If they tell law enforcement they can’t produce an unencrypted copy and it’s later proven that they could, the potential penalty would likely be more severe than anything they could have gained by using the data themselves. And any employee (or third party they tried to sell the data to) could rat them out—so they’d have to keep the information within a circle too small to make use of it at scale. And even if it never leaked, hackers would eventually find and exploit the backdoor, exposing its existence. And in either case they’d also have to face lawsuits from shareholders (rightly) complaining that they were never warned of the legal risk.

I guess in that sense you could say the only “creator” is the Big Bang.

“West Martians”.

“This Land”.

No, not any more than someone telling you the plot of a book would count as reading it—that’s generally the extent of the original work’s content that survives the process of adaptation. (Possible exceptions are faithful adaptations of stage plays like Shakespeare or Euripides—in that case watching a subtitled production might be considered the equivalent of reading the script.)

And the honeybee populations least in need of saving are the big commercial operations this tech seems targeted toward. (These operations typically park their hives in random rural locations between jobs, where their bees raid and outcompete local pollinators and carry diseases from region to region.)

The current, extravagantly wasteful generation of AIs are incapable of original reasoning. Hopefully any breakthrough that allows for the creation of such an AI would involve abandoning the current architecture for something more efficient.

Maybe not—current AI seems more focused on mimicking and distilling human behavior than on reasoning out optimal behavior on its own.

Quantum circuits aren’t general-purpose computers—they’re added to conventional computers to allow them to perform a small handful of algorithms more efficiently. I don’t believe any of those algorithms would benefit the basic features of an operating system enough that it would make sense to modify an OS to require the use of one.

(Although I could totally see Microsoft doing something like only licensing their circuit’s drivers to run on Windows.)

I believe so—see Wake-on-LAN.

States are explicitly prohibited by the Constitution from “enter[ing] into any treaty, alliance, or confederation” with foreign states, but there are plenty of cases of state and local governments joining economic partnerships and initiatives.

If the dark ages were so called due to the shortage of sources, ours will be called the glare-blind age in contrast.

Careful, Menocchio.

While [Trump-supporting] CEO Andy Yen’s recent public statements have raised my hackles more than a little, Proton remains structurally committed to privacy, encryption, and user control, ensuring its ecosystem stays independent of political shifts.

That’s a pretty weak definition of “Trump-proof”.

Are the people who would have bought Teslas now buying other EVs, or passing on buying a new car altogether?

I don’t understand—you think you’re one of the last people left who started using the internet in the 90s?

That’s like saying you can continue to do business with the guy who keeps trying to stab you, if you stay out of arm’s reach.

It’s not wrong, but it’s ignoring the underlying issue.

It sounds like she’s constructed two competing versions of you in her mind—an idealized version that always understands and sympathizes with her, and a second version constructed from all the times you’ve failed to live up to those expectations.

If you can’t be her idealized version of yourself, you can demonstrate that you’re not the second version, either. Focus on proactively doing things for her when she’s not expecting you to—everything you do that doesn’t match what her mental model of you predicts you’ll do will weaken that model in her head.

Jumping off the ISS wouldn’t cause you to de-orbit—it would just put you in a slightly more elliptical orbit that would eventually intersect the ISS again.

And if you did get into an orbit that took you down into the atmosphere, no parachute would save you—parachutes are for slowing to a safe landing speed from terminal velocity, not from orbital velocity. You’d need to go through atmosphere too thin to fill a chute, but still fast enough to burn you up.

I would never use an iPhone if my phone were my primary computing device. But I just make occasional calls and texts, and use a handful of apps (for instance, Nextcloud and Home Assistant connected directly to my home server, bypassing most of Apple’s ecosystem).

For a secondary device, I just want something simple and sturdy that I have to think about as little as possible—and for that specific use case the limitations are a plus.