No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.
> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick
That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.
Openness to technology use and to technological progress is a separate axis. The whole left-right thing is a convenient grouping mechanism and doesn't have explanatory power. If you dissolve it into multiple axes (openness to tech, authority beliefs/morals/economics, tradition, etc) you can show much tighter groups of beliefs with more distinct boundaries, but in practice they are lumped into "left" or "right" at a given moment, even though some of those clusters have switched from one side to the other (and even back!) in living memory. See also "horseshoe theory", which is what happens when you try really hard to put everyone on a single axis.
In contrast, populism is a style, not a set of beliefs.
SpaceX is the only major operator of spaceflights in the US: more than 95% of all satellites launched are launched by SpaceX, not just in the US, but worldwide.
We have regions where we deliberately minimize light pollution, but those regions aren't immune to Elon's swarm of photobombing satellites.
Not that I don't think it's cool to have a web of spacecraft enveloping the planet and bringing high-speed communications to everyone everywhere - it's pretty impressive to point up and show a train of satellites to a kid - but astronomers have been complaining about them and they are right.
This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.
Well, also that spending on needless digging would have been the best use of the resources. Instead of spending on something more immediately useful (or leaving the money with the taxpayers).
There's really many, many more lower-hanging fruits in tax spend even in science funding alone, that's significantly more of a "waste of resources" than manned space program, and drastically more so in tax spending in general. Why not focus on those more, instead of attacking one of the few remaining things where people still try to do something ambitious, constructive, and forward-looking, and one that has a hugely disproportionate and positive impact on promoting interest in science and engineering?
But I've already noticed that some people think sportsball and adtech salaries are enough to build society's mythos around, so whatever.
The vibe around smart glasses is so weird: Governments and businesses can record in public, which is right and proper, but if an individual person records what they see, that's wrong and creepy.
The original assumption behind CCTV was that it's recorded but realistically never seen, or maybe seen by one person staring at a bunch of screens at once. That's what made it acceptable.
Of course this has changed drastically, but CCTV basically got grandfathered in in most people's minds.
For $650, I just purchased a consumer-level CCTV (writes locally, on a loop) which can auto-detect all humans, vehicles, and pets — creating montages of visitors (for later review). This is entirely offline, eight camera, just over two weeks retention at 12MP (configurable to months with dual SATA slots and video setting changes).
What cloud recording is capable of determining... is absolutely limitless. I think this is what makes Flock so scary / "different."
The reasonable suspicion around random people wearing secret face cameras is consistent with the idea that both more government and more corporate surveillance are bad.
To be fair cameras on every fn corner is also creepy. But cameras on uncle Ronny are creepier because they're closer and they're usually pointed at glutes.
A fixed security camera is visible, scoped to a specific area, and (in theory) governed by policy, retention limits, audits, etc. Smart glasses are much harder to notice and can record anywhere
Yes in my country there are rules a about security cameras- not that anyone follows them but they exist and you can theoretically sue someone over them.
Glassholes are new. We can tell when someone is trying to film eleven year olds in a public swimming pool but this is the new frontier.
Everything is effin' creepy, your rights end where my start and all that. And I will guard my and my family privacy with closed fist traveling at non-trivial speed to face of folks deliberately wearing such glasses and recording, pedophiles or not. Its also punishable by law to record people without prior consent where I live (Switzerland), and not just theoretically on paper.
Since fighting government is extremely hard, lets tackle lower hanging fruit above first and try for the best case scenario later. Also, government can claim its primarily for security, whether true or not depends on the case but private folks can hardly claim that.
A lot of companies are currently doing what (if you squint) Holmes was claiming Theranos would be able to do a decade ago. I agree with you that this is enough for her to claim, plausibly to some, that she was basically on the right track.
SBF, similarly, happened to have FTX invest in Anthropic early, and while we don't know how that's gonna play out now that they're at odds with the DoW, the value of Anthropic has already increased enough that it would have made whole all the money he was wasting/embezzling, so there's going to be a path for people to claim that he's directionally worth investing more money in, if he's out anytime soon.
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