US Copyright Office Grants DMCA Exemption For Ice Cream Machines

Literally the previous /. headline:

Video Game Libraries Lose Legal Appeal To Emulate Physical Game Collections Online

Goes to show who has lobbying money and who doesn't.

Rob

The restrictions include several kinds of content that are illegal in the US, including sexualized depictions of minors and bestiality

Neither of those things are illegal in the United States; the First Amendment strongly protects fiction and art. The reason why Pixiv is geoblocking this stuff is not because of US law, but because of Visa and Mastercard.

Rob

Slashdot has been dead for years, but I'm still here to post that BSD is dying.

Rob

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. Banks and other industries have "know your customer" rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same.

Sounds like a good way to kill large social-media platforms--which, of course, is probably why it was suggested to begin with.

Rob

As someone who is a healthcare provider in a hospital system, I can say that the whole "overwhelmed hospitals" thing is largely overblown. There are some places that are having a hard time (more with staff levels and morale than with lack of beds, especially now that we've had nearly two years to adjust to COVID's demands) but for the most part, hospitals are being utilized about as much as we are every year during this season. Hell, two or three years ago I actually had a heavier workload (though this certainly wouldn't be true of all providers in the hospital). And even if the surge (which already shows signs of a quick peak) did lead to a crunch, it still probably wouldn't be like it was when there was no vaccine, and certainly not like it was when we didn't even know how to treat patients. (Incidentally, many of the patients we're seeing at the beginning of this wave who have COVID are in the hospital for reasons other than COVID.) The real problem is that hospitals run like this all the time, since so much money that could be going to increased hospital capacity and staffing is instead going to pencil-pushers and insurance companies. But in summary, while the next week or two is probably going to be rough for a lot of providers, it's not going to lead to a care-withholding catastrophe like a lot of people would have you believe.

Regardless, that's not what the author was talking about. He wasn't talking about the risk to people who need intensive care for ailments other than COVID; he was talking about the risk to fully vaccinated, masked, and tested people going to that convention. And that risk, quite frankly, is next to nonexistent. Even the experts whose words people like the author tend to take as an article of faith are saying that fully vaccinated people have little to fear from Omicron.

Rob

His reasons for going on with the show are rather trivial (making the big assumption that they're being described accurately), but the only thing here that seems remotely unhinged is the response. It's been two years since COVID-19 started, and the majority of that two million death toll (not sure where that number is coming from--should be either 5.5 million worldwide or about 1 million in the US) came before vaccines and before the Omicron variant, which by all accounts is a milder version of the disease despite crowding out the other variants. To anyone who isn't living in a bubble of fear, COVID is now very much a minor risk to anyone who is fully vaccinated. Time to come out of the bunker and rejoin the world, my friend.

Rob

This article's attempt to paint credit-card companies as victims of the culture war like social-media sites is laughable. They're not entertainment sites that people can just stop using if they're offended by what is being posted; they're an oligarchy that's a fundamental part of the modern economic infrastructure which is practically above the law, much less public opinion. They aren't being pressured by society to essentially destroy porn sites and other objectionable content; that shit is 100% a choice.

Rob

I can't believe they think that $25k is a fair amount to charge a struggling developer to get exposure on their store. Just extortionate, and we shouldn't stand for-

Hmm, what was that? How much does Kotaku charge for advertising on its own platform, which doesn't even sell games?

...Never mind.

I'm sure the tripling in suicide rate in girls aged 10-14 since 2007 is a complete coincidence.

Rob

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/...

Rob

After analyzing 275,699,516 passwords leaked during 2020 data breaches

Why the hell should anyone put effort into coming up with strong passwords when a hacker is just going to steal them anyway? If your login security doesn't at least include some sort of 2FA, it's worthless. And before you say it, fuck password managers. Getting locked out of all of my accounts because some app fucked up is not my idea of a good time.

Rob

If you don't like what the company does or who it makes contracts for work with...feel free to leave, that's the proper way to vote, with your talent and money.

The problem with this is that most of the people who agitate about these sorts of things (as opposed to the ones who already quietly do what you suggest) realize that if they were evaluated based on those metrics, their votes would be essentially worthless.

Rob

For one, it suggests anyone on an ACE inhibitor should stop taking it if they get COVID.

Alternately, it suggests that anyone on an ACEI should have it changed to an ARB, which is clinically identical but doesn't inhibit the breakdown of bradykinins. The main reasons people use ACEIs instead of ARBs to begin with are (1) cost, which is no longer a concern now that ARBs have been out for so long, and (2) outdated studies suggesting that ACEIs are better than ARBs for preventing CAD mortality, something which a lot of newer studies and experience suggests isn't the case. This news about COVID (along with the existence of Entresto for CHF patients) may end up finally killing off the routine use of ACEIs over ARBs.

Source: I am a pharmacist

Rob

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has started having his tweets factchecked and published with disclaimers when they contain misleading information. Katie Hopkins, the woman who once compared migrants to cockroaches and called for a "final solution" in relation to Muslims, has been banned from Twitter. And a subreddit called r/The_Donald has been banned after Reddit updated its hate speech guidelines -- Reddit said in a statement that "mocking people with physical disabilities" and "describing a racial minority as sub-human and inferior to the racial majority" will not be allowed. And so, naturally, people are asking where on earth they are supposed to go to get their daily dose of "free speech."

I'll take "Disingenuous Priming" for $200, Alex... Also, this article sure does take a long time to get to the point and the summary doesn't even include said point. (Parler is anti-porn, for the record.)

Rob