There is a huge housing crisis in the Netherlands, so people purchase homes before they are built, and sometimes a group of people get together to build homes that way.
In order to do this, you need to have all your permits in order. Unfortunately, the energy companies announced out of the blue that they didn't have enough energy to accommodate all their new obligations...
> Why would anyone out of the blue willingly make their personal area worse?
Because infrastructure has go somewhere.
The Netherlands has this issue: everyone resists any energy infrastructure in their area. Now there are many people who own new houses who can't move in because there's no electric power for them. Nuclear power is impossible because of NIMBY, so 85% of the energy is fossil fuel based.
"Deemed" in particular doesn't require any sort of reasoning or argument for the company to make any decision it likes. And "appropriate" is not a synonym for "necessary".
"Why did you sell my data?" "We deemed it appropriate for the purposes of providing the Services to you."
What's your legal refutation to this under US law?
(In the EU, this whole clause would possibly be unenforceable from the start, but I know a lot less about EU law.)
You missed the "in any way that Vultr deems appropriate" clause. This is a classic weasel phrase which means they can do as they please.
"Why did you sell my data to an AI company?" "We deemed it appropriate."
There is also the sublicensing clause, which means they can sell it to anyone, and "process, adapt, [...] modify, prepare derivative works", which has nothing to do with hosting, but allows them to change your data and reuse it for any purpose they "deem appropriate".
This is a truly, truly terrible idea. It adds several failure modes, some subtle so you can go a long way in a state of error, just so beginners can type `python` instead of e.g. `python3.10`.
Many developers, not just me, have a similar setup: we use virtual environments everywhere, and if you aren't in one, `python` doesn't even resolve to a symbol.
If I want to write a quick script with no dependencies, I directly call `python3.xx` on it. Otherwise, I create a virtualenv.
Yes, it's a bit harder for beginners, but from a huge amount of experience helping people who are starting up in programming, people have little issue in following a few more instructions. What demolishes beginners is getting into a bad state where nothing works and you don't know why.
If you're under the impression that your average musician gets any significant money on streaming, this is not so.
I know a lot of professional musicians who make a living from their craft. Their income sources are touring, Patreon (or the like), Bandcamp, and then streaming.
Oh, people at the top rake in big bucks, but most of the money that streaming distributes comes from people who play music all day long based on recommendations, or tags.
I met one person who makes a living on Spotify. He has literally thousands of tracks labelled "smooth jazz" and makes a steady income entirely from people who type "smooth jazz" into Spotify and then leave the program running. He isn't ripping anyone off - his tracks are unmemorable but competent and fit the bill. But this isn't really doable for people who think of their music as creation and not a commodity.
If I like an artist, I buy their tracks outright, often on Bandcamp. Quite often I buy their whole catalogue. Thing is, if I buy a $10, 10-track album on Bandcamp, the musician gets between $8.50 and $10, almost immediately. But if I play that same album 10 times on Spotify, they get $0.30, eventually. I'd have to play that album 300 times to get the same payout to the artist, and it's extremely rare for me to play albums that often, and never in one year.
That is a good summary, but of course, there is "cheating" to do the infinite amounts of work required in a finite time!
The board appears as if there exist at any time infinite levels of cellular automata going all the way down running things. In fact, they only compute one level deep and then short-circuit to using the "hardcoded" rules of Conway's life, and simply pop up the higher or lower levels on demand.
Requiring infinite amounts of information to explain a finite universe? Occam's Razor comes down pretty hard on the side of "no".
People have tried to explain the universe with cellular automata and so far none of these systems has even been consistent with our current observations of the universe, let alone predicting some new behavior that would allow us to prove or disprove that the theory was true. (If your theory doesn't predict anything new, it's not a new theory at all!)
Requiring infinite recursion of cellular automata would seem to make the whole problem much harder...
I expected to be downvoted! It's a grim idea, that this is there is and there isn't some huge prize of "a whole galaxy" a thousand years down the line.
I would have resisted it when I was a kid, myself.
About fifteen years ago, I made an attempt to figure out how much it would cost to set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars. My target was a Mars that could make its own pressure suits because terraforming would take centuries and making your own pressure suits is a precursor to that.
I realized that you had to essentially re-invent almost every industrial process humans have today, from baking to smelting steel, because all of them rely on unlimited, free air, and large quantities of cheap water.
You need to recreate most of the chemical industry, just to create new computer chips, each one of which relies on hundreds of chemical compounds available at very very high purities and affordable prices.
After a lot of work, I was unable to come up with a figure. My best guess was $3 to $30 quadrillion dollars, if it were even possible!
And all of that to have a bunch of miserable real estate in a cold, dark, arid, lifeless, airless, radioactive desert characterized by fine, abrasive, statically charged, poisonous dust. Antarctica is nicer in every way - much warmer, much brighter, has breathable air, endless quantities of water, etc - and yet no one lives there.
The most likely theory is that the universe is much like it appears to be and the speed of light is an absolute barrier, and that in practice means that interstellar civilizations never form, because it's simply far, far too expensive and difficult.
If alien civilizations lasted indefinitely, that wouldn't be a barrier, but in the one sample of a civilization we have, we are consuming our resources and generating waste at an exponentially increasing rate, and will crash and burn leaving us without the quadrillions of "dollars" it would take to even start colonizing the stars.