The corollary of that line of thought though is that by preventing tech companies from dabbling in microprocessors you reduce competition in the microprocessor space- a sector which has proven very prone to the formation of monopolies/duopolies. If anything, we want to encourage more new competitors in that space, not fewer.

Also, it’d be essentially arbitrary. Is it OK for Apple to design its own microprocessors, but not Amazon- and if so, why? Is Google allowed if it uses them in phones like Apple, but not if it uses them in data centres like Amazon?

What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.

See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They’re the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it’d only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it’s also not the likely outcome.

Yes, it’s always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.

But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren’t trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they’re relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a “they’re all the same!” when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.

An EULA is nominally a binding contract, in the sense that it is presented as such. No court has ever ruled and given precedent to the effect that EULAs are universally non-binding (because companies have always settled out of court for cases where it looks like they’re going to lose).

It is well understood that the arguments against EULAs being binding are solid ones, and that the reason why so many cases settle is because companies are not confident of winning cases on the strength of EULA terms, but you still need to go through the rigmarole of attending court and presenting your defence case. That’s how court cases work.

Edit: And perhaps more to the point of the OP, if you want to sue a company over some defect or service failure, it’ll be them who introduce the EULA as a defence, and it’ll be for you/your lawyers to argue against it. Which adds complexity and time to what might otherwise have been a straightforward claim, even if you win.

If a company takes you to court, you can’t just decide to ignore them. Either you/your representative turns up on the designated court dates and presents a case, or you’ll most likely lose by default.

If it was possible to make a court case go away just by ignoring it then everyone would just do that.

Everyone loves Brother for good reason.

I’ve had a decent experience with my Xerox too.

Biogasoline is a thing, although I’m not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.

We had one in my town until it closed down 3 years ago. Now the nearest one to me is a 90 mile round trip away.

Hydrogen definitely feels like a fad which has had its moment.

It’s also loud.

I don’t need or want everyone sat in the same room as me to know every little thing I do on my phone. Leaving aside things that are actually private, that’s just a level of inane garbage that we all don’t need to know about each other.

Sometimes I just want to glance at the football scores without announcing to everyone: “OK Google, what is the current score for the football match between Swindon Town and Harrogate?”.

Edit: It’s currently nil-nil, if you’re wondering.

Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Now I’m as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it’s more likely to be at the individual “device” level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it’s not going to be LLM technology doing that.

What I really want to know is why and how it went away.

The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there’s no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.

This is essentially a novel version of the “free as in freedom” versus “free as in beer” distinction. In this case not exactly about the cash value per se, but about the physical aspects and systemic realities behind the having of a thing.

An open hardware design means nothing more and nothing less than freedom to access, share, use and modify the designs. It is about ownership and reuse of the intellectual property.

Open hardware doesn’t change the fact that most hardware will still be manufactured by the same large corporations. It says nothing about the technical feasibility of amateur fabrication. It has nothing to do with the environmental impacts of a technology or the production thereof. It isn’t fundamentally a socialist paradigm.

For an open hardware spec like RISC-V, the reality of it is that the freedom afforded by the open designs is a freedom of large corporations to enter market with a competitive product without being squeezed out by a handful of established monopolistic giants. This is a positive thing, but it’s a positive thing with distinct limits that fall very short of any ideas of utopia.

It doesn’t really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It’s just marketing.

Quoth Wikipedia:

The term “5 nm” has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a “5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers”. However, in real world commercial practice, “5 nm” is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.

No shit that it’s easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.

It’s pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.

Or read Renée Descartes.