Maybe don't collect data on a billion people of it cannot be done without violating people's privacy.

Hmmmm... interesting approach. Is the license "permission" to watch it from sony during the duration of their contract, or do I "own" the movie, but not how it's presented through Sony, in this case.

If it's the latter, copy/rip the media.

A short aside:

I have a fairly large audible account. I noticed about 10 years ago, I still have books in my queue, but I'm unable to download/listen to them. Audible explained the licence to me, told me that it should appear back in my "library" eventually but might take years (and maybe never), but here, have a free "credit" (which is basically, another free book).

Had that happen about 6 times over the last 10 years (the most recent was about a year ago. Each time, I got a credit -- and with the exception of the most recent, the book re-appeared in my library. If the pattern continues, I should have it back in my library within 2 years from when it was removed.

I can live with that.

"an awful lot of DVDs only last a decade or two."

If only there was some way to take the data on a DVD and move it to a computer. Maybe "brute force it". We could use the term "rip"!

Then backups with redundancy would turn a decade or two in to a generation or ten. ...if only...

For hundreds of years, conservative is the label given to the political wing that desires maintaining social and political and economic hierarchies. It is a faction label given in the past to those who supports monarchy.

I effectively don't have the same level of free speech as the members of the board of directors at iHeartMedia. So I am not terribly sympathetic yhat corporate entities have to operate under restrictions and regulation. They still enjoy a power that us individuals cannot obtain.

The demographics that the media caters to are divided more by income than by political ideology. Poor white trash that thinks that investing in gold through some website they heard on the radio is one demographic. Rich white woman that is looking for an all natural facial scrub that will reverse aging while donating a portion of the profits to the whale. Take your pick how a talk show schedule is built around those ad markets.

Because people kept buying their software.

Making Art in 2026 (alt link)

Indiana is at the far end of a very large (too large) time zone, so the clocks always felt a bit off. I would have had the same problem when I was in western Michigan, but it was cloudy 6 months out of the year so who knew when noon really was. I always just assumed the noon whistle was noon and let the Sun do its own thing.

Great. I wonder how many members of Congress think this means we get more daylight.

I'm more of a Baby Ruth fan, but they renamed it and changes the recipe so it is basically extinct.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

What's the point of blaming the previous administration when they can no longer do anything about it? I could blame Nixon for not doing something about climate change, for all the good it would do.

As for AGI and worse, ASI, the risk to human civilization is very real. The rest of us are in peril right now without regulation and an international framework to inspect and confiscate materials for dangerous AI projects. A failure of leadership to lead. A failure of governments to protect its citizenry. Treating AI as just another business is a massive blunder.

Change the laws and tax AI. Perhaps a per token fee, or a flat annual tax based on computational side. All on the assumption that copyright violation is just going to happen. Not unlike how some countries charge a tax on blank media.

Ideally it should be done by treaty and cut through every major economy in the world.

Some of us still cynically hang onto our Cold War experiences. Once we started realizing that border agents can search your phone if you travel within 100 miles of a border, we got a little paranoid about what the government would find in our profiles and on our devices.
With my text messages, there are quite a few conversations that end with "hang on, let's talk voice" or "let's meet up later". I'm not the only person that is distrustful of the power that the federal government has. And of course, anyone with a half a brain distrusts what private corporations are going to do with your data once they get their claws on it.