These unicorns have been estimated to have a value of over $1B at an early stage in their life cycle when their income has been small - this valuation is based on speculation as to what might happen in the future. These companies will only be worth over $1B once they have a solid product that is selling well to many customers.

a few tickets for one way seats for Trump and some of his cronies; make the world a better place.

OK: we know that google reads every email that goes through gmail; I kind of assumed that that was to work out what advertising it could plague the gmail user with. Does it go beyond that, building profiles that are used elsewhere such as selling to life insurance (build risk profiles). Will AI lead to further leakage ?

Often the PHB attitude is: training is something that other companies do so that I can then hire their good people.

The producers now have the background for the plot of their next film.

cannot gain employment to become more experienced where do companies recruit their middle experienced workers from ?

I suspect that they will try to poach them from other companies or other countries that have not replaced new intake workers with AI. I can see this causing a big headache in a few years time.

Here is the story at the BBC. When I first saw it I wondered if the reporter had been drinking - until I saw it somewhere else!

If you exclusively speak American then you can say everything is US ASCII ... but for many who, reasonably, want to express themselves in their own language they will want other characters. But the "everything" is not entirely true even for Americans, eg 1/100 of a dollar is a cent which is U+00A2 - which slashdot will not display correctly.

No matter what your politics is.

is to peel off the coloured squares and put them back - one colour per face. This, unfortunately, takes more than 15.71 seconds.

AI companies have the cash and political connections to get what they want. The push back has already started:

The head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, the day after agency concluded that builders of AI models use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use.

Effective enforcement will not be easy.

The other problem that the spiders do is to overload servers. They do not seem to be gentle in the way that most search engine spiders are.

You have a new, corrupt, government; buying a seat at Trump's dinner table for $1 million should ensure that consequences continue to be ignored.

I assume that, as in the UK, the television & radio channels tell you what the time is, at least at the top of the hour if not more often. That time is synchronised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.