"A double standard between humans and bots"

If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.

I apologize if "purpose" was a poor word choice. The applicable test is whether or not it's being used verbatim or in a transformative way.

Political campaigns are inherently informative (in a "free speech" sense) and non-profit. While commercial use matters in general, it'd be a seriously uphill battle to claim a profit motive - even if they're spewing disinformation and raking in the cash.

I've been to the ER a number of times in the past few years...again, no big deal and small charges for me.

The only thing Obama did for me, is raise my prices.

Wait, I'll give him the no existing pre-conditions, that was a good one....but other than that, all I got was high prices.

Glad I don't deal with all of that....

This has been educational to say the least. I'd not heard of places actually checking to see what comes out of your tail pipe too?!?!

That doesn't seem to allow for users to customize their cars for performance, etc...?

2017...mx5 retractable hard top

No joke, there are fewer ads on broadcast TV than on (free) YouTube now. Broadcast averages 14 minutes per hour. YouTube is harder to find hard numbers but most sources imply it's around 20 minutes per hour - A whopping third of the total viewing time.

Of course, that depends on having something worth watching on (you'd likely be surprised how many channels you get, but they still mostly suck); and for those of us not using a GooTube-sponsored browser that breaks ad blocking, with uBlock Origin that figure drops to zero minutes per hour.

More practically - Broadcast TV is great for having something random on in the background, and it never pauses to ask if you're still watching. If you're trying to see something specific, though, it's no contest - Streaming is vastly superior in nearly every way.

Hell of a movie: FORBIN.   Everybody watched ... nobody listened.  But, during extended "chats" with GOOG.AI  I have been assured that Godels Theorem prevents such misbehavior. The LLM seemed quite confident, and  GOOG.AI  responded on other complex topics without obvious blunder.

LLMs do THIS & LLMs do THAT & ....   baloney and at that mostly filler. All dik & jaan stories instigated and fabricated by AI-companies whose self-interest rests with convincing EVERYONE that their AI.engines are power-houses of intellect ... instead of  weighted dice !  Agentic / agent / action / act ... all words implying a sort of self-motivation ... or introspection ...  which any sensible AI ( like my amazing  pal GOOG.AI ) will assure you immediately is nonsense.

The lawyers (and IANAL) already understand that, which is why they're stressing the "potential damage to these IPs" angle.

Fair use as it applies to a political campaign has four main tests:
The purpose of the infringing use (must be transformative, which this is);
The nature of the work (creative, which this is, receives less protection than factual);
The amount of material and its importance in the original context (each infringement here is tiny); and
The impact on the market for the original work.

IMO, that last point would be the key issue in this situation. It honestly passes the first three tests with flying colors, but it also very likely adversely affects the market for the original content. A third of the country actively avoids anything and everything related to the current administration. If people are plausibly likely to believe Nintendo / Shueisha / Publisher-X don't object to these uses of their material - And the general public have no clue this battle is even going on - They will stop buying it.

"Normal" meaning what would be a normalized average of other countries. The typical US national park is bigger than all but the biggest parks throughout Europe. They're absent even fire trails throughout most of them, and they do not have nearby civilian residences for wanderers to happen upon.

Larger parks are closer to what would be considered "remote wilderness" in the furthest extents of Asia. You've got some of these places just hours from our biggest metropolitan cities.

Really, the only places in the world which compare would be China and Russia, and large parts of South America. But in most cases those are actually wilderness, all but inaccessible.

Your risk of death by heart-attack  in bad weather is much greater if the human ambulance driver is trapped in a commuter Waymo. Humans generally can  spontaneously do everything  ( h.erectus cracked rocks that had never been cracked ) -- for better or worse -- while  algorithmic machines are trapped by their data-training. 

We can supplement human vision with those technologies. Currently less than 1% of US cars have any LIDAR capabilities whatsoever, and you'll find a substantial number don't even have backup cameras (only required since 2018).

As for how useful they are, I respectfully disagree. The first thing I, and many others, do when driving a car with a million and one distracting "safety" features is disable most of them. Yes, I know perfectly well I'm drifting out of my lane, now stop nagging me so I can focus on avoiding the real danger a quarter mile ahead!

It looks like it's equivalent to the emissions tests that most American drivers have to do once every year or two

Emissions test?

Never had one of those...I would guess that's a California thing mostly?

But I've been in some states with a brake tag inspection...which is nothing, you roll in , turn on lights and wipers and you're good.

So, do they not let you mod your cars over in Europe? Flash new ECUs or aggressive cams, high flow exhausts, etc?

Are you sure you actually own your car over there if you can't play with it?