I suspect the college officials wanted to pacify the students but not actually do anything about this. Simple things to do could be for example install an electric meter and inform flock the camera energy usage will be billed to Flock at $1M per kWh - that alone would have them pull the cameras in record time. Additionally, cover the cameras completely, they may be owned by Flock, but it's university property so they can put whatever they want around the camera. Lots of ways a property owner can effectively render the Flock cameras useless, and yet, none of this happened. So, either very incompetent college officials, or (more likely) virtue signaling college officials attempting to placate their student base.

Any household accepting the $10K, what are they agreeing to do or not do?

Are you saying that if I unleash an AI, willing to spend multi-million dollars in tokens and giving AI access to my money, with a simple instruction "increase my net worth as much as possible", I would not be at all criminally liable if said AI decided to hire hitmen using my money to eliminate people who stand in the way to me becoming a billionaire, like leaders and key employees of competing businesses? Wow, that would be great for any organized crime leaders, "please take care of this situation" is the only prompt, they are not liable to for any bloodshed, according to you. Am I understanding you correctly?

I don't get it either, If some curious scientist builds a bomb in their house, and it accidentally goes off taking out the entire block, that scientist would be held liable (if they survived), no? If someone sets up an automated machine gun on their laws to shoot rabbits eating the garden, if that machine gun kills the neighbor, the person who setup the machine gun is liable, no? How is Open AI (or anyone else) unleashing autonomous software with internet access not liable for what that software does?

Why? They agreed to a meaningless gesture. Nothing of substance changes of course, but Trump declares victory, can tell everyone who will listen that they caved to his will. End of story, nothing more to see here.

Simply ask the police if it is valid to call them every time you know you are being watched and recorded. If they say it's ok, start dialing 911 every time you pass a Flock camera. Seems logical.

Futile, at best temporary solution. It would be like a cooks' union demanding that nobody cook/microwave food at home, instead always buy food from a restaurant, or at the very least force grocery stores to raise prices so that home cooking at home is more expensive (e.g. frozen TV dinner minimum price $20).

The lawyer in question here claimed he didn't know that AI can hallucinate. What better way to have the message spread than make an example out of him and any other lawyers doing the same thing? Humans learn best on extreme examples, so disbar the lawyer and make them pay for a retrial including a replacement attorney of their client's choice (which I'm sure will be the top firm in the country), and such a story will very quickly spread through the attorney community, therefore making all lawyers aware of the severe consequences.

Sometimes your only purpose in life may be to be a warning to others!

That would require new laws. Flock itself could easily force this by including in their contract something like $1M fee for unjustified search, with the money going to a fund to defend anyone unfairly accused with the help of their technology (yes, you can tie the payout to winning the case, but I'm sure there will be attorneys willing to take the case contingent on a win if they can charge $1,000 per hour). Any cop who racks up a few million dollar bill to their department will be promptly dispatched from their position, and likely charged with theft of services. Such high liability would also force the departments to oversee their own officers to avoid multi-million dollar bills every month.

Tesla is not the first one to try this. I do remember renting a Prius once without instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, instead a speedometer in the center of the dash. While I disliked it, I got used to it, i.e. it became tolerable by the end of the week long rental period. That said, young people today have other opinions. My son likes the Tesla's no instrument cluster behind the steering wheel - he would not pay $199 to add one (I offered to install it for free). I suspect he would pay to not have it, so I think he would appreciate being able to get a car without an instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, especially if it's cheaper.

So while old geezers like us may hate the idea of no instrument cluster behind the steering wheel, I applaud Hyundai for offering their customer a choice. And yes, it costs more to add a display, so that cost is added. And not, you cannot just add up the cost of parts. I ran a business selling a hardware product (non-automotive) and pricing the product at 2.5x the landed cost is the break even point after including returns, lost/stolen shipments, fraud, warranty replacement, etc. I also worked in the consumer electronics design, and IIRC every $1 of parts costs ended up $10 in MSRP of the product.

Ok, now let's talk about the stupid touch controls for everything - insert old man yelling at the cloud meme.

I consider myself a tech enthusiast.

Lots of things in my house are controllable from my phone. None of them rely on any cloud service (if I am outside of my house, I have to VPN into the house to control them - my own server running open source VPN software). All my phone needs is a web browser which hits an internal network only web server I setup on my home network to control all the devices. Heck, one of the companies from whom I have a bunch of devices (20+) no longer exists (went bankrupt after the pandemic), but it's not preventing me from being able to control them. Some of the others may be gone too, but their devices talk over open or at least documented interfaces, and none require the cloud. Ok, full disclosure, my NVR does keep on trying to connect to alibaba.com and few other places, but it's on an isolated, dedicated network with no internet access - it doesn't make it not work, I even access it just fine from my phone via VPN.

Apple supports charging from PD chargers no problem.

Apple doesn't give you cheap headphones and wall warts because most people don't need them, as they have better ones already, so they just end up in the trash eventually, or stashed away at homes never used. I have a stash of such accessories, all the way back to blackberry days (yes, blackberries shipped with cheap wall warts and even headphones, well one headphone and microphone - never used them). Imagine if every shoe rack came with included shoes, yes, cheap, generic shoes.

... if you'd rather not pay for the extra screen. Not everyone wants an instrument cluster. The most popular car in the world doesn't have one (Model Y).

They could in their contracts embed a clause that any search not tied to an an official investigation or otherwise deemed as abuse will be billed at $1M per search to the law enforcement agency from which it originates, with a stipulation that the department will pay no matter what, even if their officer was not authorized - they can sue the officer to try to recover said charges on their own. This just might motivated the law enforcement agencies to do some very strict internal regulation to avoid millions of dollars worth of obligations. A couple of bankrupt police departments could serve as a warning to others, motivating them to setup very tightly controlled access.