They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

If the publisher of a single-player or small-group multiplayer game can't make a useful subset of the server software available to licensees, they should go out of business.

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

If the publisher of a movie or video game refuses to make it available in physical copies, am I justified in pretending that the work was never released?

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fssrn.com%2Fabstract%3D2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we'll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.

I wonder how the performance of 2 networked 512GB Mac Studios would compare to the performance of a (hypothetical) single Mac Studio with 1TB of RAM?

My intuition says that the network linking the two machines would be a bottleneck, but I don't know if that's a minor performance problem or a major one.

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.