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Comment Re:The Slope Keeps Getting More Slippery (Score 2) 230

So did they finish rounding up all of the immigrant criminals and gang members or did they just completely lose focus on them to chase quotas?

They never even tried.

The problem with the gang members and criminals is they try to stay under the radar, so the government doesn't really know where they are.

The undocumented immigrants who are meeting with ICE officials? Trying to go through the asylum process? Following the law and looking for a path towards legal status?

Now those folks are easy to find, and therefore deport.

The obvious outcome? Undocumented immigrants stop interacting with the government and start looking for the kind of work where the employers will help them stay off the radar.

Sounds like a big boon for gang recruitment.

Comment Re:human safari (Score 5, Informative) 234

>But the difference is that on the Ukrainian side atrocities are the exception, while on the Russian side they're standard operating procedure.

False, not from what I've seen.

Multiple reporting since the start of the war has shown that war crimes are far worse coming from the Russian side.

Have you seen the videos of POWs exchanges where the Ukrainian exchanges look like they're coming out of a concentration camp? Did you miss the widescale slaughter of civilians in places like Bucha?

There's no question that the level of warcrimes is disproportionately coming from the Russian side.

>I mean there's literally videos of Russians shooting their own soldiers for the crime of retreating from certain death in human wave assaults.

True

Have you seen the same from Ukrainians? If not, then in that aspect at least, one side is acting worse.

>You just did.

"I know you are but what am I." The level of discourse and comprehension I'd expect from someone with an opinion as uninformed as your own.

Except in your case I actually justified it.

War is nasty, folks will do nasty stuff. It's not hard to find the occasional video of war crimes to amplify. It's really hard to get a good sense of the level of war crimes on both sides just by cruising social media.

Also note that Russia has been caught repeatedly manufacturing evidence of war crimes. The lead up to the war had them staging fake atrocities, not to mention their repeated attempts to blame Ukraine for their own atrocities. I'd have extremely low confidence that a video of Ukrainian atrocities coming from a pro-Russia source is actually what it claims to be.

Comment Re:human safari (Score 5, Informative) 234

Browse X or 4chan and you'll get all the clips you want, like in /chug. Both sides are doing it, but my point is OP is retarded for only blaming "Russian orcs." Also nothing of what you said excuses the war crimes I'm referring to, especially executing POWs for sport.

>soldiers who signed up

Both sides commit atrocities, that's true of every war in history. But the difference is that on the Ukrainian side atrocities are the exception, while on the Russian side they're standard operating procedure.

I mean there's literally videos of Russians shooting their own soldiers for the crime of retreating from certain death in human wave assaults.

lol. Tell me you know nothing about the war without saying you know nothing about the war

You just did.

Comment Re:Interesting backhand by the court... (Score 3, Informative) 11

IANAL, but it seems like it shows that the plaintiff won... so they can say they found the other party culpable... but for $1. I'm guessing if the case was tossed out of court, even with prejudice, it likely would have been appealed or re-filed, so this helps ensure it has no real grounds for appeal?

At least WD is thinking about encryption. FDE is a critical thing these days, although I trust software FDE (LUKS, ZFS) more than I do hardware.

I doubt this can't be appealed. It's more do to with the fact that they couldn't show they suffered any damages (harm) from the infringement:

He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."
[...]
He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."

"Prior to trial, Western Digital made a successful motion to exclude SPEX's damages expert. SPEX then tried the case and attempted to put on a damages case without a damages expert. Based on damages theories that were never disclosed, and legally improper, the jury awarded SPEX over $250 million in damages," Gibson Dunn claimed in a statement sent to The Register.

So WD did infringe, but I guess because they were just a patent troll with no actual business they couldn't actually show they suffered any damages.

Not sure why they couldn't claim lost licensing revenue, maybe the rule was really made to combat patent trolls and it worked as intended?

Comment Optics (Score 1) 110

Nothing illustrates how seriously Tesla takes safety as paying someone to be a full-time safety driver, but sticking them in the passenger seat so it looks like the car is more self-driving.

Could one ask for a clearer illustration of sacrificing safety (of the passengers and wider public) for publicity purposes?

Comment Re:What does that even mean? (Score 1) 40

Indeed. Popularity is a shitty metric.

By Stack Overflow's "Logic" then McDonalds must be #1 because BILLIONS are served.

Popularity != Quality. i.e. Javascript, Python, and PHP are clusterfucks of bad design.

