Or probably more likely it still was a management screwup because they didn't approve the purchase of a fully redundant storage platform with proper excess capacity. Very likely had a conversation similar to the following:

IT employee: "We need to expand our storage system."
Manager: "We just did that last year."
IT employee: "Yes, I know, but we have been using it at a rate faster than originally projected."
Manager: "We don't have the budget, make due with what you have, we bought twice as much as originally planned because you wanted redundancy, use that redundancy and spare capacity to make due."

Jackery sells a 1KWh power station for about $1K or a little less. With new batteries.

The Nissan thing is way overpriced.

No actually, derivative works do not fall under fair use. You need the right from the original copyright owner to make a derivative work (this is why you don't see people other than Disney making a Star Wars movie).

Also, let me make this with a very easy example. Movies from books and comics. We see movies made all the time that used original source material that was from a book or comic (in fact over the last few decades, the vast majority of money earned by movies across the industry were by movies that came from a book or comic, with 6 of the 10 highest grossing movies of all time being a movie either from a book or comic book). All those movies required to obtain the copyright permissions from the original authors of the books and/or comics before they could make a movie about them (with Disney having acquired the movie rights to most of the Marvel Comics, and Warner Bro's having acquired the movie rights to most of D.C. Comics, and the Harry Potter series).

Tell that to the courts that have ruled otherwise. Someone painting a copy of a painting or photograph is creating a derivative work, which is covered by copyright law and is considered infringement.

I'm not so certain of that. As we are quickly moving down the rabbit hole of human-computer interactions, asking a computer algorithm to "create a photorealistic copy of which afterwards it produces a copy of artwork, would not that copy violate copyright of the original (under the hypothetical that the original is still copyrighted)? Even though an algorithm then generated that "new copy", it only exists because the original did in the first place, and thus it is in violation of that original work.

In this particular case above, I would stress that the AI algorithm isn't necessary at fault, but the person who commanded it to violate the copyright (in the same way that a tool is not at fault if it was used to break a crime, but the person using the tool).


The real questions become, if the works generated by AI can not be copyrighted, then a vast use of AI can not be monetized, and thus research and development for AI will then be stymied due to no foreseeable return on the investment, but really we should not be worried about that issue. The tools will still have a purpose in helping to speed up some tasks, just not be able to be used for others such as creative works (involving copyrights, patents, etc).

You don't understand the current mechanics of this. McDonalds Corporate and Taylor have a corporate partnership in place and both profit off this agreement at the expense of the franchise sites needing to have their machines repaired by Taylor.

And if you are looking for proof of the profits, Taylor published in 2018 that 25% of their revenue came from recurring parts and services business.

So from a corporate McD's standpoint, they are making money by having their franchise sites need to purchase a Taylor machine that constantly needs Taylor to fix (as they profit as Taylor profits, with 25% of those profits being from the repairs). So more, repairs = more profits for corporate McD's, but the franchise site loses as they are out the repair costs, as well as the sales on the ice cream.

Part of the issue is that the machines are "self-cleaning", which takes 4 hours to run and typically engaged by the night shift to run overnight and be ready for the next day. But if an error happens, the machine simply states an error occurred and the cleaning cycle did not complete and needs to be re-run, so the day shift trys to run the cycle again (another 4 hours) and then finally find out if it is "broken" because it fails again or if it simply was a random issue during the cleaning cycle. The machine does have error codes, but it is not given to the users, only Taylor techs can get them to find out what the actual error was with the cleaning cycle. Another company, Kytch, actually made a device that could read the error codes and tell the McD franchise/operator what is wrong with the machine so they could fix minor issues and get it back in service, but Taylor didn't like that and said that using the device would be harmful to people, and McD Corporate banned its use. Taylor then seemed to reverse engineer and make a duplicate device and started selling it, but were sued by the people who made the original one that Taylor said was "harmful", with that lawsuit still ongoing, with Kytch winning an injunction against Taylor, getting a Judge to agree that they were very likely infringed on by Taylor, and the judge having Taylor turn over all the duplicate devices they made to Kytch... The main case is still pending on things like damages, etc....

Long story short, Corporate McD's makes more money on having the franchise owners need to pay Taylor to maintain the often broken machines. Franchise owners get screwed since up until just a couple years ago, they could only purchase the machine from Taylor (they can now get one from an Italian manufacturer, but parts and service techs are almost non-existent in the USA/Canada markets and are really only available in/around Italy).

I mean seriously, how in the world did someone not think bad things would happen in this case? Relying on a local clock instead of a GPS linked stratum 1 source is just patently inexcusable for something important like this.

Unfortunately yes. In the days of cordless/battery powered tools, it only takes a few seconds to cut through the wall with a sawzall and create your own entry point into the home/building.

I suspect the more relevant reason SJVN emphasizes Alma moving away from strict compatibility when he writes about them is because Alma themselves recently put out a widely-read blog post to that effect.

> The second important clarification is that RHEL does not have "proprietary special sauce added". Yes it does, and Red Hat themselves have talked about it publicly, at least obliquely. While the source is open, the build environment, compile flag choices, etc. are entirely proprietary to Red Hat (I forget whether access to this information by customers is part of the subscription or not). When CentOS was acqui-hired, this was where a lot of the work involved in getting that done was spent -- putting a wall up between the RHEL build environment/etc. and that of CentOS so that there would not be even accidental leakage of RHEL build environment knowledge into CentOSâ(TM)s build process. Even before the acqui-hire, it was something Red Hat would point out to customers and prospects as evidence that CentOS was not "just like" RHEL.

How I spend my money IS expression and government in the US isn't allowed to censor me.

My freedom of speech = freedom to spend how I want to spend my savings.

It has nothing to do with "REALLY fat people". It has to do with the physical bones in my legs are too long to fit within the space from my seat to the back of the seat in front of me. No amount of adjusting, or trying to get a better "angle" or attempting to put my feet under the seat in front of me will change the fact that I need 2-3 more inches to fit my knees behind the seat, let alone let the person "recline" their seat back. If I don't have an isle seat, I don't fit. Even with the isle seat, you can't get a cart down the isle with my knees needing to stick out into the isle and I need to stand-up (hunched over to prevent my head hitting any overhead bins) while any cart is moved down the isle.

> When docker popularized container approach, but it happened outside of RH control, they ignored it as long as possible until finally they made a clone (podman) rather than ever fold in docker. Actually Red Hat did add Docker to RHEL 7. It was a huge part of the marketing push for 7 in fact. Though if you looked at it, what they had actually done was fork Docker and include *their fork* in RHEL 7. This was actually a pretty reasonable response to Docker rejecting patches for things that decentralized the Docker ecosystem, and that they ended up having to support later anyway (stuff like allowing Docker registries that were not Docker Hub). Podman and buildah were a response to Docker needing a persistent daemon running as root on the host to do things and Dockerâ(TM)s initial disinterest in changing that. Once Red Hat had those in a usable, Docker-compatible state, there was a lot less reason to need to maintain a fork of Docker, so they quit doing so in RHEL 8.

> Remember the decision to push the community away from RHEL clones to CentOS Stream was made a long time before IBM was part of the picture. Not true. IBM purchased Red Hat in mid-2019. The CentOS -> CentOS Stream change was nearly a year and a half later.