I guess we've moved on from moral panic over Tinder and "hookup culture."

Birth rates have been falling globally for fifty years and in many western countries for more like 250 years.

Yes. As I said: "if EuroOffice becomes popular it might restrict MS's freedom to kinda-not-quite support their own file format."

MSOffice is the, let's say reference implementation, because it's so popular. Choosing an incompatible file format isn't going to help make someone else popular. But if someone else gets popular enough that Microsoft cares about being compatible with them, then they'll have to adhere to the standard too.

See for example HTML/CSS.

OOXML is an ISO standard. The fact that it's developed by MS doesn't really mean anything. In fact, if EuroOffice becomes popular it might restrict MS's freedom to kinda-not-quite support their own file format.

Browsers are not the cloud.

Ostensibly, Apple could open source the code running on their own baseband hardware (Apple C1). I'm pretty sure the hardware requires signed code for FCC compliance reasons, so you'd never be able to modify it, but as far as I know, nothing prevents them from making the code available.

You're missing my point. To the best of my knowledge, you can't buy a phone that has an entirely open source operating system now; the phone hardware vendors provide closed-source bits preinstalled, and nuking them is problematic at best. More importantly, even if that were not true, you still would not be able to buy an Apple iPhone or iPad with an OS that is pure open source, which makes your concern entirely irrelevant in this context.

This discussion is about what Apple would need to do to satisfy people with privacy concerns when it comes to third-party replacements for Siri on devices that Apple makes. Arguing that you don't trust Apple because parts of the OS are closed source is irrelevant, because you won't ever trust their device in the first place (or any devices, in all likelihood).

Either way, the automatic presumption is that if a consumer does not trust the device maker, that person will buy a device from some other manufacturer. So for the purposes of this discussion, the decision by the consumer to trust Apple is in the past. It was made when they bought the device with a preinstalled OS. Thus we can presume that the consumer in question therefore trusts Apple to a great extent.

What remains, then, is what Apple, as a presumptively trusted party, would have to do to continue to maintain that level of trust in their devices while allowing third parties to inject code that deeply integrates with every app on the system in a highly invasive way.

Have you ever tweeted something completely made up? What happened? Or, if you haven't done it, what do you think would happen? Suppose, for example, that you tweeted out a claim that "Coca-Cola contains extract of ground-up baby brains". What do you think the legal consequences of that (horrendous!) claim would be?

There is an important legal distinction that this court chose to ignore, which is that you're only liable for incorrect information if it's reasonable to expect that people would believe that you are providing correct information. If you, bubblyceiling, tweet false information, you will not, in fact, be held liable for it, because courts would rightly reject the claim that readers had a reason to believe they should trust you.

Obviously, Google's statements are held to a higher standard that bubblyceiling's. But everyone understood that web search results weren't Google's statements. The question at hand then is whether people believe that Google's LLM's statements are, in fact, statements made by Google, the corporation.

No one could seriously believe that. This court was dead wrong.

I think you missed that most of those comments about Trump are gloating that he is demonstrably failing in his effort to destroy renewable power generation and favor fossil fuels -- and especially Beautiful Clean Coal (just like he's failing at approximately everything else, except this failure is good). Once you have that context, it makes a lot more sense.

Well, China, for one, is building renewable energy generation far faster than we are. They're also building a lot of coal plants so it's going to take them some effort to push their emissions down to the global average per capita. However, note that we're far, far above the global average, and also well above China.

As for India and Indonesia, their emissions are already well below the global average, so they're not really the problem. Once we and China get down to their level, then we can all start pushing the average (and therefore total) down further. We need to cut our emissions by 85% to get to that point. Or keep them constant while importing about 1.7 billion people.

That's silly. You'd toss a bomb in a garbage can or leave it in a bag under a bench. Terrorism is indiscriminate.

Both the US and Germany developed homing torpedos in WWII. You launched them and they followed whatever noise source they liked best. They also developed IR homing missiles, although those didn't work very well until the 50s.

Sperry's "Flying Bomb", the first autonomous drone, flew in 1917. You set the direction and distance and sent it on its way. Cruise missiles developed from there, up to the sophisticated target recognition ones today.

Even earlier people used balloons, and there's the story about Genghis Khan and his fire birds (and cats) that may or may not have happened.

Fire ships have been used since antiquity.

one is more expensive than the other.

Yes, an intelligent drone carrying a bomb is more expensive than a bomb. I'm not sure how that supports your point.

Imagine if , say, mexico invaded the united states (Hear me out, its a hypothetical).

It's not hypothetical:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Okay, maybe "invasion" is a bit grandiose. That just makes the point stronger. The US did a whole lot more than "retaliatory strikes." In fact, the US has had a policy of over the top retaliation from the beginning. One of the first things the US Navy did after being formed was sending out punitive expeditions. If a US trader or sailor were killed in some Pacific island village the navy would show up and completely destroy that (or some other) village.

Maybe. Ukraine apparently did this two years ago as an experiment, then decided not to continue experimenting, much less make it standard procedure.

Full autonomy was obviously one possible solution when the Russians got good at jamming drone communications. The other was switching to wired control, via kilometers-long spools of ultrathin fiberoptic cable. Ukraine has settled on the latter. This is covering the front lines with a massive spiderweb of fiberoptic cable, which is also a cost, but Ukraine has apparently decided it's what they prefer.

No. Invaders don't get the benefit of the doubt.