I (genuinely) have a couple of hundred books of mine that are/were "pirated into" the LibGen database... so... does anyone know how I can go about claiming my settlement cash?

registrations_suck you've made quite a few similar comments on this thread, and I get your point completely. However, may I ask you this: what about when an artist has decided (as many of them DO) that they want ALL of their fans - rich and poor - to be able to see them, and set the ticket price at a level that enables this. They are protected by law against scalpers... but in reality, scalpers get 80% of the tickets. In this scenario, your "poor people shouldn't cry about not being able to afford luxury goods" doesn't apply. It's more a case of "Taylor Swift made it wholly possible for me to see her, but a criminal got hold of the ticket I would have had, and illegally sold it for profit".

What is your view on that? Should someone not be policing the law as it stands? Is the law incorrect in your opinion? Who should enforce it if it IS a good law? What can be done to enforce it? Is there no place for kind-hearted artists who see a picture bigger than instant profit in your world? Should society be all about who can make the most profit, and no charitable or kind decisions should be permitted?

I really would be interested to read your answers.

How about this:

- When you turn up at the venue, to get "through the barrier", you have to put into a machine the card that you used with which to purchase the ticket. And you're not allowed to hand it back to someone behind the barrier. You have to put it back in the machine to come out, too.

- If someone can't attend, then they get a refund and any spare tickets go back on sale in a second wave.

If you look how the touting works, it's normally a case of people with multiple credit cards and multiple accounts, often using humans (rather than bots) to buy as many tickets as possible.

I'm sure there are problems with this method, but how many touts are going to be cool with handing over *their own credit card* to the random Swiftie who buys that particular ticket from them and only getting it back after the concert? I wouldn't, for sure! Maybe they'll cancel the cards before the gig. Trust me, after opening and closing 30 credit accounts every 2 months, the banks will stop giving them new cards. And if they've somehow used the same card to buy multiple tickets (which is supposed not to happen anyway), you either go in as a group or not at all... and stadium staff would easily spot a group of 40 completely unrelated people all going in on the same credit card (breaching the "non resale" rule and thus being refused entry).

Essentially, you're preventing the main mechanism of touting, by ensuring that the original purchaser of the ticket HAS TO attend the venue, or at least trust the attendee of their ticket with their credit card... whilst giving genuine "I can't attend" people the option of a full refund, with a second wave of ticket sales perhaps they day before the event for any that were refunded.

Note that no additional information here is collected other that what you provide ANYWAY, so people concerned about IDs and privacy need not worry! Sure, you could make it more secure by having to present [any form of] ID that matches the name on the card... but I reckon just the above might be enough to stop 90% of the touts.

Go on, rip my "great idea" apart now... please...

Normally I'm just as critical of people "stupid enough to fall for a scam". However, I do think this whole AI summary thing is different. People have been "trained" to (somewhat) trust search engines like Google - they know that webpages that come up in the results can contain "bad" information, but the narrative in most people's head is that you can trust the fact that Google themselves won't lie to them. Now we have a situation where people are asking GOOGLE "What is [X] bank's customer service number", and above all OTHER website results, Google THEMSELVES are saying "Your bank's customer service number is [scam number]".

Sure, you're going to say "well, if people trust Google then they're idiots"... but learning NOT to trust ANYTHING on the internet AT ALL, no matter from whom the information comes or where it's displayed is wholly different than saying "look out for scam websites".

No, I think people commenting above are correct, and Google et al need to be punished massively for factually incorrect information (particularly criminally so), resulting in only true, verifiable and correct information being displayed as fact.

If technology can't achieve that, then sorry, the technology isn't good enough. Keep working on it until it is... but don't use "normal people" as your test subjects when you face no consequences if you're wrong, but the people trusting in your "facts" can experience life-altering, unrecoverable fraud.

When I can ask an AI how it is feeling today, how this compares to yesterday, and what has caused it to have those feelings - and it can offer a response that is understandable, that I can empathise with, and without said response being based on predicting what word comes next from a bunch of sample data, or having been pre-programmed by a human - then I might consider it has the power of thought.

The thing is... yes, a giant lifting machine exists. Cranes with 75 ton lifting capacities with 300ft height and 100ft reach are commonplace. And I totally accept you gotta move a few traffic lights. But... one million dollars PER MILE? To trim some trees and move a few traffic lights when doing so is cheaper than my giant crane? That's the bit I'm calling out. You're saying it cost 12 million to move it twelve miles. Exactly How many men did they need to trim those trees and move those traffic lights? How much was the cost of renting the equipment? I totally understand just WHAT is required, but I'm calling out the cost of it. I think it costs that much because there are contractors for contractors for contractors for companies for contractors for government departments working on contracts from another department and so on... and every one of those 50 stages between ivory tower and road surface is taking a slice of the pie, because capitalism... and THAT is why it costs so much. Sure, I'm being churlish by saying I'll do it for two mil, but do you see my point - that 80% of the costs are in the "paperwork" and 20% in the actual move? Look at it the other way, from the ground up. I bet if you added up all the costs "at the front line", they'd be less than 20% of the final bill, because everyone between there and the man at the top is adding their own admin and management costs onto things. Imagine having, say, a central planning office where they could "book" such work to be done at the actual face cost instead of going through layers and layers of bids and sub-bids and contracting. Sure, sounds very anti-capitalist... but it's perfectly possible, it's just not the way America does things... (Apologies for late reply)

Dunno about the US, but in the UK...

