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Submission + - Internet Archive loses first round of Controlled Digital Lending lawsuit (theverge.com)

esme writes: A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.

Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.

Comment Re:Hypotheses (Score 2) 135

This is already an existing practice, called "pre-registration" (e.g., https://osf.io/prereg). The idea is that you register in advance what your hypothesis and methods are, so you can't go fishing around in collected data looking for something that's significant.

This is definitely a good way to give people credit for designing and planning an astronomy data collection plan.

All that said, this post seems like a pretty biased anti-open-science screed to me. It's really amazing how every time we try to peel away needless secrecy and hoarding of data in academia, some vested interest comes out to say it's going to be the end of the world. And then, lo and behold, when you finally convince the government or funders or journals or whoever to make their data more open, it's actually not that big of a deal.

Comment It's already here (Score 1) 197

This is already here in a lot of ways, with voice assistants, configurable things like IFTTT, etc. Sure, those do simple isolated things and not big complex applications. But they can easily do a task with no coding that in the recent past would have required writing a couple dozen lines of code. And it seems pretty clear to me that these things are building rapidly towards replacing things that would have been full-blown applications until recently.

As a programmer-who-got-promoted-into-management, I really doubt this is going to change the number of programmers working, though. Maybe a subset of them will spend most of their time writing webservices for new things or things specific to their employer. And another big chunk will be employed by the tech giants to run the infrastructure.

IMHO, if it means fewer people need to spend hours fighting javascript dependencies and CSS tweaks, so much the better.

Comment Re:Fourth place ain't bad (Score 1) 53

If you'd actually read the stories and site you linked, you'd see that all of these schools had the same policy and Princeton upped its no-parent-contribution limit to $100k this year where the others upped it to $75k. Princeton was also the first in the country to stop including loans in financial aid packages (in 2001).

Comment Re:In Ontario (Score 1) 74

I agree, EVs plugged in and charging does seem like a good optional drain that could be dialed back in an emergency. Particularly charging at work during the day, which seems like a likely scenario for the late-afternoon peak-demand scenario.

There are certainly times when I absolutely need my EV to charge, but they are few and far between (mostly road-trips where I make a pit stop to charge and am sitting there waiting for it). But it's usually completely optional and I'd be just fine charging at home or waiting a day or two. I can imagine charging in the late afternoon planning to do a road trip and really feeling like I needed the charge. But most of the time I'm charging up from 60%+ and have plenty of charge for the rest of the day's driving.

Comment Delete Your Account (Score 1) 29

One of the best life decisions I've made recently was quitting twitter. I removed my Twitter client from my phone and turned all notifications off for two weeks, five-ish years ago, because I was going to be on vacation and doing a lot of traveling.

By the end of the first week, I was surprised at how much time I had to read books and talk to my actual family. By the end of the second week, I was surprised at how much calmer my life was when I wasn't reading an endless stream of outrage (and typically outrage at things I never would have heard about otherwise).

If you're upset by this move, I highly recommend taking a break -- I bet you won't want to go back.

Comment Re:Why so few remain? (Score 1) 70

I don't think it's that surprising - after they served their initial purpose to publicize the constitution, they probably got filed away somewhere and could have been thrown out or destroyed by fire, moisture, bugs, etc., etc. over the years. And once the bill of rights was ratified, the original constitutions were outdated, and newer ones were more current and authoritative.

The same thing happened to Gutenberg bibles - they were cool when they came out, but within a few decades, better versions were printed, and most of them got filed away and forgotten about. Because paper and especially parchment were so valuable, many of them were cut up and used in the bindings of other books over the years.

Comment not a monopoly (Score 1) 104

those are all annoying, and anti-competitive. but apple's US market share is roughly 50% for phones, and closer to 15% for computers. the international numbers are even lower. so if apple isn't a monopoly, it really doesn't seem like these things are going to result in any finding that they've abused a monopoly position.

i would love to have a ruling that companies in apple's position have a responsibility to not be anti-competitive. almost every industry today has been consolidated into a handful of large, powerful players who cooperate as much as they compete. holding all of those oligopolies to anti-trust requirements preventing anti-competitive behavior would be a real benefit to consumers.

but i really doubt it's going to happen here.

Comment Other: Slack, then anything else (Score 1) 155

Missing option: Slack - I use it both for work, for open source projects, and for a good chunk of my personal messaging too (I've talked to a lot of my friends more during the pandemic because we've gotten them on Slack).

But there are definitely times when Signal, SMS, iMessage, etc. get used â" either because some folks don't want to use Slack, or you want to be more confident in the privacy of the messages.

-esmé

Comment Re:Doesn't make sense (Score 4, Informative) 84

Any copyright lawyers here? I got the impression the law in America doesn't care whether the copyright infringer is making money, a lot of casual personal use copiers have been sued.

The win here was a finding that Corellium's use was a fair use and one of the four factors for that finding is what impact the copying has on the market. I'm not a lawyer, but I work in a library, and the impact of copying on the market is absolutely an important factor for us every time we consider whether it's OK for us to scan an in-copyright book for one of our patrons. The same goes for Corellium, if they are not having a significant impact on Apple's iPhone sales, then that supports the finding that their use is a fair use.

-esmé

Comment As an open source dev... (Score 1) 89

...I haven't written much code for free. I mostly wrote open source code because my employer wanted me to (or allowed me to) as part of my job.

I'm sure there are people writing code in their free time, completely unrelated to their jobs, but all the open source devs I know are getting paid, either by working for big orgs that pay them, or by working as consultants.

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