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Comment Re:china's figuring it out (Score 1) 22

in China, pro-democracy speech is restricted

Not really, no. China sees itself as a democracy.

Maybe you meant to say that pro-union speech is restricted?
Or outspoken support for Communism?
Or any criticism of the dear leader?

If a company gets too big, they might try to use this to pressure teh government into getting its way

In the US, there's no real need for this

Indeed.

Comment Re:Well, one-party dictatorships ... (Score 1) 22

There are eight parties in the central parliament and the central government in Beijing. It hasn't been a single-party system ever since the CCP defeated the KMT in 1949. The CCP has the absolute majority by popular election.

This is different from countries where a single party rules without the need of having the absolute majority, or even a relative popular majority. In the UK, for example, the ruling party has less than a quarter of all the votes. (And the head of state isn't elected at all.)

Comment Imaginary property (Score 1) 44

Intellectual property? Which type? Copyright, trademark, patents?

Copyright means a temporary monopoly on fine art, you created it, and whoever you sold the rights to can determine who gets to make money off of it and who does not. (In most countries you cannot sell copyright, it is automatic and unalienable. So only you get to decide who gets to do with your work what you want.)

Trademark means that you get what you expect, and nobody else can label something similar with the same brand and claim that it is the same thing. Unless, of course, you let them get away with it. Trademarks must be registered, and they expire as soon as you don't care anymore, so you must also always defend them against appropriation.

A patent means a temporary monopoly on an invention for a specific purpose. Anyone using the invention for something else is not covered. Anyone using a different invention for the same purpose is not covered. Patents must be registered and paid for, whereupon they are published for all the world to copy, but not sell. (And in most countries, the patent must have a working prototype to be eligible. There aren't many patent offices that will blindly register an application, take the money, and leave it to the public to contest the monopoly on grounds of "prior art", "too obvious", or "it doesn't even work".)

Intellectual property means "don't think of it as a monopoly, think of it as property, which the state has to defend against thieves trying to cut in on my monopoly!" Or in other words: "Intellectual property is anything that lets me dictate how other people use the things they own."

This is about none of these things.

What this is about is personality rights. You have the right to your own name, nobody else may pretend to be you; that would be identity theft. (Although there are a lot of people who share the same name; and some people have more than one name. And then there's transliterations of names. Actually, a name is not a good way to identify someone.) You have the right to your own likeness, nobody else gets to pretend to be you. Except, of course, when there is no danger of the pretense being mistaken for the real thing, such as in parodies (Spitting Image comes to mind) or in biopics.

Comment Re:Dark energy discovered 27 years ago?? (Score 1) 90

As far as you know.

Edwin Hubble has discovered that galaxies that are further away are redshifted more, which is odd because one would expect gravitational blueshift.

This correlation between redshift and distance is called the Hubble constant.

One interpretation is that these galaxies are moving away (and that the redshift is a Doppler shift), but that doesn't make sense because at a sufficiently large distance, they appear to be moving away faster than light, and also everything is moving away from everything else. So a better interpretation is that the space between distant galaxies itself is expanding, which has been shown to be the case by the size of the supervoids.

What is not known is why the space is expanding. (A more intuitive interpretation is that the space is constant and everything in it is becoming smaller. But if we use ourselves as reference, we are not becoming smaller relative to ourselves. Space is growing relative to us. The observable universe is expanding.)

This expansion corresponds to a factor (the cosmological constant) describing the accelerating expansion of the universe. And across cosmological time and distances it is not constant, there is some form of energy at work.

It is called "dark energy" (ever since 1998, 27 years ago) because nobody knows what it is. But it is not conjecture, there is definitely something going on.

And that has been discovered, shown, tested, and proven, which makes it theory. Purely descriptive, of course, but proven theory nonetheless.

Comment Re:PHP not dying yet? (Score 1) 29

And replace them with ... ?

Shell script. (awk is fine, too.)

Or compiled machine code if you need performance; but if you need performance, you aren't going to use PHP or JS anyway.

You want to know what's cool and hip?
JS is the new Perl: Nobody knows what it is good for, but the kids are using it for everything.
(Although they are calling it TypeScript these days, it's still JS, with all the cruft and remote code injection that comes with it.)

Comment Re:Jurisdictional Overreach (Score 1) 46

assets in the EU that Belgium could touch through it's membership

That's not how law works.

This case it is about Belgian law, which applies in Belgium, not the entire EU. So if the IA have assets in, say, Ireland, that's outside of the scope.

If the IA were to break EU law, then that would be subject to European courts, not to Belgium directly.

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