocol", but in the 1980's it stood for the villain of the Tron series, Master Control Program. Will tying AI together be a good thing or will we see the rise of another kind of MCP?

Char coal, yes. Mined coal isn't that ancient.

I just checked and a single model plan is $10k per month. Even if AI were my business, no thanks...

I've been on /. long enough to remember when most people here leaned libertarian. Ian Freeman would've been celebrated as a hero. I'm shocked at the current unquestioning acceptance of whatever the Establishment media says. Sad.

Here's a different take on this story and a deep dive into Ian Freeman.

"Who's going to the slammer when the AI kills someone it shouldn't?"

The officer who ordered it deployed. Machines don't make independent decisions. They do what they're programmed to do. Humans decide what that is going to be, and send them off to do it. That's who goes to jail.

There's no difference between this and a self-driving car. Who goes to jail when a self driving car runs over a cyclist? The guy responsible for the car.

Who's getting wet over self-driving cars, Roscoe? Same technology, different job.

The Valkyries are the Choosers of the Slain. They decide who goes to Valhala, not who lives or dies. HUMANS decide who lives or dies.

Also, whoever called that robot a Valkyrie is a dick. Brunhilde is not amused.

Because you need a DEEP hole to make it worthwhile, and all the pilot projects I've heard of have huge problems with corrosion.

Because water goes in clean, then dissolves every salt it comes in contact with (and it is HOT don't forget) so it comes out corrosive, loaded with sulfur, and toxic AF. So now you've got a f-ton of horrifying water trying to eat your pipes and pumps and storage tanks.

This does not happen with fracking nearly as much because they use water to fracture the rocks, and they -leave- it there as much as they can.

The whole point of geothermal is circulation. Circulation brings salts out of the ground. That's bad, generally speaking. Also expensive.

Maybe try calculating how much water you can inject into the Earth's crust before something you hadn't thought of happens.

Like a steam explosion, maybe? People never shut up about dangers of fracking, this is the turbo-nitrous version of fracking.

Such as, just ferinstance, what's the service life of a geothermal well liner, and what the hell do you do with one when the liner has corroded away?

Yas, don't I remember hearing that injecting plain water into Mother Earth was Very Bad and we were all going to die from earthquakes and water pollution? I'm sure I read that right here at Slashdot. Like, continuously, since fracking became a thing in the news.

But doing -exactly- the same thing, only MORE, is good if it is geothermal. Right?

Somebody say "Aktchewally..." in 3, 2, 1...

It is not a coincidence that Musk lit the biggest rocket ever built on 4/20. Then, when they were scheduled to flip for stage separation, it just kept flipping until they blew it up. Thinking like Musk, that could have always been the plan. The primary purpose of this launch was to collect data on flight performance, etc, etc. But I wouldn't put it past Musk to have an almost bigger mission to just launch and explode the biggest rocket in history on 4/20 as a pure stunt. The man acts like a kid sometimes.

Or how about TOR sweeping Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette AND Best Series?

Nobody else published science fiction this year?