I don’t think there’s a hard line. Nematodes will react to being touched, that implies a primitive level of self-awareness. Most animals possess some form of proprioceptive sense, against, a form of self awareness. Higher self-awareness is just about being able to predict and plan your own actions a few more moves ahead.
Not that I necessarily disagree, but it's easy to build small mechanical devices that react to being touched, so that alone doesn't imply self-awareness. As you go to smaller and smaller organisms, they start to more closely resemble actual mechanical(/chemical) devices.
This advice from the article to the affected retailers:
Brands and their ordering providers that watch for their site loading under someone else's domain, or for checkout sessions that never reach the real payment provider, are well placed to catch these sites early.
It can be detected if the IT folks look in the right places. I suppose a SCAM ALERT page could be presented to a reverse proxy when discovered.
Connections Museum in Seattle is where they should look. As deep as it gets! They maintain working switches dating back to over 100ya, massive documentation libraries, and artifacts and parts out the wazoo from telephones to teletypes to outside facilities and equipment to momentos and books and on and on.
If Connections has a weak zone in its collections, it's in the post-ATT/1984 era of cell technology and computer networking.
Open Sundays 10-3.
Howdy! Connections Musuem volunteer here at the Seattle Duwamish site. We're working on the computer networking with both IRC and dial-up modem demonstrations. We also have the DMS-10 for digital switching into the modern era.
I have my old GSM textbook, but I'm not too sure how to cook up a good incremental era demonstration of Cellular technology as of yet. I think the best we have is the display of radio telephones, and I'll look more into it.
Come on down, and we've also got some sweet postcards and t-shirts.
If someone says Google can't be trusted for purchases of long-term, capital-style goods like a thermostat (or smoke detectors), I'd have to agree.
The Nest I bought way back when may still be installed in the home I sold 10+ years ago.
But I didn't buy it from Google, I bought it from Nest (pre-Google) - a company that designed and sold high-tech gear that was designed to be permanently installed and (presumably) last a good long time. The acquisition was not a good match, but it is what it is - lesson learned and reputations lost.
(and the design, honestly, was more down Apple's lane than Google's - I thought the former would be more likely to buy them out, not that it guaranteed any different results).
I think that's an overly optimistic take, because we've been through this over and over, and it's only getting worse. We collectively are clearly not getting the message, and we don't own anything as a result.
Actually, I agree. I wasn't talking about consumer boycotts in particular. With the current concentration of money and power, consumer choice has less influence on corporations with each passing day. This is made abundantly clear with the current wipeout of the personal computing market to make way for AI data centers.
So I believe that the lesson we should learn here is the importance of public pressure and proper regulations that rein in bad actors.
I have one objection, though. It's a mistake to think that Anthropic is on the consumer's side. That's the same mistake we've made over and over.
Well, a president should certainly be held accountable for any executive order that is overturned on constitutional grounds. Not only should the president have (and use) plenty of legal counsel to avoid this, but a president stepping beyond constitutional bounds is acting illegally which (a) none of us should and (b) ought not go unpunished.
Held accountable how? Like a fine or something? Maybe a strongly worded reprimand from the judiciary to be added to the president's formal HR employment record?
Very interesting link. I am now confused and intrigued that the trademark for "heroin" is listed as being revoked as part of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI.
Part VIII, Annex VI on reparations: Germany was forced to renounce trademark rights on pharmaceutical and chemical products in favor of the Allied powers, so Bayer's Aspirin and Heroin were included.
Though that is not the type of abandonment that IKEA is worried about in this case. In fact it isn't really clear what form of trademark abandonment IKEA would have to be concerned about for this action to be justified. IANAL but IKEA is definitely not worried about the trademark being ruled abandoned due to non-use, procedural issues or naked licensing; they can easily prove the mark(s) are in active use, and the other two are not related to trademark enforcement.
Again, IANAL but we do need to stop spreading FUD about what trademarks entail. Trademarks are meant to protect a brand from being diluted or confused, not to police the world of all parody or reference to some thing. In fact, if the store in the game wasn't even called an IKEA, I am really curious what "trademark" they felt it violated, but unfortunately not curious enough to find out.
P.S.: a better example of a trademark that fell to non-use would be "Twitter". However I personally dunno if there is a trademark that fell specifically because they didn't bully enough people who tried to use their trademark in ways that wouldn't be confused with their brand. That seems to be a made-up invention by corporate lawyers that people just accept at face value. If it really worked this way, the mark "JavaScript" should've fallen a long time ago.
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