I dont think this is whats being argued here. Its a Tort suit, so its going to really be more akin to a personal injury claim.

Thats not to say it won't end up in the Supreme Court as its invoking potentially novel legal theories, nor that there won't be potential constitutional questions, but I dont think they are arguing a constitutional right, rather that its simply "your client hurt my client, and we want compensation", so the legal question will be "what responsibility does the oil company have to actions which harm others".

Then you'd see no air fryers, smart TV's or smart speakers being sold in the UK for a reasonable price.

Data subsidizes the sale of consumer electronics regrettably. Someone somewhere is willing to pay for that data so that they can use it against the consumer who bought the connected electronics item.

I purchased an Air Fryer on Amazon for about $30USD. It has a temperature knob, and a time knob. It has no smart features. And it works great. What *possibly* could be subsidized by making it "smart".

As best as I know the only "smart" appliance I have is the damn samsung tv set and I'm not sure what data they'd get out of "sometimes uses netflix" and "sometimes uses hdmi port".

Imagine thinking you've insulated yourself from "corporate media" by following fark.com links.

Imagine thinking that added anything constructive to the conversation.

Focus on the argument, not the man.

Yep. The only time my windows box ever crashes , its 99.999% of the time a Nvidia driver issue from me trying to stuff 10 billion polygons into a hole that only accepts 9.

Regular office app useage should never venter into these blacker waters.

This is why I groan a little bit when I hear people say "We are not a democracy , we are a republic".

The United states is a republic AND a democracy.
China is a republic AND a dictatorship.
The United Kingdom is a monarchy AND a democracy.
Saudi Arabia is a monarchy AND a dictatorship.

Its two separate axes. Even though its arguable that North Korea is a monarchy due to the suspiciously hereditary nature of their presidency, monarchies tend to also include an aristocracy with houses and lords and all that sort of guff. Plus they also have "Democratic" in their name, and we all know that very much is not true.

One reason I actually really like MacOS is theres this big glossy dumbed down but efficient UI but under the hood its basically UNIX with all the bells and whistles one would expect from UNIX (all your awks and seds and greps , everythings a file, etc etc etc). Which means my mother can drive MacOS happily clicking on the big colorful buttons that do precisely what they say they do, but I can flip open a terminal and start micromanaging the kernel execution scheduler. (I'm sure there must be something similar for windows, I dunno, maybe regedit tweaking or powershell or something, but I've never bothered to learn it, because I only really use windows to boot into steam and murder space marines.)

I think that ought be the standard. The easy-mode UIX compliant friendly interface for the common folk, and a big but useful mess of hidden functionality for the geeks, preferably in a format where we can use our experience without having to deal with dreary youtubes where a guy shouts tech words for 30 minutes in incomprehensible broken english (or worse, some AI just makes shit up for 30 minutes in a droneing cookie-cutter ai voice)

Its entirely possible they are interested in the tech itself. What works in wee little model and what works in a 10mil full size aircraft aren't always the same (both physics wise and production cost wise). Theres a reason why IRL helicopters favour a single giant blade while dinky little models prefer the quadcopter design.

There are RC VTOL planes out there. But perhaps this one just works better?

Yep. I can learn a popular tune on the guitar and thats fine. But if I go int public and perform it, I have to pay a royalty fee. (Thats why the RIAA are always hitting up pubs and venues for performance fees. Its royalties for all those cover songs).

The problem is local compute is absurdly front loaded cost wise. The big Nvidia cards that can run the larger models (And no a 5080 isn't even close) the costs can run in the tens of thousands for just one. If your needs are modest a Mac Studio MIGHT cover inference (256gb unified memory goes a long way, and most of the key libraries now support metal) but for serious work you gotta go Nvidia, and that aint cheap.

Its this thing that I assume is screwing up the universities. Universities usually have giant pools of people working in various capacities, from admin full timers, to academics, t ground staff, professors, and more often then not a huge number of postgrads not exactly on the payroll but still working on research projects whilst living off scholarships and grants. Even a small university could have upwards of 5000 employees, contractors and postgrads.

I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this sort of corporate bullying from Oracle, when alternative JVMs and DBMS are *right there*. Though I strongly suspect Oracle Financials are the sticking point.

Unfortunately Mel Brooks is 98. He's not gonna be around for long. Statistically it'll be a minor miracle if he makes it 3 more years. If he lives long enough to finish this, it'll almost certainly be his swansong.

Yeah this sounds fun.

Honestly, I thought old Mel had passed away. So, it's a bit of a delight to hear that at 98 he's still going strong and directing films. Though, we'd definitely hope this one doesn't get stuck in development hell. Even optimistically, he wouldn't have much time left.

No, there actually is a genuine concern here, and it might be unsolvable, one of those "contradictions in capitalism" the marxists used to complain about.

Heres the problem,

On one hand, the basic physics of resource consumption is that theres a hard limit on how much stuff we can dig up/grow/etc and its pretty clear we are pretty close to that limit. At least if we want to have a planet we can actually live comfortably on.

On the other, populations around the world are ageing and once people hit a certain age they need to stop working because of health, capacity and frankly dignity. Nobody wants to be a 90yo working in a factory. And frankly its almost certain by that point the body just isnt capable of that at all. So as people retire OTHER people need to produce items for them to consume so they dont starve and die (and get medicine etc). I read somewhere you need 3-4 working people per retired person to have a situation where everyone can get food and shit. And that means if were not replacing people at a high enough rate with children, the economy will collapse (For an accessible example of this watch this video about south korea https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... ).

I dont know if this is fixeable outside of massive automation. And unlike the earlier mentioned marxists, I dont think a change in economic system would actually fix this (Though it might solve other problems). We're kinda fucked unless we can throw a LOT of robots at the situation. All of us (Japan is not alone in this problem. Far from it)

Out of curiousity I grabbed one of those steamdecks. And heres the thing, its played every game I've thrown at it flawlessly. Oh some things aren't quite as pretty as they are on my desktop gaming PC, but thats because the desktop has a 3060. But the point is, it runs. The only real hickup is sometimes the controls dont translate well to the handheld controller format (though weirdly, dwarf fortress is ...... intuitive?..... on it)

The old TiVos had this 15 years ago. Those things where great, well at least until they where abandoned (at least in australia, I heard somewhere they still exist in the US?) and we discovered for the first time why the cloud sucks.