While I think there is some truth to this, I read a compelling case for why he has gone to the Trump side of things. One of Elon's children from his first marriage is now a trans woman and it seems that Elon has sort of gone bat shit crazy in terms of dealing with this. Instead of trying to find some way to accept this, he went to Trump simply because he knew Trump would bash trans people (doing so was a very effective part of his 2024 TV advertising). I think it may honestly be that simple.

The last time I remember this actually happening was in the 2000s. I do sometimes buy CDs and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought one that seemed to have any copy protection on it. Unless you want to give specifics, I think you're talking about how things were a long time ago and assuming incorrectly that they never changed. I think pretty much everybody figured out quite a while ago that people who actually want to buy physical product aren't the enemy and treating them like potential thieves was counterproductive.

No.

You asked.

Many companies really only care about how much a worker costs. EVERYTHING else, and I really mane EVERYTHING, is unimportant other than making sure that the person seems to be legally allowed to work in the USA or for a US company. My best friend works for a privately held IT company that only does business in one specific US industry. They have no desire to do business in other countries or other industries. He told me that his company stopped hiring people in India because they were "too expensive", so a lot of new hires now are in Nepal. Where do you go when Nepalese people get "too expensive"? Burkina Faso? Equatorial Guinea? My guess is that the remote employees or someone pretending to be them simply used remote tools like Zoom to do any orientation. I'm not saying my friend's company hired any of these people, but I can 100% guarantee you that they wouldn't ask too many questions if a potential employee was willing to work cheap enough to meet their needs. There are probably a lot of US companies like that.

I was thinking about this too. True story from the early 90s in my IT career. I worked as a civilian employee of a branch of the US military. I'm not going to say which one because I actually liked and respected the members. One of my co-workers was assigned to a project that involved trying to make a piece of equipment portable. Today, it would be no problem. But 30+ years ago, it was a big ask. The project was done by a military contractor and there was a requirement to use ADA on it. My co-worker had to learn how to manage the equipment and the company that made it told him that they wrote the whole thing in C and put a very small ADA program on the front end that just called the C program to do all the work. He said they assured him that doing so was in full compliance of the way the ADA requirement was specified.

A couple of months ago at a social event, I got briefly caught up in a multi-person conversation about learning Spanish. I took it in college and have a 2nd major in it and while I don't claim to be fluent, I'm pretty good. It's not a problem for me to use it. This guy's wife said she was using Duolingo to learn Spanish. She's about 30 years old I guess so certainly not too old and not particularly likely to have big struggles if she is serious about learning it. Two of the other people in this conversation are guys I would rate as fluent Spanish speakers, although they native English speakers by birth. She told us that earlier in the day or maybe a day or two ago when she had most recently used Duolingo it asked her to say in Spanish something like "I need to put on a presidential costume". She did not know how to say that. In fact, none of the 3 of us Spanish speakers knew the Spanish word for "costume" with all of us saying we had never had it come up where we had to use that word. It made me seriously question the value of Duolingo to learn foreign languages. If I was going to learn another one, that wouldn't be what I would use. She said she mostly liked it, but every now and then it had useless phrases for her to learn.

The fact that the company continues to use VMware - legally although they can no longer update it - sort of means that they aren't really a former customer. If they stopped using it completely when they decided not to pay Broadcom's subscription fee, I'd agree that they are a former customer. So that probably gives Broadcom the right to audit them. In my career at various jobs we sometimes had to go through this kind of audit as some companies were super paranoid that their customers might be using more copies of something than they paid for. It's been a while so I can't really remember specifics, but I vaguely recall that a company I worked for got busted during a similar audit as some people in another part of the company didn't respect the licensing agreement and just used the product beyond what we paid for and we had to pay some kind of fine/license fee to get straight.

Not this week.

I doubt this can't be appealed. It's more do to with the fact that they couldn't show they suffered any damages (harm) from the infringement:

He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."
[...]
He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."

"Prior to trial, Western Digital made a successful motion to exclude SPEX's damages expert. SPEX then tried the case and attempted to put on a damages case without a damages expert. Based on damages theories that were never disclosed, and legally improper, the jury awarded SPEX over $250 million in damages," Gibson Dunn claimed in a statement sent to The Register.

So WD did infringe, but I guess because they were just a patent troll with no actual business they couldn't actually show they suffered any damages.

Not sure why they couldn't claim lost licensing revenue, maybe the rule was really made to combat patent trolls and it worked as intended?

Nothing illustrates how seriously Tesla takes safety as paying someone to be a full-time safety driver, but sticking them in the passenger seat so it looks like the car is more self-driving.

Could one ask for a clearer illustration of sacrificing safety (of the passengers and wider public) for publicity purposes?

I could see a couple of causes.
One, communication is a bit more democratized. So people who read and write have less formal training around grammar than they used to.

Second, language evolves. The gap between a comma and period was always a bit tenuous. The semicolon simply lost it's niche.

Impossible;

At this point what student in their right mind is going to enrol in a US college.

Go through all the hassle of applying to a place, getting accepted, then you're denied for some random reason and have to go back to square one.

Might as well just apply to Canada or Europe in the first place.

No worries for the US, I'm sure they'll still get a few of the students who can't get accepted by their preferred country.

Based on my experience with another company in the early 2000s and this whole "Take it or resign without severance" thing, I would bet almost anything I have that the employees will not be paid for relocation. If they were going to be paying for relocation, the whole situation would have been handled differently. I would imagine the whole point of this is to do massive layoffs without paying severance and refusing to pay for relocation is one way to discourage people from taking them up on this half-assed offer. In this type of blunt action, what always happens is the best performers find other jobs with other companies and leave without severance and the very worst performers stay to the bitter end and a few might even pay their own costs to relocate because they know if they leave their current company, they'll never get a similar job at similar pay elsewhere. So Amazon is surely trying to limit how many of those low performers want to move o keep their jobs.

I wonder if it's the case that the people being targeted having $100m+ in OpenAI stock options, and those options go away if they jump ship to Meta. That would explain why they might be sticking with OpenAI because they believe it can succeed.

Meta pulled in $160B last year, so a couple billion trying to buy the industry's top AI team isn't a terrible idea, though I'm not sure it will succeed. I think OpenAI has the lead, but the quality of LLMs are starting to converge and OpenAI's lead at this point is mostly mind share.