If you're dinging the WWI British and French democracies for their treatment of colonies, you should apply the same to German treatment of colonies. The only reason Britain and France had more colonies is that they were much more maritime nations than Prussia was, and got a big head start. If Germany had had the same chances, they would have done the same thing. As far as I can tell, Britain and France were significantly more democratic than Germany.

For WWII, as democratic capitalists we saw the fascist and communist countries as similar because they were totalitarian. Soviets saw the imperialist and fascist countries as similar because they were capitalist. Germans saw democracy and communism as similar because they were both materialistic. (I'm way oversimplifying here, of course.) The Soviets did try to ally with the Western democracies before the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, but failed partly because Britain and France didn't take the negotiations seriously. From their point of view, alliances with capitalists were for strategic purposes only, so they weren't as concerned about which capitalist side they were on, The Soviets were also expansionist, but working from a weaker position than Germany or Japan.

You are of course completely correct in your assessment of unemployment starting big wars.

Sure, Redhat has the moral right to make money from their own efforts.

What RHEL is selling is support, since you can get everything else free. Nobody is going to pay RH prices unless they need the support. So, what you're paying RHEL for is what they're doing with their own efforts.

NOAA is US only. There are plenty of climate scientists everywhere, and they all agree. Please tell me why Japanese scientists should care about NOAA's research funding.

Electric cars are better. The average life of a car is considerably over ten years (I'm not bothering to look it up). For the duration of its lifetime, the internal combustion car is going to consume fossil fuels and emit CO2. The electric car will take any electricity, and, as that shifts to renewables and (I hope) nuclear, it automatically becomes cleaner.

Valve was probably looking for some sort of assurance that there wouldn't be a lawsuit. Even winning a lawsuit can be expensive and tedious.

I'm a beta male. I'm mostly feature-complete and usually fit to be let out into public.

That looks like a very succinct summary of the article, catching all the important points. Good work.

Individual responsibility doesn't work here. Let's take dumping benzene. John Smith is a truck driver. He needs his job to help support his family. His employer has deliberately set things in a way that he needs to dump the benzene in the river to meet the numbers he needs to keep his job. If John stays legal, he gets fired, and Jim is hired to do the same thing. Due to the corporate policy, and the lack of strong labor unions, the company will find someone to dump the benzene in the river, whether it's John or Jim or Joe, and anyone who insists on taking it to a proper disposal center suffers.

This is the sort of thing Wells Fargo did: raise quotas to the point where they could not realistically be met by legitimate means. Low-level bank employees had the choice between behaving illegitimately or being fired. This isn't just theoretical. (When the regulators found out about it, Wells Fargo claimed innocence, fired a lot of low-level employees, and blamed them.)

Now that we've determined that upper management caused the situation, how do we punish anyone in upper management? They didn't directly order anyone to do anything illegal. The responsibility can't be pinned on any individual, so no individual manager or executive can be convicted.

The company can be fined (although they'll try to get out of it by blaming it on rogue employees), but the management has taken that into account in their decisions. The expected cost of fines and penalties will be part of the cost-benefit analysis.

Arguably, strong unions would help resist this, but the corporations have been working very hard on union-busting for decades, and have succeeded in poisoning public opinion against unions and weakening labor laws. Corporations will resist facing criminal punishment for the reasons you've given. The only other way to stop this that I can see is to make financial punishment a multiple of the money the corporations saved, and that's not going to happen any time soon in the US.

This is what's taught at some or all business schools. I have friends with MBAs that tell me about these things. Causing a lot of harm in order to increase shareholder value a little is praised at those schools. Changing that is going to take a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt in the process.

I don't see it as that clear-cut.

Artists keep looking at other works in their field, and learning from them. All art is derivative to some extent, and a lot of it is copyrighted. I can have a brilliant idea for a story, and I'll still write dialogue and descriptions in a way influenced by everything else I've read. Alternatively, I can write a story with no significant new ideas, taking elements of plot from various other sources. It'll be unpublishable (I hope) but legal. That seems to me to be comparable to AIs searching source material.

Also, there's the question of the least copyrightable unit. This post is Copyright David H. Thornley, 2023 (and would be without the copyright notice). You can take any ideas I have and write them in your own words, and it'll be legal. You're going to use some of the same words I used, maybe even a short phrase, and it'll still be legal. Copy the paragraph above literally, and you're definitely infringing.

It seems to me that, to violate copyright, you have to violate a specific copyright. You can take a few specific elements from this post without violating my copyright. If you combine that with a few specific elements from numerous other sources, whose copyright are you infringing on? It's legal for you to read this post, since I've put it out to be read, and it's legal to take small scraps of my writing. If you do that without taking enough to be identifiable as my work, is that infringement?

This is another case where technology has outstripped law.

However, plenty have been tricked into *grading to Windows 11.

The flip side is whether anyone should have privacy (as a moral, not technical, question). There's things about me I'm just as happy not being general knowledge, and none of them are illegal.

I keep wondering whether part of the solution would be to realize that we've all got our dirty little secrets, and that if pictures of me having sex as a furry (a purely hypothetical situation, you understand) come out, it's no big deal.

What I'm taking out of relativity here is the absence of an absolute spacetime frame of reference. I'd say that believing in one is more an article of faith than believing in relativity, given where the evidence goes.

I've read a few (not particularly technical), and missed that part. I suppose the question I should ask is, is this change of spin detectable as such?

Right - local hidden variable theories are wrong. The analogy shows that suddenly knowing the outcome of an event a spacewise interval away is not necessarily FTL communication. Thanks for the explication, by the way. I hadn't understood that about quantum teleportation before. However, I don't understand the word "instantaneously" in physics, and haven't since I studied Special Relativity.

As I understand quantum entanglement, if we have entangled photons and I measure the the polarization of mine, I've collapsed the wave function (whatever that actually means) of my photon, and I have some information (not complete) about how your measurement will go. If you measure your polarization with an apparatus tilted relative to mine, I still don't know what your measurement can be; all I can do is figure probabilities. Is the wave function really collapsed then?

The classical analogy that I keep thinking of is when a third party has one black and one red card. Said party then mixes them up (or in some way we don't know determines the order), puts them in opaque envelopes, and gives each of us one of them. If I open mine, I know instantly what yours is, no matter where in the Universe you are. That doesn't mean any FTL communication is possible with cards and envelopes.