flipbrad

Fake it till you make it (a genuine emergency, that is)

I don't see it as dumb at all. I have solar PV, but adding a 5.8kWh battery would cost over USD 2k / local currency equivalent. As a result, I frequently have to export solar to the grid (during low demand, mid day periods) and then buy it from the grid when it's already in high national demand (and priced accordingly). I also have a 13 year old car that our family is fast outgrowing. It's used once or twice a week mostly for shopping, and also for some occasional long drives to see family etc. The latter are the only times I'd be at risk of starting with low charge (easily avoided). My next car will almost certainly be an EV, or PHEV. I'm supremely eager to be able to leave it in the garage/on the driveway as a home battery that's an order of magnitude bigger than a standalone battery I would buy and then have to devote attic or closet space to (and have to accept a fire risk for). I'm effectively deferring several buying decisions (car upgrade, battery purchase) until I get a good V2G option that is an all-in-one solution.

Particularly appropriate comment since in this case, everyone in the EU has had this for months, and the UK would as well if it hadn't Brexited. https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

"Those are taxable events for the people who sell the shares Tesla is buying back."

But in which jurisdictions is that tax payable, and at what rates?

I dont think we know the actual range of motives for shutdown. Oracle may have forced it, for instance.

First time I've heard of nuclear being a cheap technology to deploy

What do you mean? At least in England, there's https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26/section/2

Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. (And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is strategic e.g. an amicus, or the NSA lawsuit - but the latter does help secure a healthy environment for it and future projects that might want to take its place.)

It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process).

We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis...

Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit...

Anyhow, I'm going to assume people are just ignorant as to how much WMF does, not deliberately trying to undermine it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith , as they say.

(disclosure: lawyer for WMF)

There's also r&d going into additional, inferred data layers, e.g.: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Breaking_n...

Not quite what you're looking for, but something to play around and give feedback on in this area is https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experimen...

EU law to the rescue: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...

I was thinking of sales tax / VAT.

Don't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.

First, you take USD4-5 off that in tax. Then more for support, finance and and marketing. Then electricity, bandwidth and insurance. Then games licences. Then hw...

Might help show prior art to defeat software patents too.

Historically it was always interesting and quite challenging legal work, reconciling some things a bit like this with privacy, lawful intercept and anti-remote-exploitation-tool (anti-trojan) laws, especially in Europe (think: the cookie rule, which goes beyond cookies and PII). Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.

Billion has wildly different meanings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

This isn't (AIUI) relevant to that exact problem. As Wikipedia explains:

"[T]he Orange Book lists patents that are purported to protect each drug. Patent listings and use codes are provided by the drug application owner, and the FDA is obliged to list them. In order for a generic drug manufacturer to win approval of a drug under the Hatch-Waxman Act, the generic manufacturer must certify that they will not launch their generic until after the expiration of the Orange Book-listed patent, or that the patent is invalid, unenforceable, or that the generic product will not infringe the listed patent. "

It sounds like it's easy for manufacturers to.keep adding patents, and the onus is on the generics to make the case that they're not violating. Perhaps most are just scared away, until every listed patent expires (and no new ones are added in the interim)

Plurality of search engines?

[Citation needed]

DMCA is sometimes just used as shorthand for all similar notice-and-takedown regimes.

No moreso than the OS itself. The real responsibility actually lies with the people causing the remote access (e.g. the website operator, the remote hacker, etc).

Yes. Although in fairness, the "cookie rule" part has been updated since then. But not anytime recently.

And the GDPR's subsequent entry into force created the current emphasis on how actively (and individually) you need to consent to things, and how much you have to be told about them first. Stuff like "clicking anywhere on this site, tells us you consent" was a lot more common, pre-GDPR

Note that this isn't a cookie law, it's also the EU's main anti-malware law. The principle is that no piece of third-party controlled software should write information to your computer/phone, or read info from it, over the Internet, without your prior informed consent (with narrow exceptions for storage/reads that are needed to provide a service you've asked for, or equally narrow functions like load balancing). This isn't just about browser cookies, but also your webcam, your mic, and the contents of your Documents folder.

The principle seems sound, but the EU is deadlocked over reforms to create some extra exemptions, e.g. for security scans/mandatory updates, or privacy-respecting audience metrics. EU regulators are already sort of turning a blind eye to those, so it's fair to say the EU isn't great at regulating - it's not fixing what society mostly seems to see as bugs/overreach in the original (now decades-old) law.

The fact that Eric Holder is a judge on this new court - while also working at Covington & Burling [1], a law firm actively involved in helping large companies defend these very same transatlantic data flows [2] - tells you all you need to know about the new court. Ditto his fellow judge, Rajesh De, who used to be the NSA's top judge.

[1] https://www.cov.com/en/professionals/h/eric-holder

[2] https://www.cov.com/en/news-and-insights/news/2019/07/coving...

AFAIK these are changes that apply to any company in the UK (whether or not theyre LSE-listed). This also wouldn't depend on whether they operate within the City of London.

The absolute first thing I ever do when publicly working on a doc like that (if I absolutely must) is Ctrl+r any trademarks, swapping them for [#x].