tal

I don't think that that'd be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn't going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.

That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn't. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.

before they agreed to fix the price at $1 in September.

Probably not going to be enforced, given the context, but I believe that this is illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#United_States

Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given level by controlling supply and demand.

In the United States, price fixing can be prosecuted as a criminal federal offense under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[3]

Criminal prosecutions must be handled by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Federal Trade Commission also has jurisdiction for civil antitrust violations. Many state attorneys general also bring antitrust cases and have antitrust offices, such as Virginia, New York, and California. Further, where price fixing is used as an artifice to defraud a U.S. government agency into paying more than market value, the U.S. attorney may proceed under the False Claims Act.

Private individuals or organizations may file lawsuits for triple damages for antitrust violations and, depending on the law, recover attorneys fees and costs expended on prosecution of a case.[4][5] If the case at hand also violates the False Claims Act of 1863, in addition to the Sherman Act, private individuals may also bring a civil action in the name of the United States under the Qui Tam provision of The False Claims Act.

Under American law, exchanging prices among competitors can also violate the antitrust laws. That includes exchanging prices with the intent to fix prices or the exchange affecting the prices individual competitors set. Proof that competitors have shared prices can be used as part of the evidence of an illegal price fixing agreement.[5] Experts generally advise that competitors avoid even the appearance of agreeing on price.[5]

I would guess that it's probably not much by way of change

theoretically, maybe just a single line patch

to cause this check not to take place.

I believe that the point of the Czechia situation was that it was a modification to the constitution; this will have a higher bar to change than would be the case for simply enacting an ordinary law. The idea was to entrench the status quo behind the bar for constitutional modification.

kagis

Looks like it's a 60% supermajority in each legislative house:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Czech_Republic#Amending_the_Constitution

With reference to the provision of the article 39, paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which states that "for the enactment of a constitutional act, 3/5 of all deputies must agree, and 3/5 of senators present", changing the constitution is a more difficult procedure than changing an ordinary statute, making it an entrenched constitution in the typology of constitutions. Despite the tradition of entrenched constitutions throughout Czech history, some voiced the opinion, during the preparation of the Constitution of the Czech Republic, that this one should be flexible.

So to produce such an effect, if there are laws that would prohibit bans on end-to-end encryption, say, those laws would need to be constitutional law or similar in an EU member state where such a law has a higher-than-ordinary bar to change.

linux phone

I know that given this community, a lot of people are going to be on a Linux phone already.

But there are some very real drawbacks to Linux phones in 2025. It won't be a practical replacement for most people.

• The hardware is not remotely-competitive with high-end hardware that Android can run on.

• Everything I've seen has suggested that power usage isn't as good, probably because Android has had shit-tons of engineers working on cutting power usage for many years.

• Some of the reason that I'd want to use a phone in the first place is for access to the Android app ecosystem. Like, that one app that your employer or bank insists you use or you want to use to update firmware on some Bluetooth device because the vendor doesn't support fwupd. Maybe it's possible to use Waydroid and a Linux machine for some of that; I don't know about all.

• GNU/Linux has a large software library, but a lot of it is not designed around a touch UI.

• One major benefit of Android is that it does a lot to help eliminate a couple things that the general population has had trouble with. The harm from installing malware is mitigated by more-or-less isolating apps. A lot of users just don't understand the concept of managing memory usage; Android just suspends apps transparently. A lot of users apparently don't have a great understanding of a filesystem, and the Android app ecosystem tends to hide the filesystem.

And you may not care for your own use, but without scale, it's hard to get support from hardware vendors and such.

That being said, I remember 25 years back or so when Linux was "never going to be a real server OS", when it was never going to have games, when it was never going to make it big in the embedded world, and so forth. It often took time, but it inexorably showed up. And the kernel, at least, made it big on smartphones. GNU/Linux can be pretty hard to stop in new markets. But...it can also take a while to get there.

That's actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves "take packages". But historically, I don't believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn't done the registration thing historically, either.

I don't see why it would need to be affected.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn't something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn't check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don't have to do so.

I think that there's a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don't need to install an alternative firmware on your phone

it's not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn't registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that's going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren't going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

They may not be paid promptly, but I kind of suspect that if back pay is not forthcoming, there's probably going to be a class-action lawsuit or similar, and they may wind up not just wages, but with with interest on said wages.

Hah! In a world where everyone's hot topic is heavyweight, highly-parallel-compute chips, there's a lightweight, serial-compute chipmaker making the news.

The Czechs got upset at EU-level efforts on gun control

Czechia has permissive firearm law

and passed an amendment to Czechia's constitution in 2021 guaranteeing certain firearm rights in Czechia. If the EU passed a directive that conflicted with it after that point without getting Czechs to approve an amendment to their constitution, Czechia would immediately begin violating the directive, which raises the stakes for people who wanted additional restrictions EU-wide.

One imagines that the same tactic could be used in other areas; if one or more EU members prohibited restrictions on end-to-end encryption or the like, it'd create a legal bar that would first need to be undone to create a restriction EU-wide.

That being said, if this sort of hardball tactic gets done too frequently, it'd make it really difficult to legislate at the EU level, because you'd have one state or another creating legal landmines all over.

And any other individual member could still impose their own state-level restrictions on end-to-end encryption in such a scenario

it'd only create an impediment to EU-wide restrictions.

I wouldn't put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that's probably unlikely.

The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment. In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you'd have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.

Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.

I'm pretty sure that to do something like that, you'd need AGI. Then you'd need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you'd need to get it deployed.

What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we're still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren't even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a "Eureka" moment.

Disney was a lot more active in World War II. Propaganda and other war-related films aside, some of the nose and patch art were official and donations from Disney.

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196132/disney-pins-on-wings/

Walt Disney Productions created approximately 1,200 designs during World War II for both American and Allied military units. Designs were also created for other organizations such as civil defense and war industries. All of this work was done by the studio free-of-charge as a donation to the war effort.

Walt Disney Productions created over 1,200 unit insignia during World War II for all branches of the U.S. armed forces. In addition to U.S. military units, designs were also accomplished at the request of Allied military units from Britain, Canada, China, France, New Zealand, South Africa and Poland. Individual units were allowed to request designs directly from the Disney organization and accept finished work without having to go through any higher headquarters.

Virtually all of the Disney characters appeared in Unit insignia. The most requested was Donald Duck who appeared in at least 216 unit designs. Donald's quick temper and fighting spirit had universal appeal to all services. Pluto appeared in 45 designs, Goofy in 38 insignia, and Dumbo the Elephant in 20. Mickey Mouse was featured in 37 designs, but none associated with combat units. Mickey's nice-guy persona seemed better suited to represent home front and defense industry activities. Snow White, while unofficially utilized in aircraft nose art, was used only once for a medical unit. Additional Disney characters appearing on insignia included Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio, the Reluctant Dragon, Flower, Daisy Duck, Huey, Dewey & Louie, Little Hiawatha, all of the seven Dwarfs, Ferdinand the Bull, Peg Leg Pete and others. The only major Disney character that did not appear in any insignia designs was Bambi.

EDIT: Looks like people are still making patches with the designs today:

https://popularpatch.com/walt-disney-patches

EDIT2: Walt Disney personally drew some of it, like this bomber nose art:

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/04/07/casper-wwii-pilot-flew-b-29-bomber-with-nose-art-drawn-by-walt-disney/