We have a similar problem in the UK. Courts and juries tend to believe the police, even though they have a reputation for lying.

To my knowledge, you are pedantically correct, but that doesn't mean you aren't in legal jeopardy for the death; you just won't face murder charges. You could still very easily be hit with civil wrongful death claims, and maybe negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter charges for creating the situation that led to that death.

That's kind of my take on the story, but my wording would be more along the lines of "What are the success criteria?" Or perhaps "Would I donate to support this?" (Surely I would not donate on the basis of the description here and not even feeling motivated to learn more.)

But that's also why I wouldn't donate to support the project. You could think of it as a kind of paradox of choice. There are LOTS of things I could donate money to, but in general the success criteria are almost never clear. Whatever I donate to, it's likely that I could have had "more success" donating somewhere else.

Disclaimer needed? I was weird enough to pay for some freely distributed software. Long time ago, and usually for educational purposes for me or my students. One of the results I was hoping for was that the software would continue to exist with support and possibly even improvements, but can't recall any cases where that actually happened. Later donations often had more clear objectives, but my batting average for "wins" was so low that I mostly stopped donating...

Deserves the Funny, but it's also too true in a sad way. In those days the machines were basic enough that you could actually figure out what was going on. Now they are entirely black boxes at every level and from every perspective.

Obligatory quote against the censor trolls. However I have two substantive responses to your topics.

First, I think the extreme megalomanics with sufficient resources are already cloning themselves. Still a secret, but I think the basic plan involves a series of clones a few years apart, all of them carefully indoctrinated to believe whatever the cloner believes. The "upgrade" plan will involve only one major jump, presumably explained as a "relative" who just looks remarkably similar to the megalomaniac at the head of the chain, and then each few years a fresh prime-age clone will be swapped into the top (and only visible) role. Not sure how long the "prime-age" span is, but the plan will be to make the cloner appear to be ageless. (And by the time it becomes obvious what is going on, no one is expected to be able to do anything about it.)

Second, the extreme sociopathic elitists only want medical care for themselves. The only reason "the peasants" should get any healthcare at all is for the sake of developing new medical treatments for the elite. Human guinea pigs, but treated with less respect. Apart from that, they probably believe that peasants can be allowed to buy whatever healthcare they can afford, but at full market price and while maximizing the profits for the elite.

On the spectrum without telling me you don't know anyone on the spectrum.

It's like Jesus fucking Christ people don't even understand what masking is. People with disabilities go out of their way to hide their disabilities because we do not treat people with disabilities well.

I have a functioning autistic buddy who I didn't really know was autistic for years. Severe ADHD.

My mother was also a high-functioning alcoholic. That and the cigarettes eventually killed her. Severe mental illness treated with booze and smokes.

This is why the right wing is attacking empathy. That plus higher education and critical thinking are the enemies of the ruling elites. While you're raging about people who have substantial disabilities but can just barely hold down a job they're busy raising your grocery prices and getting ready to make your job go away with robots and AI.

They need your rage and attention focused somewhere else and you are happy to oblige them.

We've got nepo babies everywhere and billionaires screwing us over but we are all deeply deeply deeply furious about disabled people getting a little bit of extra time on a test.

I mentioned this elsewhere but the author of this article writes anti-education articles for a living. You can look her up and you will find at least a half dozen of them and counting.

It is amazing how easy it is to manipulate Americans into screwing themselves over. You were going to spend all your rage on this and completely ignore the actual elites fucking you in the ass and raising your grocery prices.

So I thought I would get an example of a "shooting yourself in the foot" (using JavaScript, but I should have gone for examples with Ruby and JavaScript) to try and extend the Funny moderation. However the google search is so sick and literal minded these days that it went off on the tangent of subtle programming mistakes when using JavaScript. Which devolved into another stupid argument with the AI.

In theory it could have asked me what I was looking for, but in practice I think I human being wouldn't have started out on such a stupid foot.

So glad to hear that it was entirely in my mind.

Then again, you might be crazy if you're taking medical advice from Time magazine, such little as is left of it...

But I also felt you needed to be quoted against the ADHD censors with mod points.

Mod parent Funny, but I thought the story had much more potential for humor and so far there's none. Maybe it's too early and the moderators haven't woken up yet?

(Not casting a stone. Felt like I was barely going to manage to wake up after that horrendous test yesterday... Second time at that test site. First time was bad, but this time was more like a circus.)

Just the ACK and concurrence. But if I could read minds, the YOB's is the LAST one I would want to read.

Maybe, but only if you assume that the intent is to share that video with others or whatever.

On the flip side, I can think of a lot of useful reasons to do so, mostly involving use of large amounts of AI to go back and process the data. Imagine losing something and being able to ask, "Where is this," and getting an answer about where you left it. Imagine being able to say, "Was [insert person] part of the conversation where I said [insert subject]" and getting an answer. The potential impact of always-on recording for assisting with memory recall is enormous, assuming adequate storage and processing power.

Also, it completely solves the "You look familiar" problem, both in the "Did I meet this person?" sense and in the "What is his/her name?" sense.

Nope. Not true. You can't use it commercially, but the definition of commercial use excludes a lot of things that you might think are commercial, e.g. any form of artwork, book covers, Facebook posting, etc.

This doesn't give you the right to record someone who has asked you not to record them, though, especially if there is audio and it is a two-party consent state. And if you are deliberately confronting someone in public who asks you not to record them, it could also run afoul of harassment laws.

I have an even more radical proposal. Roll back copyright duration to 28 years, but only for works for hire.

• Works of corporate authorship (movies, etc.): 14 +14 (renewal required).
• Works of individual authorship: 50 years or the life of the author, whichever is longer.

This strikes a balance that acknowledges individuals' lower ability to earn money off of a work, and ensures that individuals are able to continue benefitting from their works for the rest of their lives, while still ensuring that musical works written when my long-deceased grandparents were children are no longer locked away where no one can perform them without expensive licensing and ensuring that people who never contributed anything towards the works' creation (e.g. the grandchildren of a composer, author, or artist) don't get to live off of other people's work for the rest of their lives.

It was broken long before that. Minivans have always been treated as light trucks despite not being trucks in any meaningful sense of the word, and industry interference has prevented light truck standards from keeping up with technological improvements.

As long as we have such a culture of regulatory capture, I don't think these sorts of standards are ever going to do what they are intended to do.