Comment Re:Los Viagras (Score 4, Funny) 97
Stop making jokes about us, or else a customer service agent will be with your shortly.
Stop making jokes about us, or else a customer service agent will be with your shortly.
If I not-hypothetically bought a $100,000 Cybertruck with debt tomorrow, I'd receive an asset arguably worth $100k
You're the best kind of correct on definitions, but Cybertruck is arguably the worst example.
It was recommended to me in the mid-00s by a guy in a Christian metal band! Despite this, I actually did read it. In fact, I drove to the Christian book store where he worked (because of course he worked at a place like that), and bought the book there. I met a lot of musicians back then and wasn't going to let a Christian scare me off.
It was a pretty good read and seemed reasonable while also "not the thing for me" because dammit, Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a landlord. When this Christian metalhead told me that the money he spent on dog food (and lots of other things, but it was the dog food that really stood out) was accounted for as an expense by his LLC, I backed away slowly (because the Christian stuff wasn't bad enough?!).
In my defense, I gotta say he was a really good guitar player and his band had top-notch headbangable riffs (to go with their mostly stupid lyrics). IMHO at the time they were tied for first place as the best metal band in Albuquerque. I loved them and it probably mystified them that I kept showing up to their gigs.
Life is funny.
banks get bailed out by the taxpayer.
They're supposed to get "bailed out" by the interest they charge their other customers. I wish the taxpayers would, just once, insist on sticking to the former arrangement.
I'd be concerned about seeing VPNs as a "solution." If a 17-year-old in Montana uses a VPN whose endpoint is in New York and they access porn, they and the pornserver have still violated the law, haven't they? The VPN doesn't cause the violation to cease to exist. The VPN merely makes it hard for the pornserver to know.
If I were the kind of person who advocated for these new laws, I would set up a "sting" and show that pornserver violated the law, just like how you might send an underage person to try to buy booze from a convenience store.
Using a VPN is like using a fake ID for the booze. It might provide a "it's too hard" defense, but it also might not. You don't know until a judge or jury says "not guilty."
It's a lot more than a mere "marketing stunt" if he establishes a legal precedent that inventors can't use some kinds of optimization algorithms to sift through possible solutions.
I hate to say this, but that sounds like an argument in favor of the plaintiffs against Internet Archive.
If a "typical library" uses DRMed books, then the only way to avoid violating DMCA (both when people read the books, and when the library trafficks in software which lets people read the books) is to get authorization from the copyright owners. So those libraries must be using licensing, rather than relying on the exemptions codified in copyright law or things like Fair Use in common law.
So you're really just calling attention to the fact that Internet Archive must be doing things very differently from typical libraries, blowing off licensing "deals" and instead relying on copyright. But if the works are DRMed, then they can't do that legally, thanks to DMCA. The whole point of DMCA is to nullify anything in copyright law which is in favor of the user rather than the copyright owner. If it didn't do that, then the pieces of shit who voted to enact DMCA would not have been paid. Bitrot and other disadvantages are the point.
The People need to repeal 1201. (Or even better, outlaw DRM, so that situations no longer exist where 1201 can be applied.) Barring that, then IA needs to get authorization from the copyright owners, before they can legally lend the books (and worse: trafficking in the software is going to require some authorization too, but that gets into some complexicated issues). They didn't do that, so they're going to lose.
I wonder if we could possibly manipulate Republicans to repeal 1201, on the basis that people who write books are four-eyed liberal academic LGBTQ-friendly elitist intellectuals -- exactly the kind of monsters that the government is supposed to be hurting. If we have to live through this ridiculous era, then we should at least try to get something from our American Khmer Rouge. DMCA IS A WOKE PLOT!!!!1
Anyone else notice how the holidays start earlier and earlier every year?
financial down turn.
This doesn't look like a financial downturn. It looks like a technological advance which disrupted a now-semi-obsolete way of doing things. It's a financial upturn: the cost of doing "office-like things" just got cheaper, because it doesn't need offices (or as many offices) anymore. For every dollar that landlords or banks lose, someone else is saving more than a dollar by not paying for things they don't need, plus overhead. Getting work done got cheaper, and that's a net improvement for almost everyone.
in a few years when the economy recovers.
We got here due to the economy improving; there's nothing to recover from. A "recovery" which makes the buildings re-open as offices again, would likely be due to damage, e.g. EMPs destroying our communication networks.
Bard will argue with you if you tell it is wrong about some things.
Privacy is half the value of PGP. The other half is about authentication: knowing who sent the email. It's arguably useful (within the hypothesis that Facebook is useful) to know that an email which claims to come from Facebook, actually came from Facebook.
But wait
LLMs have zero original creation capability. If an AI is generating _____ then it was trained on real _____.
If you have seen 18-year-old people fuck, and then you're introduced to the idea that 17-year-old people exist, then I don't think it requires much originality to visualize 17-year-old people fucking.
You don't think today's software could be used to generate a video where the Muppet Babies do a shot-for-shot remake of Behind the Green Door, despite it never being trained on exactly that? Surely it hasn't already seen "Die Hard at Barbenheim's Los Alamos beach mansion" (performed by the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter) but I bet it could render it.
Yankovic is as food-oriented as my dog! For all I know, an "okay" sandwich to him might be ten feet long and wrapped in gold foil.
It's a bit shocking that 1500 employees isn't 5000% of them.
Anyone know what these employees worked on?
It is impossible for Apple or anyone else "censor" their own work-for-hire. If you are thinking about personally saying something as yourself, and then you change your mind, you are not "censoring" yourself; you're just choosing a different thing to say.
When people use "censor" for things like this, they are just desensitizing others to the threat of actual censorship. Nobody had a gun pointed as De Nero's head, saying that he had to work for Apple and say whatever they wanted him to say. He voluntarily agreed to this work (whenever you see De Nero on a stage publicizing a movie, he is at work ), and I bet he was well paid for it.
Furthermore, I bet whenever De Nero's is off Apple's stage, he's allowed to talk about whatever it was that Apple's corporate mouth did not want to say. How dare you compare this to censorship!
It has always been this way. When I worked in the newspaper biz (2007-2020), the process I saw was that every writer's work was edited in some way. It was usually just for space (e.g. "we need to get these 200 words down to 100 words"; ah, the constraints of physical paper, where you can't just put up a scrollbar), but not always.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
