The percentage of the US federal budget that goes to military is actually pretty small- it is about twelve percent. The vast majority of the US federal budget goes to social spending like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and tons of âoelittleâ programs like housing assistance, income insurance, education, roads, etc., etc.,. When I look at the US federal budget, I see something that actually looks pretty dang socialistic, given that the vast majority of our tax dollars go to public goods programs.

(And I feel the need to emphasize: the Department of Defence itself can easily be understood as one of the most holistic and comprehensive socialist programs in the United States. It is the only point where you have an entire whole-life comprehensive culture of its own that needs to meet every need, and provides comprehensive and far reaching benefits to the men and women who serve in it. I canâ(TM)t think of anything that quite compares to it in the entirety of US culture.)

In short, I do not any more believe this persisting myth that the Defence department is eating up everybodyâ(TM)s opportunities. You could completely erase the Department of Defence, put that money elsewhere, and it would hardly make a big difference. The contribution, at average, from an American citizen to the Department of Defence is about $2,500 per year. If you think thatâ(TM)s going to fuel massive changes at your school, and in health care, and unemployment insurance, and social security payouts, and Medicare payments, and on and on⦠â¦the math just does not add up.

Pointless? Thanks to the debates, most everybody I know who was against nuclear, now thinks that it is very important to the climate crisis. Attitudes have definitely shifted in the last twenty years. Why did they shift? Because of the open debates. Did people change their mind the moment you said something? Probably not. It takes time for people to chew on things. But it has definitely resulted in a change of perspective. At least in my neck of the woods.

No. The timescales are on the side of my argument. The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years.

If just one alien civilization figured out how to travel at 1% the speed of light from Star to star, it would take about 10 million years to expand from one side of the galaxy to the other. That is a very small length of time, because if life is common enough for there to be, say, hundreds of civilizations developing in the galaxy, over its billions of years of history, then the spread of their beginnings would most likely vary by far more than just 10 million years.

If civilizations make machine superintelligences, then why do we not see machine superintelligences all over the place? They should have probes and satellites at a minimum, in every star system by now.

The weakness in that argument is that something has to happen to every single other civilization in our galaxy. It takes only one single success, to puncture the bubble.

My understanding is that the majority of the problem has to do with permitting and inspections. Are they planning to do anything to accelerate and ease permitting, inspections, and other such non-manufacturing related processes?

I have noticed that every time the price of housing goes down, there is fear and panic in the news. We are wedded to the idea that the home is an investment and its price shall only go up, and that if the price does not go up, something is very wrong:

Well that's stupid.

The entire history and purpose of "230" was to encourage sites to engage in moderation, alternatively favoring or suppressing different content, and to give them the freedom to do so without being treated anything like newspapers or other media.

I doubt that there's anything interesting that happened, and I certainly don't believe your take on it, but as a general rule there's nothing at all wrong with the government offering advice or asking people to do things and for people to agree or to voluntarily do those things.

For example: If the government puts out an Amber Alert, you don't have to read it, you don't have to watch for the child who has apparently been kidnapped, and you don't have to report sightings. You can ignore the whole thing and go about your day. You can even deliberately notice the kid and the kidnappers and not lift a finger. That's not illegal. You're committing no crime by letting kidnappings happen where you lack a duty to stop them.

But it's nice to help rescue children, so why not do what the government is asking you to volunteer to do?

Apparently the reason why is that you are opposed to anti-kidnapping, pro-saving-children government conspiracies of that sort.

They're almost always the same. If there are any that aren't, I'd be shocked. He occupies the same sort of 'designated target of hate' that the Rothschilds did. In fact, that's really where it all starts -- a couple of political consultants working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian dictator, decided that a useful political tactic would be to have an enemy to demonize, so they rather arbitrarily decided it would be Soros. Read all about it.

And so we wound up with Hungary being thoroughly fucked up, Hungary impairing the functioning of the EU and NATO, increases in anti-semitism and fascism, probably daily death threats against a guy who did nothing wrong, and all to score some cheap political points.

It's disgusting.

Still works fine, actually. And it's been closer to three decades now. 47 USC 230 is from 1996.