Customers don't care what language you implemented the solution in -- they just want shit to work.

---

Path of Exile 2 is an incomplete, boring, tedious, Ruth Souls-lite grindfest.

Comment Re:Semicolons are between a comma and a period (Score 1) 86

Semicolons create a harder stop than a comma, to encapsulate a thought; but not as hard a stop as a period, which is a more complete encapsulation of a thought.

Implication? People are expressing less compound thoughts in sentences, they stylistically seek faster flow and harder stops perhaps? Does social media consumption impact how people write and express thoughts? Article doesn't say, but interesting result regardless.

I could see a couple of causes.
One, communication is a bit more democratized. So people who read and write have less formal training around grammar than they used to.

Second, language evolves. The gap between a comma and period was always a bit tenuous. The semicolon simply lost it's niche.

Comment Re:Foreign College Enrollments Way Down (Score 1) 173

Colleges make a lot of money off foreign students, and enrollments are way, way off, especially from China (the most lucrative group). This is not going to help, but is not nearly as important to prospective students as the brain drain of foreign-born professors who are top in their fields going back to their native countries. Why go to CalTech (or wherever) and pay through the nose for tuition, room and board, transport, etc. when the top researchers that you want to study under are leaving and going back to China and India?

At this point what student in their right mind is going to enrol in a US college.

Go through all the hassle of applying to a place, getting accepted, then you're denied for some random reason and have to go back to square one.

Might as well just apply to Canada or Europe in the first place.

No worries for the US, I'm sure they'll still get a few of the students who can't get accepted by their preferred country.

Submission + - JD Vance joined Bluesky - was banned 11 minutes later. (x.com) 7

RoccamOccam writes: U.S. Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky with the post "Hello, Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you." His post included a screenshot from the United States Supreme Court Decision that upheld Tennessee's law barring "gender-affirming" treatments on minors.

He then wrote "To that end, I found Justice Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called 'experts' have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth. I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?".

He was banned 11 minutes later.

Comment Re:Retirement (Score 1) 32

The $100M bonus, if not an exaggeration, is probably restricted stock/options which will require you to be there four years to get all the money.

The $100M number seems too high to be realistic to me. For reference, Tim Cook's total compensation last year was $60M. Since his compensation is probably heavily tilted toward equity, we can assume that what he was actually paid in grants (the value of the stock/options when they were given, but not yet vested) was probably more like $15-30M. If Altman had said $1M, I would have easily believed him. Had he said, $10M I would've had doubts. But he said $100M and that's clearly absurd.

I wonder if it's the case that the people being targeted having $100m+ in OpenAI stock options, and those options go away if they jump ship to Meta. That would explain why they might be sticking with OpenAI because they believe it can succeed.

Meta pulled in $160B last year, so a couple billion trying to buy the industry's top AI team isn't a terrible idea, though I'm not sure it will succeed. I think OpenAI has the lead, but the quality of LLMs are starting to converge and OpenAI's lead at this point is mostly mind share.

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

I was the OP!

I can certainly imagine a company getting a patent for a drug then later on realizing the drug was worthless as it didn't work, wasn't marketable, or there were simply much better options on the market

Canada isn't much, but across the world the fees could add up to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands per yer per drug? Maybe if the drug really is a bust you just let it expire.

It still seems bizarre considering that it must cost many millions to develop a drug to the point of being able to patent something. But I feel there must be a logical path to this screw up other than a manager out of nowhere trying to save a few hundred bucks (Canadian!).

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

It's very unlikely that any pharma company is holding on to worthless patents. If nothing else, getting a patent granted takes both time and money, and there's no point in patenting something unless you have a use for it. And, when you apply for a patent, you have to make one or more claims, each one of them describing a use for whatever you're patenting that you want protected. No use, no claims, no patent.

Sure, but they requested a refund of the 2017 fee. I doubt this was some middle manager going completely insane. There had to be some kind of official process at work, even if that process went haywire.

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

I imagine an overflowing mail inbox that is not getting processed because the team now works from home 100%...

They let it lapse in 2019, before COVID sent folks working from home.

This sounds more like a bureaucratic screw-up, unless at that time they didn't know the true market/application and legit thought the drug was so useless that it wasn't worth $450. That sounds bizarre, but among many drugs and countries those fees probably add up, maybe they do just let a bunch of the worthless ones expire.

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