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Yet Musk consistently opposes AI regulation - https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/elon-musk-criticizes-ai-re... - even though it might help him.

I too am skeptical of government-granted intellectual monopolies, as Richard Stallman correctly names them. Trademarks are the least offensive of them because they expire relatively quickly and are designed to prevent genuine consumer confusion. Trade dress rules help prevent consumers from unwittingly buying products from Company A while thinking it's Company B.

This video game creates zero risk that a consumer will buy furniture from the wrong store, so trade dress should be inapplicable. IKEA would likely even lose in court. But as the article points out: legal proceedings ... get really expensive.

This move was pure bullying by IKEA lawyers.

The legal short-hand saying that "corporations are people" is terrible PR. Non-legal-experts look at that and logically and correctly conclude "no, they're not", and think it's a ridiculous statement.

The underlying legal principle is that groups of individuals banding together don't lose their fundamental rights. That applies to unions, non-profits, clubs, churches, political parties, small businesses, and yes, corporations.

Courts do allow more government control over "commercial speech" than, say, political speech. But that discriminates based on the type of speech, not the type of speaker.

OpenAI and Anthropic are falling over themselves to claim these "incidents" show their products are both amazingly super-powerful and also "dangerous" so they need to be regulated. In addition to these stories, these companies are sponsoring "please regulate us" ads. ( https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/dueling-pacs-take-center-sta... ) Like Uber, companies that had no concern for the law as they innovated their way to the top, once there, push for laws to limit competition.

So it turns out destroying a record to obstruct an investigation is also a crime under 18 U.S. Code § 1519. For that they wouldn't need to prove that it was "evidence" or even that it was relevant.

So as much as I sympathize with the guy a d wabt to cheer him on, he's probably screwed.

> But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.

I think it's an interesting case that will get litigated in the courts. It seems they'll have to prove that the phone contained "evidence"; it could have just had embarrassing personal photos that he didn't want shared. When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?

I hope he's found not guilty, but either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.

Some general advice that probably works around the world is, if you're present in a country illegally, don't go out of your way to seek out immigration enforcement officials to record them for TikTok.

Nothing in the article refutes the assertion that Carlitos Ricardo Parias has been in the country illegally for 2+ decades, so it's not surprising that he's detained by ICE pending deportation. The Intercept refers to him as a "journalist" though all I can verify is that has a large TikTok following.

The Intercept's editorial comment calling ramming ICE SUVs "a meaningless move in a small car physically pinned by multiple large SUVs" is laughable and destroys any notion one might have that they have journalistic integrity. I think in any country, when surrounded by police, if you ram police vehicles rather than stopping and raising your hands, you'll be in trouble. While him getting shot in the elbow is a great example of police ineptitude, I guess we've just gotten used to that.

There are plenty of things to complain about regarding ICE behavior, but detaining someone who's in the country illegally isn't one of them.

Voting with your wallet lets you send dozens of fine-grained messages a day. You support companies you want to support, and don't support those you don't want. Others will choose differently and that's fine for them. The mere existence of businesses you dislike is not a sign that this process has failed, you don't have the right to stop others from getting what they want to pay for.

Voting in federal elections in the US lets you send a message of less then one bit per year. It's a horribly ineffective method.

Apple exists because plenty of people vote for it with their wallets. I don't. But I don't mind that it exists.

I vote against Google when I can. I block ads and use Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. But the results are so poor compared to Google that I switch to use Google often. That's a sign to me that their product is worth my occasional, small "vote", and I'm okay with that.

> Connecting to the grid has enormous value

Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.

If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.

Students have cheated for as long as there have been tests - AI is just the latest tool. The only thing that matters in deterring cheating is the consequences. As a society we've become more tolerant of cheating, so we get more of it.

As anectdoal evidence, Westpoint has a famous honor code, with various cheating scandals over the years:

* 1951, 90 cheating students expelled

* 1976, 153 cheating students expelled

* 2020, 8 cheating students expelled, 50+ cheating students forced to repeat a year.

References: * https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/16/west...

Sure, but "rejecting all server-side processing" is basically trusting the website to honor my wishes. I don't put much faith in that at all.

They'll have my IP and browser fingerprint. Using Firefox mobile narrows me down to 1-2% of the world, but also lets me run ad blockers and noscript, to block some of the more troublesome trackers.

It's all tradeoffs...

That's a nice feature, every OS should have that.

I believe the old TrueCrypt had two passwords, each revealing a different set of files. You'd put e.g. your tax forms in one, so if forced to decrypt your drive, you could cooperate and do so.

It's not illegal to delete your own vacation photos. So to prove this guy guilty of destruction of evidence, does the government need to prove there was actual evidence in the phone?

> Just set your browser to delete all the cookies at the end of the session except for whatever sites you want to allow to 'remember' you

Exactly. I use the "I don't care about cookies" extension, which rejects most cookies automatically without me having to see the popups. But even accepting cookies is fine - I'll be closing my browser soon anyway and they'll be gone.

I don't see why convincing people to overpay for something based on hype and artificial scarcity required any "sweetheart deals" via congress.

Wow, you competely edited your comment to say something different than the one I replied to.

You also still failed to articulate your argument.

I don't think you want to make this about intelligence.

The study points out that CO2 levels are rising, and in 50 years might cause blood HCO3- to exceed 30mEq/L. It then references https://journals.lww.com/cjasn/abstract/10.2215/cjn.11941017... as to why that level is dangerous.

But if you read that abstract, it's about diagnosing blood diseases, and suggests based on surveys of different studies of current people's blood levels that levels above 30mEq/L be flagged as out of normal. It doesn't discuss harms or outcomes.

