There are countless American idioms meant to indicate that it's okay to do immoral things to get what you want: "the ends justify the means", "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs", "desperate times call for desperate measures", "it's a dog eat dog world", &c, &c.

As for your claim about the chinese idiom, I've never heard it. Can you please provide the precise chinese language translation, so I can verify if it even exists at all?

Great work by the investigators here! I enjoyed reading through the specific examples they found. There are a few that looked like people making mistakes with matplotlib and not catching it; a bunch that looked like people deliberately filling in missing sequence info with other data; and a few that are just baffling (little possibility it was a mistake; but also no obvious reason to fake that specific data). A bit of a shitshow, and clearly unacceptable. I mostly hope that this nonsense hasn't negatively impacted too much research and progress, and that the professional repercussions are appropriate.

Why did eBay even have a thousand employees to lose? What could these people have been working on?

The key word is "try." They try through the art of persuasion, to make buyers think copyright law says something other than what it says.

Google is free to completely ignore these bullshit requirements and stop doing business in Europe.

For whatever reason, they have chosen to keep transacting with Europeans. Perhaps they chose poorly, and should have instead consulted Slashdot posters about whether or not making tons of money is worth the outrageous indignity.

Doesn't adding the disclaimer truly fix the problem, though? Apparently nontechnical users didn't understand what incognito does, so a sufficiently-well-written disclaimer ought to be able to fully correct the misunderstanding.

On the techie side, we all know that a browser setting isn't going to somehow magically keep other peoples' computers from remembering users' requests, but non-techies didn't understand that magic isn't a thing, so Google's understandably under some pressure to better-document the incognito feature.

Imagine the [unlikely?] case where someone wants to implement FACstamp on their own computer. Can they?

They'd end up facing a similar problem as DRM standards: whoever backs it can't allow any independent implementations, because that would undermine the purpose: preventing people from signing the "wrong" data.

So this FACstamp idea requires proprietary software for every step of the process, with a key obfuscated or hidden inside a TPM chip or something like that. Wanna write something that is interoperable with it? You can't.

Authors can license textbooks instead of selling them, but do they?

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if kids these days (yes, I'm old) are agreeing to EULAs when they open their textbook apps. But I know for sure that tens of millions of people still alive today, purchased textbooks instead of licensing them. If those textbooks still exist, then the knowledge is attainable without any contracts, so there's no means of discriminating against computers.

Just avoid the weird textbooks (ones that require special software to read) and anyone's LLM can get around the problem you're describing.

Wow, Google advocates that I should be able to maintain a media player without any particular weird dependencies?

Maybe you can really get this stuff moving fast toward the midpoint, but how do you stop at the destination?

With onboard propulsion you would just flip the craft at the halfway mark, and fire the rocket (or whatever) in the other direction, but if this is using the momentum from Earth photons to go, I'm drawing a blank on how to decelerate. Do I have to .. *shudder* .. RTFA?

My rips from 20ish years ago are all in Vorbis and so I still play Vorbis files occasionally, but it's slowly becoming less frequent. For the last few years I've been re-ripping all my old CDs to FLAC, but I'm super-lazy. Every few months I have a burst of giving-a-fuck and I'll rip another boxfull, but then I put it aside for another few months. I suspect it'll be years until I get rid of the last Vorbis file, if ever.

Everything new is FLAC.

I do still use Vorbis for Navidrome's on-the-fly transcoding for my remote players (i.e. phone), but probably ought to upgrade to Opus.

Stop making jokes about us, or else a customer service agent will be with your shortly.

If I not-hypothetically bought a $100,000 Cybertruck with debt tomorrow, I'd receive an asset arguably worth $100k

You're the best kind of correct on definitions, but Cybertruck is arguably the worst example.

It was recommended to me in the mid-00s by a guy in a Christian metal band! Despite this, I actually did read it. In fact, I drove to the Christian book store where he worked (because of course he worked at a place like that), and bought the book there. I met a lot of musicians back then and wasn't going to let a Christian scare me off.

It was a pretty good read and seemed reasonable while also "not the thing for me" because dammit, Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a landlord. When this Christian metalhead told me that the money he spent on dog food (and lots of other things, but it was the dog food that really stood out) was accounted for as an expense by his LLC, I backed away slowly (because the Christian stuff wasn't bad enough?!).

In my defense, I gotta say he was a really good guitar player and his band had top-notch headbangable riffs (to go with their mostly stupid lyrics). IMHO at the time they were tied for first place as the best metal band in Albuquerque. I loved them and it probably mystified them that I kept showing up to their gigs.

Life is funny.