Comment Re:Easiest way to help? (Score 1) 60
You can. With a browser plugin called "Short Stop".
You can. With a browser plugin called "Short Stop".
Reddit might have a good complaint about terms of service or CFAA or something. I don't know. But at least one part of their complaint looks like garbage:
7. Congress has enacted laws to prevent exactly what Defendants are doing:
circumventing or bypassing technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted
works. See Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201, et seq. Each of the Defendants
in this action is profiting by evading technological control measures to access Reddit data it
knows it does not have permission to access or use. Because Reddit has always believed in the
open internet, it takes its role as a steward of its users’ communities, discussions, and authentic
human discourse seriously. Through this action, Reddit seeks to end Defendants’ circumvention
of security measures protecting Reddit data, blatant misuse of Reddit content, and disrespect for
its users’ rights, all of which harm Reddit and its hundreds of thousands of authentic human
communities.
Ah, DMCA, my old friend. Let's review some DCMA definitions from 1201(a)(3), but I'll add some emphasis:
(3) As used in this subsection—
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
It is here that I must mention that I happen to have a reddit account, and I am somewhat familiar with that website. And I never, ever authorized any technological measure to limit access to my posts/comments. That doesn't mean reddit can't do it, but reddit never asked me and I never authorized it, so whatever is being circumvented does not, therefore (by DMCA's own words), "effectively control access to a work" because the technological measure was never authorized by the copyright owner. I suspect that no reddit users have authorized this, or at most, only reddit employees have been ordered by their bosses to authorize it.
Furthermore, how do we know that the copyright owners don't authorize anyone to "avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure" their copyrighted works? I authorize people to do that. (Indeed, my Slashdot sig below, is a reference to that.) I don't think I have ever said on reddit that I authorize it (the way i have done here on Slashdot) but if anyone (reddit?!?) ever bothers to ask me...
There seems to be some popular misunderstanding of DMCA, that it prohibits cracking DRM. But that's only true if the copyright owner authorized the DRM in the first place and also if they don't authorizing cracking it. Neither of those two required conditions apply in this case.
"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom
If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and taking Daystrom's sanity with it), I think his speech sums up my outlook on technological progress pretty well. If somewhere, someone is toiling, that's an error to be corrected. In a weird way, creating the fat slobs of WALL-E is, in fact, the goal. (Though for some reason, I prefer to picture Hedonismbot from Futurama as my true ideal.)
As for how to solve the resulting "finally, we can all afford to be fat slobs, so now we are all fat slobs" problem, I dunno, someone else can worry about that.
Police enforce the law without respect to the morality of that enforcement.
Look at England where there are jailings for 'hurty words'.
Limiting of state power, while often aiding criminal behaviour, is actually to stop to evil people in government abusing their power.
Yeah.
Most Australians would have never seen a drip coffee machine, and rarely instant coffee.
Everything here is high pressure expresso machines, or pod machines if you don’t care so much.
Nobody uses sugar either, because our coffee quality is usually excellent with no bitterness.
Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.
art is made by artists, not robots
Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?
I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)
Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and
.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then
.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).
But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!
Wouldn't you?
The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.
And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?
Sound similar to Royal Rifes claim he could resonate cancer cells to death using modulated RF.
In Australia this is a mostly solved problem.
Our phone companies track spammers and our phones say, spam caller.
Since that has happened, the volume of spam calls dropped off a cliff.
I see maybe one every 2 weeks.
But the again Australia stiles a good balance between corporate power and the people. ie
Universal 4 weeks holiday where you are paid 17% extra.
10 paid sick days.
11% on top of your salary goes to a superannuation fund you can choose.
The retail price you see is what you pay at the register.
Strong consumer rights for things like warranties.
Universal free healthcare + private healthcare if want it.
Mostly well maintained infrastructure.
Very low gun crime.
Kangaroos.
Metric!
We also have some of the most useless politicians in the world!!, would you Americans like some?
He was part of a Christian mission group trying to rescue people who were trafficked.
Victims land in Thailand thinking they have a job, get on the bus, then bus goes on a ferry and suddenly they are a lawless no mans land.
60 minutes did a story on this not long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.