Generally a few things

1) eminent domain for countryside land
2) tunnels into cities.
3) once the network is in existence cities that don't have it lose out and will make a big effort to find land for

The distances in America are much bigger, so ideally you'd move to a faster rail standard, either simply double European width or maglev. Of Underground tunnels, though, are a really big thing because the main benefit of trains is that you can run them right to the center of the city so that people living there can leave their offices 20 minutes before the train, walk or take a taxi, get to the station 10 minutes before departure and still safely get their train.

At the other end it's even faster because you don't need the 10 minutes of leeway.

You have clearly never been to a proper Scottish bog. You step on what seems like an innocent clump of moss and disappear almost instantly without trace and your digested, but likely quite well preserved by the low oxygen conditions, body is only recovered thousands of years later. There are some like that in Wales and the North of England too. https://science.slashdot.org/s...

Those constitutional limits only protect things which have an "expectation of privacy" which it's very likely these records don't count as having due to various dubious supreme court rulings in the US. These are normal business records sold on the open market. Why should the IRS, trying to find criminals, be given less access than advertising companies?

Let's be clear about this, what they are doing is fully constitutionally permitted (as adjudicated by the US supreme court) use of business records which have no constitutional expectation of privacy under the US constitution.

Specifically, the data brokers were build with the aim of allowing advertising companies to buy this data so that they could profit from it. That allows all sorts of dodgy practices like dynamic pricing which allows companies to take advantage when they get into a monopoly or cartel situation in constrained markets and extort higher prices from consumers.

The right thing is to say that consumers own this data and that nobody has access to it without permission, as Europe does with the GDPR. What is being proposed here is a specific exception to allow the super-rich to continue to evade the taxation which pays to protect their business interests whilst the rest end up having to pay more and get less.

Then why didn't you make that accusation in the first place and why does Norwegian Wikipedia not have any level of accusations against them.

If that's true and you took an actual interest in their methods then I congratulate you. Please recognize, though, that you wouldn't be able to do that if there wasn't a single identifiable scheme behind trademark protection (any blockchain etc. restrictions are largely beside the point). I'm not sure if I understand or agree with your proposals for improvement but if you take complaints to your elected representatives and ask them to get involved that will at least show that someone cares about the scheme and wants it improved, which I do believe you to likely be right in demanding.

That's a bit of a non-sequiter. I'm not Norwegian and don't claim to be. I'm from the UK. We, like everyone else get affected by Norwegian energy policy so my commenting is completely reasonable. I'm happy to believe there are problems and I appreciate if you work on them, but working on the wrong problems won't get things fixed.

Trust me. If all the Incel's get truly philosophical, none of us are going to be "ok".

According to the Google translation

The certificate is recognized by the authorities in public procurement, and as of July 1, 2014, over 5,000 businesses in Norway are certified Environmental Lighthouse.

So, the certificate gives you permission to sell to one of the richest governments in the world. That sounds pretty solidly valuable. They even say

The businesses must document and meet both statutory requirements and requirements imposed by the Environmental Lighthouse certification scheme. The requirements include the environmental aspects of energy, waste, transport, purchasing and the working environment. The business must implement measures to create a more environmentally friendly operation and a good working environment.

So it sounds like the government actually has good reasons to want the certificates.

The point was that that was going to go away as a route for unsigned apps to be replaced with a requirement for signatures even when using ADB or other alternative installation methods. Google is backing off that change for now. This should mean that things like Obtainium keep working in future.

If full AGI AI supremacy was honestly at stake and they were working at full speed for it, I think I could actually respect that opinion. My feeling, though, is that there's lots of beating a dead horse of LLM style simplistic (in terms of synapse behavior) new neural networks which are aiming at replacing workings in repetitive tasks that don't really require intelligence. I'm sure that several companies have real AI researchers actually working on new approaches some of which might pan out at some point in the (possibly very distant) future, but most of them likely already know that their main approach is a dead end for AGI and they just hope to find a way to make big bucks.

He couldn't though.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. - Frank Wilhoit

It's hasn't always been true of all conservatives; even at the end of the last Trump term a bunch of conservative judges showed that they valued the US Constitution over party loyalty. The American supreme court is now demonstrating this principle perfectly though. Biden failed to understand that his only possible way to have any long term achievements was to push much much harder and faster. That was probably the last chance for a moderate Democrat agenda.

I think it's fine, but when posting a new take, the Slashdot tradition is that you link to the old take so people don't have to go over that again. In that sense, Gravis Zero is doing Slashdot a great service.

I found a GitHub repo that Harishankar has contributed to but others here say that's not related. I wonder if

a) anyone can find some better info on what he's been doing?
b) anyone knows which of the various open source robot cleaner projects online are any good? Is buying a cheap one and taking it over a good way to go?

It's really disturbing the way people happily let a machine which gets to know where your property is, what you have and even potentially what times your home tends to be empty send data off to random companies all over the world that could easily make more profit selling the data to thieves than they make from some $20 vacuum.

I mean yes, in a trivial sense. Experimental procedure: Ask subject for name. If name is "John" then mark as non conscious, otherwise mark as conscious.

That's a bad experiment though.

Maybe, or maybe once we are able to actually define and identify consciousness we will be able to know exactly what it can do that nothing else can and build a test which easily and quickly gives the answer.

Did you read my comment to the end? The part where I explicitly said this isn't conscious? "What hasn't happened is conscious thought", I said. Please do read the whole of it and then let's discuss again.

Did you actually read my comment in which I described an algorithm for a random number generate not just to create new options that aren't in it but, in fact, to create any possible option that a given computer could hypothetically achieve. If you didn't understand it, please ask.

That's a pretty bad and limited definition. It's also apparently the defnition of Microsoft's head of ai

“They’re not conscious,” he said. “So it would be absurd to pursue research that investigates that question, because they’re not and they can’t be.”

If you are working on AI for Microsoft, you need to leave now. Even if this guy is right, most of the interesting ideas in the field of AI have been discovered by people who were attempting difficult things and failed. Microsoft's research in this area is going to be crippling to anyone working for them.

Even if it doe turn out that only biological systems can be conscious, the way you are going to prove that is by trying to build a conscious non-biological system, defining clearly what you are aiming for and then showing that it can't work in a standard Turing machine equivalent computer. Showing how to do that is likely to be hugely useful in a bunch of fields.