Good thing that wasn't the argument, then. In fact, your summary of it doesn't even make sense -- middlemen don't get in trouble for taking things down, they get in trouble for not taking things down.

What actually happened was that just before the Internet got big, two cases came down concerning different online services. CompuServe got sued for user-posted content, but was found not to be liable because they had not moderated anything and were just a middleman. Prodigy got sued for user-posted content and was found to be liable because they moderated their boards (for things like bad language; they wanted to be family friendly) but had failed to moderate every post perfectly. By letting one bad thing through, they were liable for it -- and by extension, anything else they had failed to catch.

Since Congress wanted sites to moderate user content -- they were really concerned about porn -- they passed a law that encouraged sites to do moderation but did not hold them responsible for failing to moderate every single little thing perfectly in every respect. Further, sites got to choose what they were moderating for -- could be porn, but could just as easily be off-topic posts, like talking about carrots when everyone else is talking about money.

In practice, sites don't like to moderate much -- it takes effort, it may lose engaged users, it costs money, it can't please everyone -- but they certainly can, and there's nothing wrong with it. Get rid of the protection of the CDA and sites won't be able to do mandatory moderation sufficiently, so they'll fall back on none. This is apparently okay with scum who get kicked off of boards left and right, but should not be okay with people who have standards and don't want to put up with that crap.

I assume that you're replying to the part about fair use turning prima facie infringements into non-infringing uses, but it's difficult to tell.

If so, well, that's the statute at work:

No factor is determinative in fair use, even though often enough the fourth factor is. Always do the full test, every time. And recognize that much comes down to which side of the bed the judge got up on. It's not as bad as the copyright utility doctrine and conceptual separability, but it's not great. Look at time shifting; people extoll it as a classic fair use but really it fails on three out of four factors and is middling at best on the fourth, and was originally going to go the other way. Prof. Litman has a nice write-up about it. And for every example of fair use, there's always a counter example where the same sort of thing came out differently due to a minor factual difference.

Anyway, got a cite where a court held that a prima facie infringing use was a lawful fair use and which was nevertheless still an unlawfully infringing use meriting damages and/or injunctive relief? I'd love to read it. Closest thing that comes to mind was some of the section 1201 stuff from ages ago, distinguishing fair use from circumvention.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

Oh boy, guess what? Even have an LL.M in IP.

There's really no such thing as an obvious fair use. It's always fact-intensive, always case-by-case. And there's always the risk of times changing. Format shifting comes to us from the RIAA v. Diamond case, and it's terrifying to think of how differently that gone had it been litigated just a few years later when the iTunes Music Store was open. I'll agree though that the use of pirated books for training was a bad idea, in that it does not help how a court will perceive the AI developers. Never a good idea to piss off a judge, and it's clear these guys were not thinking.

Still, there's no market for AI analysis of books as far as I know, and the use was transformative in nature given that no one appeared to be reading them, they were just grist for the mill. This is actually more favorable to fair use than Google Books, which is intended for some human to ultimately use to get to read snippets of text in search results. Imagine how strong Google's case would've been if they'd said that searching for a string of text points you to a book with no snippet or anything else to tell you what's inside. Maybe a page or chapter number, for all the good that does.

Once you get over the training hurdle though, it looks like pretty smooth sailing. The model is demonstrably lossy. It's too abstract to mesh with the concept of an abridgement or condensation. You might be able to get snippets here and there out of it, but I would imagine that given a few examples to dive deep into analyizing, OpenAI can show that they appear because they're built out of common chains of text from multiple works, or are overrepresented due to multiple copies of the work. (Kind of like how the image-generating AIs are said to like to make fake Getty Images watermarks because it saw so many of them in training data, so it must be important)

Personally, I like their chances. Either way, it'll be interesting to see.

Users are allowed more freedom with regard to non-fiction, since the facts therein are uncopyrightable, and the general organization may be as well. Fiction, being more creative, enjoys a bit more protection from potential fair users.

I'm a lawyer. I would suggest you take a look at the court opinions concerning Google Book Search. You may be surprised. Try Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 954 F. Supp. 2d 282 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) which was at the trial level, and then Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015), when it went up on appeal.