The waste management and recycling industry is valued at 24 billion GB pounds per year

In England, 43.4% of all waste is recycled.

Even thirteen years ago, the UK exported (i.e. not even including UK-based business) four billion GB pounds per year in recyclable materials.

I cannot believe the US (where I believe you might be from, though I could easily be wrong) doesn't have similar figures, with the value increased in line with population. So... I'd propose there IS a HUGE recycling business/industry, and it's simply YOU that's not seeing that, but other people are.

Seriously, now, what? How does one extra-large load cost eighty-five million dollars to move from one place to another? Can anyone give me a sensible breakdown of this? Honestly, give me fifty million to do it and I will, and I'll walk away with a forty-eight million dollar profit. THIS is an example of government waste... and yet someone else is saying it'll cost THREE TIMES this! It's insane. Where are they suggesting all that money will go?

For one million dollars, I could build one large lorry to take it along the roads, and one giant lifting machine to lift it over any obstacles it can't get under (and to lift it out of and into place). I'll then pay myself and a mate or two the other million to drive the machines. Anything else I'm not thinking of? Obviously, you're not going to tax any of this because it's government expenditure, so doing so would be ridiculous. And you can't rebuild a used Shuttle, so insurance is pretty pointless. Uhh... food for me and a mate? Don't worry, we'll only stop at one-star Michelin restaurants on the way...

It would be brilliant if we could get to that point here in the UK. Beggars are a plague on many towns and cities, and in 99.9% of cases it's a *lifestyle choice*. Even homelessness here (noting most beggars aren't homeless) is mostly by choice - there are plenty of beds in hostels available, however they won't accept you if you're drunk or on drugs. So people end up sleeping on the streets because they prefer that to being sober or drug free. Beggars exist because some people actually give them money, wrongly thinking they're helping somehow. If no-one carried cash any more, the beggars would stop begging and might even make some kind of attempt to get clean. Please bring your Swedish ways over here!

Absolutely 100% this! If you can only respond to my questions with answers from a company-approved script, then you are literally no better than an "AI" system. You're a flesh-based decision tree, not a genuine human being demonstrating understanding of my problem and a willingness to solve it. There's a nasty part of me that feels I *should* be able to treat this person like an unfeeling, unemotional inanimate object, and rant at it until I feel better. But then I remember that it's not the agent's fault they are restricted to a script, it's the company's. I just don't see the point of paying someone to do the ONE THING a computer CAN do, i.e. respond to various scenarios with pre-programmed information and never deviate from it, even if the responses are completely illogical, unfair, or somehow nefarious.

Pay humans to be human... they're surprisingly good at it you know...

The thing about those "license agreements" is that they're generally unenforceable for many reasons, a major one being contract law (in the UK, at least). To be legal, a contract has to be "fair" (a tricky legal term, a bit like "the man on the street") as well as other steps such as both parties must have had the opportunity to contribute to the agreement, with negotiated terms that must be made on an equal footing. A typical "license agreement" that is *forced* on you by making you click "yes" on receiving a software update is not valid because there was no option to add proposed terms nor to negotiate, nor was it made on the basis of two parties of equal footing entering an agreement - one is simply told "sign this bit of paper or you don't get to use the software you have already paid for" and isn't even given the chance to add their own terms (such as "you will pay for the man hours of our staff you use in any such audit").

It is my understanding that software companies have never (except in very specific exceptions) tested the enforcement of such a "license" in court as most of them know they aren't valid from the most basic legal perspective of what constitutes a fair agreement between two parties.

Personally, I'd re-write the sentence as:

although there's an argument going on in my head to write it as:

But yeah, it's just a horrible sentence. In fact, initially I thought they were considering the lemons, limes, radishes and lettuce as berries. Totally confusing! I work in publishing in the UK BTW, and my job involves editing and proof-reading, so really I should be getting this right, but... this is actually quite a difficult one IMHO!

I have found over the last ten years that so many authors don't know how to use semicolons. Also ellipses, which they often use where an em-dash should go, for example at the end of a line of interrupted speech (as opposed to someone's sentence trailing off gradually into nothing).

So forgiving and devout that he jumped out of his own car and, on foot, approached someone stopped behind him at the lights? Sure, that's definitely the action of someone pious, friendly and non-combative. Jeez, Why the lies always?

This is the bit that I'm confused by. Was she presumed guilty prior to conviction? I don't believe so. Why does the presumption of innocence need bolstering? And what would that look like?

Don't get me wrong, I think the American criminal justice system is insane, but... just like how I believe the worst person to give HIV safety advice is someone who has AIDS (I think people at risk would pay far more attention to someone who actually followed said advice than someone saying "I didn't do this but you should"), I don't think it's right for a criminal who has been proven guilty to be proposing legislation that bolsters the presumption of innocence. You *weren't* innocent, so what's your beef? Crazy.

I know this is Slashdot, but I DID actually look at the linked examples whereby the AI tool replicated entire (or almost entire) articles. And... as long as the evidence isn't completely fabricated, it's genuinely surprising. People who take the position LLM operators always say that it's just statistical data points and the model doesn't contain enough of the original to be able to spit out anything that would count as infringing. Well... not in this case, no sirree - we're talking multiple paragraphs of text lifted verbatim. For one, I cannot see any "fair use" defence (or any other kind) here. And two, a question: is there something about this specific model that enabled it to quote such large chunks of text, or is this an eye-opener that ALL LLMs might do the same thing?