for example: https://msc.fema.gov/portal/se...

nonsense... if you buy low lying land next to a low bank river, you can bet it will flood. period.

I absolutely used this feature in Zillow to eliminate potential homes in flood plains. The data was based on FEMA flood plain maps which insurance companies also use to deny your claim if they believe it's in a flood zone and you didn't purchase special flood insurance. This was a really useful feature and of course people will use it for purchase decisions. Another case of a buyer beware, and oh, by the way, you're fucked because useful information is harder to find.

IBM, the company that originally brought us vaporware (anyone remember OS2?) , come up with yet another product - some day - made of unobtainium. Sure...

Sorry silly stodge, I am saying that we live in a plutocracy. Laws that would put you or I in jail for long periods are not even applied to the rich. Just to underscore the preferential treatment of the rich, there is an almost $700 Billion dollar tax gap between what is owed, and what is collected. The gap comes from complex investments and wealth hiding strategy employed by rich to avoid paying owed taxes exacerbated by republicans cutting IRS budgets year after year. Consequently, you and I with simple tax returns must pay every dollar, the rich actually believe only fools pay taxes. https://itep.org/growing-tax-g... Again, they use these bonuses to buy our electeds to gain benefit. Finally, look at Trump pardons... rich convicted criminal after convicted criminal. . What they have in common, they can pay him. Trump has pardoned more than 1600 criminals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Sure Biden pardoned 4100, but Trump is more that 1/2 that not even 1 year into this term and Biden wasn't directly paid.

Single mothers with children, and grandmothers were getting hit with multi thousand dollar demands from the music police over intellectual property violations from their 10 years old kids and grand kids downloading a song or two. Now, these oligarchs piss all over any intellectual property in the name of "training ai", and it's too big to fail investments.

He's not writing for AI, but rather the Oligarchs who refuse to respect intellectual property and seek to redirect the work and value of creatives for their own profit and exploitation. Writing for these parasites does not give your work any greater importance. No matter the source, to the oligarchs, its all just raw data to be assimilated and aggregated. Loosing the individuality, importance and relevance for the purpose of training their difference algorithms. In his ignorance, he's not increase his value, he is losing it; and while doing so bowing to the robber barons of the technical age.

Feudalism is already here. Oligarchs enrich themselves by creating paywalls from chaos. The citizenry pay for things that were less expensive under true capitalist competition. Oligarchs use their wealth to dismantle rules, regulations, safety requirements, and oversight (aka neo-liberal deregulation) it break unions, pay remaining workers less money, monopolize and increase costs, buy up competition or smash startups with legal harassment, leaving us with shitty more expensive things that don't work and no recourse. We don't own anything anymore. We are only allowed to rent things protecting the oligarchs with one sided ELU's and no rights to fix something that breaks. This has been true for a couple of decades now, Trump and reichwing are just blatant about it.

If Tucows is a Canadian company, they can tell the FBI to pound sand. The FBI as zero international jurisdiction.

It doesn't matter if they can pass the test. the real question is if an agent can get licensed as a professional.

You have to pay the tithe, bend the knee, and kiss the ring to purchase indulgences (pardons). The current going rate for pardons is (c) $5M, to get your case heard by Trump. https://www.nbcnews.com/politi... I doubt these individuals have that kind of cash, so I don't expect to see any pardons of these people..

Investors always reward cutting staff with raising stock prices. And, since CEO pay is largely determined by stock price...

Just asking the question demonstrates a dangerous level of naivety

Many of us never bought into the idea of the "smart" bullshit. We saw though the nonsense and realized we were just data sources or chumps that would get the service offed as soon as the "smart" company got bought or went bankrupt, or decided it wasn't financially feasible to continue supporting the newly bricked house toy .

OpenAI is on track to generate $13B in revenue in 2025 with a 16% increase over 2024. Good luck spending 10x revenue.