So even "potentially toxic" seems baseless.

"The one above" is not clear, can you please articulate your argument?

> There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to these increasing atmospheric CO2 levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms... Studies indicate that, after this time, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to CO2 accumulation in the body, has the potential to cause a range of adverse health effects.

There's an awful lot of distance from "can" and "potential" to "toxic".

SpaceX bids on competitive government space launch contracts and wins most of them because they're more reliable and often half the price of the competitors, or less. Government is now essentially subsidizing SpaceX's space launch competitors, giving them more expensive contracts on which they often fail to deliver, only because the government doesn't want to be dependent on a single space launch contractor. So complaints government subsidies seem misdirected.

Many companies have tried to launch LEO space-based communications constellations, starting with Iridium 30 years ago. Starlink is first and only so far to succeed at scale and provide truly global internet access. Indeed having the space launch and communications business joint has helped both of them. Indeed that helped SpaceX drive down launch costs, given their reusability and economies of scale. Having two very successful business lines integrated and synergistic seems like a massive plus, so I guess don't see the concern about the Starlink part of the business "propping up" the space launch part of the business.

SpaceX has accomplished spectacular things in reusable launch vehicles and space-based networking. It will soon restore the heavy launch capability that the US lost when it retired the Saturn V in the 1970s, but in an affordable and sustainable manner. SpaceX is almost single-handedly keeping the US ahead in space.

I'm bullish on SpaceX as a company in terms of technical accomplishment.

Buying SPCX would make sense at about 1/4 of its IPO price. The IPO price and subsequent rise was inflated via hype and artificial supply restriction, i.e. publicly selling just 4% of the total company ownership.

The cops said they had been tracking the car for days. So just once they should have looked at the license plate, and seen the full 7-digit number, which does not match the 5-digit number reported as stolen.

Instead they just blindly trusted Flock's identification of the vehicle.

The problem with giving a free pass to the lazy and incompetent cops who didn't do the least bit of due diligence before surrounding a couple with 4 cop cars in a manner that could have resulted in death, is that you can apply such flimsy excuses to everyone in the chain, and end up excusing everyone, because each link is only partly responsible.

Yes, I'd also blame the city for deploying constant warrantless surveillance.

Yes, I'd also blame Flock.

Yes, I'd also blame the Sergeants who set officer incentives and don't punish lazy cops, and prosecutors and judges who rarely hold police accountable.

But also blame the 4+ lazy and incompetent police officers, not one of whom bothered to double-check the pictures against the report and say, hey, this license plate has 7 digits...

Exactly, it seems that HN can assume a certain level of scientific knowledge among its readers that Nature can't.

An engineer friend of mine, after a decade in industry where he rose to management, decided to go get an MBA at a top ten management school. Compared to engineering, he said it was easy, since everything they teach you is obvious common sense.

I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense, it really helps to have someone lay it all out together and remind you to think about those obvious common sense things as you go about managing a business.

That's why democracy shouldn't be worshipped as the end-all be-all key to good government or good society. Or as Churchill put it, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Freedom and liberty should be the foundations of a healthy society. Democracy should be reserved only for those things that must be decided collectively and universally enforced.

What kids do on their phones doesn't even come close. Let parents and vendors decide what their kids and customers can do. I've met plenty of well-adjusted kids who aren't on social media because their parents don't let them.

Years ago the US government allegedly proposed prediction markets, in part to encourage the exact kinds of behavior that the US Special Forces soldier exhibited. Of course they wanted it from adversaries, not from allies.

By creating prediction markets with points rather than dollars, Meta probably avoids a lot of the legal issues current prediction markets are facing. But it also loses the one real value of prediction markets: when people put their own real money at stake, their decisions should be based more on actual knowledge and estimation than wishful thinking.

So what use is a prediction market of points for anyone?

It depends on a lot of things. If they've also applied to another college that's better suited to their ability, admitting then to a school where they'll likely fail is not really doing them a favor.

I used a discount buyer's agent and it worked great! We viewed houses on the internet ourselves, went to open houses ourselves, and arranged showings with seller's agents ourselves. Once we had it narrowed down to two houses, we brought our buyer's agent to look at both houses, offer suggestions, and do all the bidding and purchase paperwork.

The realtor cartel still enforced a 6% commission, with half to the seller's agent and half to the buyer's agent. Our contract with the buyer's agent refunded half of his commission to us. So basically we got a 1.5% home discount. Our buyer's agent still made 1.5% but didn't have to babysit us while traipsing through dozens of potential homes, so it feels like everyone wins.

Or, the world needs more of your field because it's now cheaper.

I've often heard of house painting as an example of this. It used to take a crew of 8 with buckets, paintbrushes, and ladders to repaint a house. Then paint rollers came along and it got easier. Then sprayers came along and it got even easier. Costs fell, so now people want their houses painted far more often. Landlords now nearly always fully repaint apartments between tenants. As cost fell, painting demand rose.

> Anthropic and US Government, there can be only one right in this situation.

And just to be clear, that's a maximum of one right in this situation.

> The FDA has approved bemotrizinol (PARSOL Shield). This is the first new sunscreen ingredient approved in over 20 years, offering superior UVA and UVB protection... an advanced sunscreen filter that has long been used in Europe and Asia.

The FDA statement makes this sound like something we all should be pleased with. Somehow this 19,000-person bureaucracy is popular on Hacker News, but I like to remind people that the FDA's primary job is to prevent Americans from buying medicines.

A more accurate summary might be something like:

> After many decades of successfully preventing Americans from buying the same safe and effective bemotrizinol sunscreen that the rest of world has had for years, today the FDA finally relented and stopped blocking Americans from buying it.