Better a windfall bonus for those companies, than nobody getting any money back at all. Sure, consumers are worse-off victims than their vendors, but the vendors are nevertheless victims too. You can't really undo all (or even most) of the harm, but every little bit helps.

Democrats better hope Republicans find another way to keep this crippling tax increase, or else the economy might start recovering before the midterm elections. Republicans are making an enormous mistake, and Democrats are interrupting them.

Republicans: "Fuck America! Here, have the biggest tax increase of your entire lifetime! You wanted poverty and reduced individual rights, so here comes poverty and reduced individual rights."

Cold, Calculating Democrats: "Keep digging your own graves, Republicans!"

Bleeding Heart Democrats: "Noooo, it hurts too many Americans. We need to prevent Republicans from doing things which infuriate voters!"

If we really want Trump to stop trashing America to distract us from his pedophilia, then I have a modest proposal which should solve this. I hope oldschool conservative Republicans will listen to me, because they're going to be the hardest to persuade. Fortunately the far-left (i.e. MAGA) Republican majority has already embraced and endorsed what I'm about to say, so I'm hoping the caucus can unify toward them instead of toward the conservatives. (But I still think conservative support would be good; you never know when the flavor of the month will go sour. Let's get Massie over on our side!)

We need to de-stigmatize raping children.

Whenever your child (or grandchild; Hi Slashdot graybeards!) gets raped, don't make a big deal about it. Just say "Things happen. You'll get over it." Whenever a high-profile rapist in a different country gets prosecuted, we Americans need to be unified in saying "We wouldn't ever let such government overreach happen here, and every 11-year-old American kid knows that if they shake their ass or dress provocatively, they're asking for it."

But right now, if you rape a 11-year-old kid (even here in America, where it ought to be safe), you still risk potentially-serious consequences despite all the great work Trump has done so far. It's only natural for rapists to feel forced to evade, so they have to murder their victims to silence them, start wars or bullshit prosecutions to distract the public, or whatever. Remove the consequences of rape, and you'll remove their incentives for illegal and/or anti-American activities.

Imagine a Trump presidency where he no longer needs to perform illegal and anti-American activities to cover up for raping children. It's time to stop Trump's sideshows! Legalize raping children, and preach child rape's virtues to your fellow countrymen. We can make Trump's second term a successful one, but it won't happen if you just sit on your ass. We all need to speak out in public and go house-to-house explaining the advantages of legalizing and legitimizing raping children to our neighbors. It's our civic duty.

If MAGA people can do it, why can't the rest of us? Let's all try to measure up!

other major religions are far less sacred writing oriented

Replace the word "writings" with "dogma" and his post says the same thing as before, except without the nit you're picking.

BTW, the fact that nobody has found any facts at all (I couldn't help but notice that you were unable to mention a single one) which challenge evolution after over 150 years of some people really looking hard, is why it has been such an enduring theory. It's not 1860 anymore, and we've become a lot more certain (it's all a matter of degrees) about the existence of evolution, than we are of the existence of gravity.

If you really want to attack science and have at least a chance of landing solid punch, I recommend you attack physicists. Those people are on much less solid ground than biologists.

To get the most popular passwords, duh. These things are trained on lots of passwords, so they know which ones are the best guesses for autocompletion.

You should be talking about the stock market! Err, I mean, aliens! Something else. Anything else, just not raping children. Why the fuck would you want to talk about raping children when we could be talking about aliens? I never raped an alien.

You dare to call yourselves communists?!

Yeah, I want everyone (especially chicks) to know that I used a gold-plated banana, not just a prole's regular $10 banana.

Give it some human-generated music. When I listen to Black Sabbath, I am pretty sure I can hear some Cream, but I've long wondered what else?

If you stop paying your lunch money to the bully, he might get mad and act against you!

One bright spot .. Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction

This just goes to show: we need more terrorism and hurricanes, so that the resulting injuries and destruction can further brighten the spots of health care and construction labor.

If you're a patriotic American, then please do your part to increase GDP and employment, by breaking a window today! And if the glass shards hurt someone, so much the better. Economic growth is economic growth!

IM needs to become a fully P2P (and non-proprietary) thing, so that there is no central authority (other than maybe DNS itself) to be coerced. Of course, that brings up NAT problems so that laymen are going to have connectivity problems, and a lack of any sort of commercial advertising and other pressures to get people to come over. (And I'm casually glossing over other problems, such as authentication.) No wonder it hasn't taken off yet.

But if we can get there, the holy grail is a lack of any particular party being a provider of the IM service. We'd just have providers of the lower-level services (i.e. ISPs), who can't really interfere with individual applications unless encryption gets banned, which would mean no more e-commerce, so there should be strong lobbying (e.g. rich people like Bezos) on The Peoples' side.

The goal is to have it such that whenever a law says users are required to avoid certain topics, it'll be the users themselves who are expected to comply with it. (e.g. If you discover that you are sometimes choosing to set the Evil Bit, then you are expected to report yourself.)

Until we get to this point, IM cannot be secure or resistant to censorship (same thing).

"Computer, tell me what to do!"

That's the most compelling evidence I've seen so far, that AI insiders really think their businesses are bubbles. Maybe it really isn't a bubble, but if you think that, you're going against Google's analysis of the situation.

But what do they know? Pffft!

Youtube/google placed the access control and is the only party with standing to sue over the violation.

No, I think you are mistaken, but only due to a funny nuance in DMCA. The copyright owners do have standing (even though they didn't apply the DRM) and Youtube (who did apply the DRM) arguably doesn't!

Behold the legendary 1201(a)(3), where there are a pair of extremely unintuitive definitions, emphasis mine:

(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.

(I'm focusing on 1201(a)(3)(B), though 1201(a)(3)(A) has some interesting implications as well.)

I read this as saying it's the copyright owner who decides whether or not the application of DRM is authorized, not the party who actually applied the DRM. And if the DRM isn't authorized by the copyright holder, then there is no access-limiting technological measure to be circumvented. We never even get around to having to read the definition of circumvention, because there's no [authorized] access control in the first place.

So if you upload your video to youtube, and then youtube, without your authorization, slaps DRM on it, then people who break the DRM and access the video are not violating DMCA!

(They can also be freed of violating DMCA even if you do authorize the application of DRM (1201(a)(3)(B)), as long as you also authorize people to break that DRM (1201(a)(3)(A)), but that's beside the point -- yet also what my sig happens to be about.)

But if you do authorize youtube to slap DRM on it, then people who access the video without your authorization do violate DMCA, and you, not youtube, are the "injured" party when youtube's DRM is broken without your permission.

If you or anyone else reads 1201(a)(3)(B) differently, I would love to hear your views. AFAIK there's no case law on this particular aspect of DMCA, so far.