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Comment A Surprising Result From This Crew (Score 1) 87

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

Comment Why we don't polygraph people anymore (Score 2) 116

I can think of a few things leading to Voight-Kampff-style polygraph tests being phased out in this timeline

1. Several U.S. states have banned reliance on polygraph test results by employers. "Polygraph" on Wikipedia lists Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Delaware and Iowa. In addition, the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act 1998 generally bans polygraphing by employers outside the rent-a-cop industry.
2. Autism advocacy organizations raised a stink about false positive results on autistic or otherwise neurodivergent human beings.
3. The LLM training set probably picked up answers from someone's cheat sheet, such as "The turtle was dragging its hind leg, and I was waiting for it to stop squirming so I could see if it needed to go to the vet."

Comment Free apps are more likely to use protocols (Score 1) 68

you have your itinerary saved in a note taking app that isn't on the appstore

If an app meets F-Droid's licensing policy then it is more likely to follow the principle that protocols are better than platforms. This means there are probably other apps, probably including apps on Google Play Store, that can reach the document repository where you saved your itinerary.

Comment Apple was beaten to Tivoization by decades (Score 1) 68

insane market (started by Apple) of personal devices that you buy that you literally don't have admin access on

That was 1985 with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 7800 ProSystem, the first popular home computing devices to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized software. Between that and the iPhone was the TiVo DVR, the first popular home computing device to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized derivatives of copylefted software.

Comment Apple used x86 in 2005-2020 (Score 1) 327

In 2005, Mac computers used Intel Core Duo x86 processors. From 2006 through 2020, Mac computers used Intel x86-64 processors. starting with Core 2 Duo. macOS on x86-64 could still run x86 applications until macOS 10.15 "Catalina Wine Killer", released in June 2019.

What CPU architecture were you using on the desktop from 2008 through 2020, if not x86 or x86-64?

Comment Re:Is this for real? (Score 1) 34

Choose your adventure books are AWESOME. I had a time travel one that I probably worked my way through a hundred times, always coming up with different scenarios. It was like training wheels for the imagination, with just enough guidance to keep you from spiraling out of control, but still let you stretch.

There was one called Inside UFO 54-40 that had an ending you couldn't navigate to. You had to "cheat" to find it, by just reading a section of the book that you had no way to reach. I thought that was pretty clever.

Similarly, Infocom had a text adventure game called The Lurking Horror that needed you to enter a computer password at some point to continue with the game. The password was only provided in the physical materials included with the purchased copy of the game. But if you knew how to hack into the game binaries, the password was actually there -- multiple times -- in plaintext. That had to be intentional.

Comment Re:Seriously ...? (Score 1) 255

The same business as any other police officer has in arresting (and shooting, if they feel threatened) people who interfere with their duties.

Except ICE isn't ordinary police. They're described as law enforcement officers, but their jurisdiction encompasses only a very small range of laws, related to immigration and customs (hence the name). Plugging multiple rounds into U.S. citizens who piss them off for some reason is not within their mandate.

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