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Comment Re:VPN? (Score 1) 37

The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.

I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.

Comment Re: Hertz jumped the gun (Score 2) 214

As others said, it depends on if you have home charging or not.
If you can charge at home, EVs are great for commuting, it does require some additional planning for long trips, but it's getting much better.
Also cost to charge at home is 1/3rd or less than cost for gas. Cost to supercharge is often very similar to the cost for gas, sometime even more than gas.

Rentals are generally for people away from home, so EVs for the rental market mostly doesn't make sense right now.

Driving a rental EV right now as main EV is in the body shop. coincidentally. But I'm not away from home.

Comment Re:Amazing lack of context here (Score 1) 282

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.

Comment Re:"Can't have it both ways" is the core argument (Score 1) 282

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.

Comment Re:"Can't have it both ways" is the core argument (Score 1) 282

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.

Comment Re:Reality is setting in (Score 1) 203

So, building out gas stations all over the country and regularly shipping fuel to each one of them was doable, but connecting chargers to the existing electrical grid is too difficult?

When the grid is barely adequate for the existing load? Yes, building out infrastructure for a fleet of battery-powered devices is pointless, unless you want to also build out a shit-ton of generating capacity to back it up.

Comment Don't remind people (Score 1) 106

No idea on the men-vs-women thing.

But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.

If we want people to just accept that things are shitty and must always remain shitty, then it's probably best to not encourage people to think about the topic at all. Shhhh! Don't bring it up, and pretend that the idea of a convenient media library, where users have the choice to use whatever player software that they want on whatever device that they want, simply doesn't exist at all.

Comment Re:If it's not fair use (Score 1) 64

It is?

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:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work ... is not an infringement of copyright.

You don't think it's at all strange that the Supreme Court insists on explicit analysis of all four fair use factors, yet if while doing so you refer or even rely on the work's transformative nature, hey, don't sweat thinking about the right to prepare derivative works, close enough I'm sure.

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.

Indeed, the very problem I was trying to point out.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

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