Oh yes, some governments love the idea of censorship-by-proxy: instead of issuing unpopular laws against free speech or free commerce, they come up with rules to make companies responsible for countering money laundering, human trafficking, or what have you. Rules with vague criteria but very stiff penalties, in order to scare companies into erring on the side of caution.

But in this case, it is quite that simple. Banks and payment processors should be declared to be a Common Carrier, especially since their services should be considered essential, these days. Which means they cannot deny service to anyone, unless there is a clear indication that they are running afoul of the law.

That's a bit like being on a cruise where the breakfast buffet offers only eggs prepared a 1000 different ways, and you're telling someone who is allergic to eggs "if you can't find something good, maybe lower your standards". For the record: I do like eggs.

A tiny handful? The problem is that they pretty much dominated the Blockbuster niche for the past decade or two. The kind of movie many of us turn to for a few hours of dumb escapism: usually with a simple but solid plot, some explosions and eye candy, uncomplicated characters, but big ticket actors and good production values. For those of us who enjoy that sort of thing, but dislike the premise of superheroes, it has been woefully slim pickings the past years.

At least the damn thing apologized. That's pretty impressive. Though not quite what we want from AI.

It's not like it's the first time either. Here they caught a lady taking a wee behind a parked car. They did blur her face though...

It's doable, if he gets a couple of Chinese engineers to help. Designing and building factories is an art in itself, one we've largely lost in the West. But in China, they know how to set up an automated factory, producing goods to the right tolerances, and applying automated QA. They do that pretty much every day.

MacOS runs on non-Apple bare metal as well: Hackintosh. And it runs very well. I built a top end "Mac" for a fraction of what Apple would have charged for similar performance. The only issue is that keeping the OS and software up to date can be a major PITA.

No kidding. But "si vis pacem para bellum". Many nations aspire to lasting peace, but as it turns out there's always some ambitious a-hole who thinks their neighbour's land is there for the taking.

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

Those have already been deployed. They are flown to the front by the operator, who will in most cases also designate the target, after which the drone will engage it autonomously. Jamming is most effective at close range, so that's when you want the AI to take over.

The dollar being the reserve currency of choice is one thing, what really matters is that oil is traded around the world in dollars. That effectively expands the dollar economy by trillions, and is what allows more dollars to be printed without affecting inflation. Once countries stop selling or paying for oil in dollars, that's when the currency will crash and burn for real.

Productivity did soar, by rather quite a bit. But companies did not use that increase in productivity to offer the same stuff with fewer employees, they used it to offer ever more complex products and services, while keeping them affordable.

Industrialism has added decades to the average human lifespan. We shouldn't be blind to the ill effects, and be open to improving things, but let's not focus on only the downsides.

Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

Then why the eye-wateringly high bills for SLS and Starliner? They got to build on the exact same body of knowledge available to SpaceX.