Gambling and prostitution - oldest professions in the word. Many governments have tried to stop them and all failed miserably despite resources committed. If it has been proven that it cannot be stopped, is it worth spending the taxpayer's money in futile attempts? Human nature, however flawed, cannot be denied, so one sensible alternative is to to regulate it and tax it like any other business. At least prevent people from being taken advantage of by dishonest players, have some control over it as far as non-adults are concerned, and have them pay taxes so the regulation enforcement is funded - minimize the damages if you cannot elimiate them.

The gist of the story is that a young student was good at extracting information from young hackers using social engineering. It yielded better results that law enforcement agencies.

Of course they did. Wouldn't you, if you could? Say you could get a guaranteed cut from every gallon of gasoline sold in a particular state by lobbying politicians that every single gas station in the state has to belong to your organization, and they you can set a per gallon "membership fee" for any gas station to belong.

If you're looking for a new racket currently in process of getting enshrined into laws, 3d printing validation laws are being pushed in a few states already, where in order to sell a 3d printer, that printer must send all designs to some company to verify if it is dangerous to society or not. Now imaging the money you could make if it was your company that every single printer in the world would have to get approval from before printing any design. A freakin' gold mine!

No argument there, but then again I've always considered Elon Must a 21st century car salesman. So he doesn't call his showrooms and service centers dealers, so what?

I live in Washington too. I've owned many cars, including multiple Teslas between 2013 and 2024. I will tell you that there is no clear winner between direct sales and dealer system. At first (think 2013-2018) Tesla service was amazing, they would bend over backwards to help the early adopters, then then Model 3, and then Model Y came, profitability became the top priority and they wouldn't even cover a yellowing screen under warranty in a less than one year old six digit priced Model S. I saw people coming with videos of their Model 3's malfunctioning, and Tesla service saying "we cannot reproduce it, therefore the problem fixed itself". That is also when I realized that the manufacturer owned service service means there is no competition, so they can charge whatever they want - for example an $8 chip that failed in one of my Teslas causing the main screen no to boot costed $3,000 to fix (eventually there was a NHTSA forced recall, but not when I needed the fix, luckily I am capable of replacing a BGA EMMC part myself, but that is not within an average owner's capabilities). I now own dealer sold cars, and have to tell you I am getting great service from the dealer (4 cars, 3 different manufacturers), despite the manufacturer's inadequacies with modern technologies (yea, they suck at software). In the past I've owned many dealer sold brands, and my service experience varied. I've had some great experiences, and some horrible ones too. I remember long ago having an issue with a 2 year old Honda for which the dealer wanted a bunch of money to resurface the rotors, eventually getting new rotors replaced under Honda warranty, the service guy literally winking at me saying "hey, I gotta try to make money, eh?" (yep, he was Canadian ;-) ). On the other end of the spectrum I had a Lexus once which the dealer was willing to go to mat for me to lemon my car over a bluetooth hands free issue that Lexus (Toyota) was unable to resolve. Lexus actually sent an engineer from Japan to repair the problem (turned out to be a bent pin in one of the harnesses) tp avoid the car getting returned as a lemon.

Bottom line is that direct sales vs. dealer experience does not have a clear cut winner for consumers. I do however strongly believe that both should be allowed by law. This explicit allowing one manufacturer at a time political bribing shit in WA state is just government corruption (happens in other areas to, check out automatic card shufflers allowed in WA as an example, or charter school licenses). I say let people choose, do they wan to buy from a dealer or direct from manufacturer, let he market decide what the people want. Heck, allow the same manufacturer to sell via dealer and direct, see what people choose. I bet such a choice would spurn competition for dealers to show people why it's worth it buying from them. And yes, I get that it would cost some dealers profits, in situation where they require people to buy a bunch of their cars to qualify for an allocation for a special car (e.g. Porsche 911 GT3 RS), or charge Additional Dealer Markup on top of MSRP (e.g. Corvette).

By this logic copyright holders could not go after sites facilitating pirated media distribution, instead they would have to go after each individual consumer of said media, no? After all, the pirate sites do not damage the copyright holders, they only create a new pay-per-view/listen/read royalty stream or them.

They have their uses. I got one few years back, 50" 4K UHD for $249 IIRC, which was a really good price for a screen that size at the time. I never connected it to the internet (maybe once, out of the box, to get latest firmware), but have been using it for years as an HDMI screen for some security cameras. It's held up really well, especially given it's ON 24/7.

Have you confirmed this?

I did similar with a Vizio TV. I gave it no internet connection, so it serves as a large 4K HDMI monitor.

Maybe if the rider told Waymo support they plan to unleash deadly force in self defense if the attacker manages to break through the window, or brandishes a weapon, or tries to set the car on fire, or whatever other threatening action, then the passengers will fear for their lives and plan on using whatever is necessary to neutralize the threat. Decline to answer whether or not the passengers have guns, maybe they do, maybe they don't. Perhaps then some manager would decide it's worth using an override because it's not worth the bad PR? Sometimes escalation threats work. No Waymo manager wants to be responsible for an incident where passengers of a ride start shooting automatic weapons out the windows.

Prices often already don't match shelf stickers. I see it all the time. If customer catches it, they get the lower price, if they don't, they don't even know that they chose the item based on a lower posted price. Stores blame it on manual pricing tags. With electronic ones, they will have no excuse that someone forgot to update the price.

Digital prices can work just the same, going up activates on shelves an hour in advance, going down activates instantly - if customer insists that when they put their item in the basket the price was higher, honor it automatically (no human in the loop required, customer insists on paying more, let them).

Some grocery stores already do dynamic pricing, but they mask it under dynamic discounts - they make you scan a code at the shelf, then login to their site, then you get your personalized discount.

If you have a domain you can join during installation, no Microsoft account required. Also, no stupid AI stuff such as Recall even available to enable. This is one nig reason why I still keep a decade old domain controller at home. Once installed, the PC doesn't ever need to see the controller again.

Even if every company which can afford large scale training of AI models, downloads the entire content of whatever streaming provider for training, that traffic will still pale in comparison with the total of all humans watching their content. The bot traffic in question here is individual agents retrieving information for a specific job for a specific human, not for model training. While you can instruct an agent to go watch 5,000 hrs of streaming videos and report back with some conclusion from them, that would be quite costly. On the other hand, asking a bot to visit 5,000 sites looking for a best SSD at a best price, much more affordable in terms of AI costs.

If they officially don't sell to anyone by huge customers, could that be used by someone who simply hacked vmware licenses and is selling the pirated licenses to smaller customers, willing to pay penalties of some multiple of lost revenue ($0.00 exactly, since that is Broadcom's target revenue from smaller customers)?