We are facing the same problem that Gutenberg created in the 15th century: a proliferation in the ability of everyone to create and communicate whatever they want and whatever people want to read. Due mainly to a dramatic fall in the cost of production of books. But its far more extreme than Gutenberg because the drop in costs is so much greater. In an era in which everyone has Internet access, a smart phone and/or laptop, writing in publishable format has become much easier and publishing itself has basically become free.

And the problem arises in the same areas it arose back in the day: pornography, religious heresy, political subversion. The same thing happened in 17c France, where people took their manuscripts to Holland for printing which their local booksellers in Paris were afraid to touch. Holland was also a center of piracy, where you could get a run of some best seller quickly and smuggle it back to Paris or London to sell at a discount. A sort of early predecessor of the Pirate Bay.

There is really no solution to this. You can see the same sorts of measures being taken up - the creation of a sort of index, the banning of some materials by righteous jurisdictions, For instance, as late as the 20c the works of \Joyce being banned in Ireland, Lady Chatterly in England, lots of books in the US. In the end this, and the Papal Index, were dropped because they were widely ridiculed and were not working. When the main result of your policy is to drive your best regarded novelists abroad and their works to be published in France, something is not working. And its not achieving its goal, if anything its increasing the interest in the banned material.

Governments however do not feel they can simply stop trying - and one understands this. Along with kinds of freedom of speech most here would find important and valuable, there is also the darker side of human nature that flourishes at the edges. What do you do about it? Do you decide to just give up? One understands why they feel they cannot. And one also understands that regulation and censorship of the truly vile is only possible by measures which have a dramatic negative effect on privacy.

Its a bit like speeding. You can pretty much stop speeding dead if you have enough cameras and you have number plate recognition. The side effect is that all trips and all car use then become trackable. You lower accidents. But the temptation to increase the use of the data is enormous. Similarly with facial recognition - you probably could use it in conjunction with other draconian measures to stop phone snatching and shop lifting. And there seems to be no other affordable way to do that. But the cost in privacy of such a total package is not small.

I see the problem and its historical parallels clearly enough, but don't know the answer.

Wasn't there an 80186? That literally nobody built anything with? Like, it was almost a proof of concept?

Just today I noted that GIMP 3.2.2 (an application, not an OS) has dropped support for 32-bit x86.

https://emetonline.org/resourc...

https://www.icanw.org/what_you...

https://armscontrolcenter.org/...

"No user serviceable parts inside"

Or, in simple English, repair requires skill, training, knowledge, some combination of the three, beyond that a regular and common user would possess.

It also works, in the real world, to identify some product that can not, in fact, be repaired at the component level, either due to physical reality (epoxy potted components come to mind) or the manufacturer's inability to source the required components (third-part complex parts, I could offer examples which should be obvious to anyone able to make an argument from knowledge).

Sometimes this is more a statement of reality than an attempt at obfuscation. 'cause some stuff cannot be 'fixed', and the average user would not even understand why.

Disclaimer - I fully support Right to Repair. I also acknowledge the reality that some stuff is really difficult. And in the example from TFA, We are generally talking about equipment that is not so much 'repaired' as either replaced at the subassembly level, or more likely, in the example, problem-solved in software. You want the right to repair your router's software? Or just access to it after the explicit agreement or arbitrary agreement with the manufacturer says no? As in, you paid for support during the warranty period, but after that expired, the manufacturer soon abandoned software support...? Read the EULA. Ask the State to force them to do whatever the State decided to do. Watch innovation die.

"So, let the companies retain their monopoly over repair and then regulate that repair business"

Your solution is the highest abuse of rent-seeking for the ostensible purpose of 'making things right'.

And this is how government destroys our lives, beyond even the efforts of 'those evil corporations' that are assumed to exit merely to exploit us.

Your proposal is the opposite of liberty. It substitutes the State for the Corporation. And diminishes us further with no benefit, because the State will act in its own interest. The solution is less of the State, more of the individual. Right to Repair does this better than regulating repair.

What's more, you really have to know what you're doing to coax it into re-using code, rather than rewriting the same functionality with each prompt.

I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

Oh, and I forgot one thing. Iran is quite proud of the amount of enriched uranium it already has, which has reached the point where it would take less than weeks, perhaps to enrich it to weapons grade. If you were paying attention, you could be confused as to why Iran has any enriched uranium that approaches weapons grade, when it's previously agreed not to do so, that it was sanctioned for doing so, and now it claims it has a right to do so in opposition to widespread agreement that it should not by other nations. By its own words. It's telling you that sanctions weren't effective and that they were ignored or subverted. You wanted evidence, listen to Iran's leadership itself if you would.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations https://share.google/QgdoNXHS0...

Iran Sanctions: Fact or Fiction | UANI https://share.google/aqXycKz6t...

Iran’s Response to Sanctions? Ignore Them | The Washington Institute https://share.google/BnGQ9tcN0...

There is more.

If you were more informed about history you would know that not only did Iran ignore the sanctions and agreements, they expelled inspectors and refused to permit follow up inspections as mandated by the agreements they signed.

And many of the dispute resolution mechanisms were subverted or diverted by the other parties involved, the UN and European nations in particular.

This is so widely known that i challenge you to provide evidence of Iran's compliance. But if you cannot, then consider they did not comply in meaningful ways.

I doubt you will. Try again.

Iran was not in compliance with anything and was so antisemitic it hosted an international conference on holocaust denial. Khamenei himself literally claimed Covid was black magic caused by Jews creating a satanic pact with demons.

What are you blathering on about? It's embarassing to see you at +5 insightful. From the moment the regime seized power it's been at war with the US. It's violated every agreement it's ever made with the west and openly pursued its stated goal of trying to exterminate the Jews before turning its eye to destroying America. They never "trusted" America, they just knew some American leaders were either unbelievable suckers or actively supportive of their regime due to anti-western radicalism.

As for a million troops to defend itself the IRGC is estimated at maybe 600K absolute maximum combat capable personnel, in a country of ~93 million people about 80% of which absolutely despise the IRGC to the point 30,000+ of them accepted the risk of being murdered to take to the streets in protest.

That's just plain gaslighting. Every major western city has been filled with two groups of protestors for the past month: Iranians desperately calling for more international intervention to end the mass slaughter and decades of global terror from the Islamic Republic, and migrants + white westerners waving pictures of Khamenei and hezbollah flags screaming "hands off Iran".

There's been TONS of people taking the regime's side.