The terms of the conversation are so whackadoodle skewed, I don't know how to start the conversation.

This entire area is full of such overblown rhetorical use of language, I think people check out about even assessing the ethics. There's something so disproportionate about the conversation around digital copyright. We could maybe start to look squarely at how to address the economics involved by agreeing not to use silly language that's been promoted by intellectual property owners as a way of demonizing their own potential consumers.

Or it's a design consequence of making the device so small -- clearly, right? -- and people's general impression of its smallness is positive, so they live with the power button? No?

*Any* position of a power button on any device could be in the wrong, awkward spot in some imaginable bracket. Am I wrong about this? Could the fact that the old Power button -- here I checked, because I've got a Mini here and don't use the button to speak of -- on the back right not be a problem for an imagined rack of servers?

It's also true that the way the new Mini vents heat could be an obstacle for some racks, and not for others. Right? What am I missing here?

Your example of the monitors did occur to me. I'm sitting at a monitor whose power switch is inexcusably difficult to find. Mounted on a wall -- the example that started this little nested set of threads -- my monitor would not work for me at all.

>It only adds cost for the user and brings no benefit.

Is this not glaringly obviously a design compromise they made in keeping the mini's footprint so small for this next generation? I thought that was obvious?

Do you leave your TV *plugged in* while you're not watching? That's the level of power draw we're talking about in a sleeping Mini:
> Sleeping Mac Mini: 1 to 3 watts of power measured by third party, 0.5 watt on the spec sheet
> Plugged-in TV: 0.5 to 2 watts of power

It's true -- one could unplug the 100-inch wall-mounted TV set from its power cable whenever Dancing with the Stars ended, or hit the breaker, or use an exposed [power strip/surge's] switch, to not waste *just* that little bit of juice overnight. Do you do that? When you see some new TV tech in the news, do you rise to this same bait over this environmental issue each time? Are you writing screeds against the Toshiba people for the Frame TV's art features? (In that case, man, apparently you really would have a strong STOP-MESSING-WITH-MY-FIRMWARE-OVERNIGHT fodder from what I've seen.)

It goes to the position Apple has somehow attained in the world, and to the ego-jousting state of discourse on the internet I suppose, that a simple design choice for a power button has this kind of 'rise-to-the-troll' effect. Apple's assumptions about sleep mode and always-on devices are ones the industry basically shares. But hey, blame Cupertino for not saving the world in every way with every product, you know? This is a potentially clumsy design choice, and my first reaction was "Okay, so clearly making it much smaller forced them into some odd compromises."

(Modest practical experience: I have an M2 Mac Mini now at my home workstation. It turns off, and on again, without my mashing the power button. It's set to power on every morning at 5:10am, 20 or 50 minutes before I work on a given day. There is a UI for this stuff. I've probably used the physical Power button four times? When moving the system around, mostly?)

When LeBron James left for Miami in 2010, owner Dan Gilbert of the Cleveland Cavaliers wrote a sort of jilted-owner open letter missive in which he described the "cowardly betrayal" by James. That letter was in Comic Sans MS.

If memory serves, Gilbert described how the Cavaliers would win a championship before LeBron... Who, on his return a few years later, led the franchise to its sole championship. Whether that amounts to Comic Sans winning out in the end, I doubt. LBJ had won already in Miami. (Shrug.)

The specifics of the tech involved are one thing, but many states have done this for a while now. The contracts (and the RFPs before them) involved in standardized testing will show examples all over the country.

Despite training against a significant body of student responses, at least one AI-driven evaluation maybe seven years ago (personal experience here) would give high marks (for example, 4/4 on use of evidence, 4/4 on structure of essay, 3/3 on writing conventions -- usually there are multiple criteria in the scoring rubric) to an essay that was comprised entirely of periods and paragraph breaks. No letters at all. Not that kids would have know specifically how to game the system, but there were real holes.

The rate at which AI scoring is doubled by human scorers is something that may be changing over time, but there were always "thrifty" states that checked on those computer scores at a lower rate than would make you comfortable as a parent. Your well-funded states would have higher rates of human reads, and double reads. Again, nothing new in outline, as far as the modal of scoring. Just shifting confidence in the AI numbers, and ongoing pressure to do the cheap thing.

Whatever the punishment here, that a person of this status had access to information at this level is unacceptable. That's not one kid bro just feeling his oats and violating an oath. It's a serious sign of systemic negligence.

