I really don't know more about resolving complaints as I haven't had any problems. I guess at some point things would go to courts.

Employment is the thing that's defined as employment by the labor law, where the employer signs an employment contract with you and then pays you salary and sorts out your taxes/insurance... Contracting is having a business licence and sending invoices to a customer - with zero relation to labor law. In particular, no concept of vacation, and you pay your own taxes and insurance.

I had 25 days of vacation (standard here, 5 days over minimum). The US company had to register with the local tax agency - there is a standard procedure for this situation. Applicable labor law is based on physical location specified in contract so my local law had to be followed.

You don't usually sue companies for violation of labor laws here - you go to the labor agency and complain, then they sort it out. I didn't have any problems though, so I don't know much about this.

Nah, that's positive.

Edit: BTW, a large portion of seemingly independent porn sites are actually run by only few companies. Especially the Xvideos corporation.

You picked about the only remaining thing where it's not always a requirement. It's a requirement even there if the transaction is over certain threshold (varies by local law, usually around 10k EUR) or certain categories of items (drugs, alcohol, tobacco-related, sextoys, weapons etc).

Also, don't forget that these laws also have requirements on you keeping logs, most of the time 3, 5 or more years. So yeah you have to obey a deletion request when that time is up, not "on request" - that would be illegal in most cases.

In many EU countries birthdate (and more) is public information, btw - my own birthdate is made public by the state itself (on the business registry website), together with my name and residence address. Same for any owner of real estate - be it land, house or unit - names, residence addresses and birthdates are publicly available in the online cadastre.

And as a user, it is a hard requirement for me too. I never want to go back to locking and versions, that's absolutely terrible and completely kills the workflow I have with my colleagues. Collaborative docs editing is single most awesome development of the modern web and users are choosing the otherwise not-so-good Google Docs solely based on this feature. Perhaps not every user needs it - but there are countless users that do. If I wanted to edit without collaboration I'd use Word - much better UX and document editing capabilities... Sadly no truly working collaboration - it's too much like locking/versions, so it's not an option. I'd rather use collaborative raw text editor than the best of the best locking/versioned WYSIWYGs.

We could be doing our absolute best and still be surprised pikachus anyways. And there's no scifi remedy that will help us resolve these problems, we're not even K1, much less K2 - who's on Earth when it comes dies.

As the only known example of intelligent life in the observable universe, we should be doing everything we can to preserve ourselves. Having everyone on one planet is not a good idea if you're looking for survival on geological timescales (and/or have bad luck).

What if the training sets are proprietary (as in, they don't have licence to share)? Should they keep the research to themselves just because of that? I don't think that's better than not sharing the training set. It also doesn't mean the research is invalidated - find your own pictures and it's going to work. Same as - find your own plants and it's going to work.

TBH, I just don't see the training set as part of the research... In my case, I'd feed it tons of electronic circuits to try to teach it generate some. Why should I care about some random other pictures? I care about the research and I have my own training sets.

I'm not saying I agree with them, I'm a software person and open means to me what it means to you. I'd prefer if it was truly open by our definition. But I don't think we can bash the choice of the word so easily.