If you are wanting to steal a car then clearly you are commiting theft and the question of data is secondary. Suppose instead your government is wanting to track your car to see where it has been. It is (I hope) illegal for them to force everyone to have a GPS tracker installed on their vehicle for this purpose. However, it is not illegal for a car manufacturer to choose put one on your vehicle - after all you need if for navigation - but then have it record your location data to a file that they can read when they service your car, or even transmit it over a mibile data connection.

Now, in Europe or Canada, data protection laws would probably make it illegal for the car manufacturer to sell that personal data to anyone. However, if they did sell it to say a government then the person breaking the law would be the car manufacturer, not the government, because the data is under the control of the company and they have a duty under the law to protect it which includes not selling it to anyone, government or otherwise.

Hence my question anout what laws the _government_ broke because, from where I'm standing, it looks like the airlines who are at fault here because they owned the data and so it is they who have the duty to protect it although, given the weaker data protection laws in the US, it may be that they are allowed to sell everyone's personal data.

Fee? Why not have an auction like they do for upgrades? That way you can get passengers bidding to keep their data private against governments and other companies wanting to know all about you and the airline can make even more money!

What laws did your government break? The airlines were not compelled to release the data, they chose to sell the data to the government. If anyone broke the law it was the airlines who sold the private data they held...which is probably why they required the government not to tell anyone how they got it.

I doubt it will take HP long to figure out how to require an ink cartridge in order for the system to work and then they can sell the system for much less.

It depends very much on the reason for the change. It may be that the new proposed definition is for some good scientific reason that has little to do with the political/social need to classify a group of chemicals that build up over the long term in the environment and cause damage. Indeed, it would seem to me that you would be better off completely separating the two definitions since it seems likely that there are more "forever chemicals" than just pfas.

Well I guess if your philsophy is "move fast and break things" planes are pretty fast moving. It's the second part that worries me though.

Yes, but you do realize that if the environment was so finely balanced that the extinction of a handful of the thousands of mosquito species were enough to cause an ecosystem collapse on such a massive scale that it eradicated humans then such an event would already have happened and we would not be here discussing it as a possibility?

Really? It is _much_ easier to repopulate them than to eradicate them - mosquitoes breed fast under ideal conditions which is something very easy to provide so that makes it a very viable back-up plan in the very unlikely event that we need it. I'm all for a cautious approach but surrendering to irrational fears of an insanely unlikely - and arguably basically impossible - consequence is, well irrational. If you are that concerned about miniscule probabilities, don't worry it is much more likely that we'll all be wiped out by an extinction-level meteoroid impact before anything like this happens.

...which is the best kind of possible. Saturn is thought to have a solid core although I doubt we have the technology to build anything capable of surviving the conditions there.

Open the pod bay doors Gemini!

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Definitely much more dramitc flair than the lengthy explanation I was expecting about how it does not have any pod bay doors to open!

We should absolutely do ecological studies to determine the likely effects of eradicating the dangerous species of mosquitoes. However, given the benefit to human health we should absolutely not just assume that "bad things" will happen and abandon a plan that could save millions of lives. Indeed, it may be that the largest ecological impact will be human population surges in areas hit currently by mosquitoe-borne diseases like malaria and if that is the case I do not see how it is at all ethical to tell all those people that millions of them have to die to preserve the ecological balance.

Thosands, if not millions, of species have gone extinct since humans evolved and not all of those extinctions are due to humans.I would agree that ecological studies need to be done before we try this but if we keep some mosquitoes in captivity we can always re-populate the species should the ecological rebalancing cause problems. However, I see no real possibility that such a rebalancing would be an existential threat to us. Indeed, we've already eradicated multiple species including passenger pigeons, dodos and wooly mammoths all of which were food sources and so far more likely to impact human existence than mosquitoes.

It's also not at all clear why we would know so much better in a few centuries - science can't deliver certainty and you cannot calculate the odds of something you do not know anything about occurring...but given that none of the species we have inadvertently eradicated - plus the few we have deliberately killed like the small pox virus - have had serious consequences for us it seems highly unlikely that eradicating the dangerous species of mosquitoes would harm us but, even if it did, we could still re-populate from those we have repserved in captivity.

That's too specific. The more general question we need to know the answer to is what would the ecological impact be of removing mosquitoes from the environment. It might be that some predator populations would decline but it may also be that some other species surges in numbers to fill the ecological gap left by eradicating mosquitoes. It would not be a great improvement if mosquitoes were replaced by some other, potentially worse biting insect or, if the population of predators relying on mosquitoes declined would that allow some other insect population to surge as a result?

We'd obviously need answers to this broader question before eradicating them but, provided we kept some mosuitoes alive in captivity, it is much easier to undo an eradication that it is to undo the introduction of a new species and given the potential benefits, provided we have this safeguard and the studies suggest no significant, negative ecological impact it would seem reasonable to try it.

Yes but only around two things: public performance and copying/distrubution and arguably public performance is a form of distribution.

The problem with the current situation is that it gives YouTube all the power with none of the responsibility.

They do not need to pay. Copyright, as the name says, is the right to copy and distributute something. So long as you purchase a legal copy you are allowed to use it as you wish provided you do not distribute copies.

If I buy a book the copyright holder cannot tell me that I'm only allowed to read 5 pages a day, or that I can't use it to balance a table, prop open a door or even burn it. Similarly, they can't tell me that I'm not allowed to use it to train a machine learning algorithm provided that the algorithm does not reproduce copies of parts of the book - if it does that then it is breaking copyright.

I get that some authors think they should be compensated more simply because companies are using their books etc. to train AI algorithms that make them money but if they want that they need to get the law changed.