Back in the days when the goal was to spook consumers, preventing "piracy" (what a ludicrous, Orwellian word choice) by making an example of a handful of individuals, everyday people were suddenly crucified by media companies out of the blue.

I guess when you're a corporate entity you have the resources to make the argument that wildly disproportionate damages are not characteristic of a functioning system of justice. A single mom in Idaho can't stand up against Sony quite so much.

All of the analogies you make are to physical objects which when stolen, are not available to their original owners. Then you pour on the rhetoric, adding "going to the toilet in" the cop's helmet -- and somehow the police officer has died? Maybe due to the lack of protection from the stolen object? I'm just confused.

The overblown metaphors used, starting with "piracy," are just crazy in this area. It's intellectual property law. We can talk about it in proportionate terms, and figure things out, without any talk about babies and bayonets, can't we?

Perhaps INTERPOL can EXPRESS CONCERN about the "torture" you describe?

(In all seriousness, the overheated rhetorical language around this somewhat-fraying area of intellectual property law in the age of digital content is striking. "Piracy" is not the term we ought to use for someone making a local copy of a streamed Kurt Russell movie from 1984.

Maybe one step toward arriving at a basically fair economic model around this might be for people to tone things down about three notches. Ads are annoying, but the frequent Hims commercials I see on Hulu aren't waterboarding me. My watching Local Hero on a plane ride is not equivalent to my waiting in the Arabian Sea to attack vulnerable supertankers and do bodily harm to their crews.)

"Someone heckles" they can easily handle, most of the time anyway.

At the Rose, the tradition of "groundlings" talking back to the actors is a real thing.

In Minneapolis there's a (beautiful, brilliant) group called "Ten Thousand Things" that stages classic theater in places like prisons and rehab facilities, as well as putting on shows for the general public. The circumstances -- you can't dim the lights in a prison, and the space is often something like a modest conference room -- means incredibly immediate, close contact with the audience. In prisons, they get people talking back to the characters, advising them about what they should do.

The actors can handle this. I wouldn't want to be that "heckler" so desperate for attention when it comes to my fellow audience members, though...

Any time someone tells you there isn't, or wasn't, any real choice? Keep one hand on your wallet.

In the case of something like the dropping of atomic weapons on major cities, you really think there was a black-and-white choice with only two options? Yes/No? No range of possible targets? Because [alternate history full of assumptions, so we HAD to]?

There were enormous moral consequences to that decision, such as it was. I'm not at all clear that it was even really thought through. The strategic bombings of World War II, and particularly the fire bombings of Japan, created a way of thinking, and a creature like Curtis LeMay, where it was possible to drop those bombs without even really *considering* those choices. Harry Truman essentially gave LeMay and company a "use it when it's ready" authorization. Incredible.

There was an exhibit at the Smithsonian with the fuselage of the Enola Gay on display in the 1990s sometime. There was resistance to putting anything on the wall about the effects of the bombings. Just a fuselage of the airplane, with no context at all. That tells you we haven't really dealt with the implications of these events.

Fox News, a major "news" organization, has been run from root to branch since at least 2004 as a pure instrument of propaganda. For example: It is not in any way equipped or motivated to self-correct errors. This is not how "news" organizations work.

There is nothing comparable happening on the left. The idea that there is? Is classic "Both sides do it!" fallacy. The New York Times is accountable for its reporting when it doesn't meet standards of basic truthfulness, and actively seeks not to make errors of that level. This is not the case with Fox News. At all.

And Fox News is just the mainstream example of a metastasizing field of right-wing propaganda instruments. These are news organizations that don't *believe in the truth,* but rather in what they can convince people of.

Let me suggest that you perhaps investigate the range of different payment models present in medical settings wherever you live. Your comment strongly suggests that you're only aware of the "Fee For Services" payment model.

The array of vectors of force acting on medical interactions between patients and health care providers is bewildering. To use a classic example in the US, there are a ton of factors that go into the high rate of cesarean sections that occur here. To attribute huge, systemic problems to the personal qualities of doctors is, I would suggest to you, not a well-informed reaction.

The unsettling truth, for you, is going to be that the forces that result in lots of c-sections are going to be many of the same forces encouraging AI's introduction into this setting. Not to suggest cynical motives -- but hey, the AI is going to be an extension of the existing practice models. We can hope it somehow takes in "best practice" models more, but I'm doubting that someone like you will necessarily love that when it says (as human beings have too) that maybe some screenings don't need to happen as often. When medical standards groups suggested lowering the frequency of mammograms (or just "annual checkups") people screamed.