ChemicalRascal

It really doesn’t have to be a “fact of life”, and it isn’t in many places, such as Australia and England – nations with very similar degrees of economic prosperity, and very similar cultures, to the USA.

The Looker is fantastic. I was particularly disappointed to learn that Blow took it as an insult, though.

Solar wind is not going to just yeet stuff around like that. It’ll have some sort of impact, but it’s not like, you know, actual wind.

Whisked off into space by what, exactly?

A large swarm of satellites, forming an adjustable solar shade, sitting around L1 for Earth-Sun is likely the best approach we would have. The swarm wouldn’t be in a geosynchronous orbit, though, but instead a heliosynchronous one.

Good stuff, Georgia. Especially with it being unanimous. Though given Trump’s demonstrated typical approach, I can’t imagine the rebuke from the court will prevent him from making similar attempts in the future.

Realistically? Something a lot like what we currently have, but with everyone having access to prompt healthcare, living in comfort. A focus on community and cooperation being more dominant in the culture, rather than competition and comparison.

Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be “in the know” about why one sub has “true” out the front.

With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there’s a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won’t be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.

I just learned to accept that I am weird and filthy.

The problem with that approach is that the resulting AI doesn’t contain any identifiable “copies” of the material that was used to train it. No copying, no copyright. The AI model is not a legally recognizable derivative work.

That’s a HUGE assumption you’ve made, and certainly not something that has been tested in court, let alone found to be true.

In the context of existing legal precedent, there’s an argument to be made that the resulting model is itself a derivative work of the copyright-protected works, even if it does not literally contain an identifiable copy, as it is a derivative of the work in the common meaning of the term.

If the future output of the model that happens to sound very similar to the original voice actor counts as a copyright violation, then human sound-alikes and impersonators would also be in violation and things become a huge mess.

A key distinction here is that a human brain is not a work, and in that sense, a human brain learning things is not a derivative work.

She really struggles to maintain basic decorum, doesn’t she? I can’t understand what her constituents see in her.

We have the foreknowledge of seeing EEE happen with XMPP/Google Chat, now. We can fight back against EEE against ActivityPub as it actually happens, with instances defederating with Meta and so on, when they start actually taking those negative actions. It’s gonna be fine.

Something something, that’s how you get a Nazi bar.

Well, her being a cop is self-evident, but let’s review the entire comment:

She’s a racist, classist noeliberal and a fucking cop (or close enough).

Her political career has been chock-full of attacking public institutions like schools, protecting white-collar crime which destroyed countless lives, protecting child molesters in the church, implementing policy against the poor, and protecting prison slavery. I’m not sure where exactly the confusion lies.

I would argue that, frankly, her being a neoliberal should be explained, for the sake of discussion, but her being racist and classist should be. The details of her career being “chock-full” of various acts should be coupled with specific citations to reporting of those acts. And so on.

I don’t like Harris, mind, but the comment being discussed could have established its evidence in a more convincing manner.

Point three seems entirely noncredible to me. They were doing a thunder-run, by all appearances. That doesn’t just happen. You don’t accidentally cross the Rubicon, you don’t just happen to go “whoopsie, we’re in the Moscow Oblast, aren’t we goofy goobers!”.

And then the assertion: “However, I want to emphasize that image has always been a secondary concern for Putin.” Isn’t that just… objectively false? Image has always been huge for Putin. He presents himself as a strongman, a man able to lie to your face, but is so powerful that you, the Russian citizen, can do nothing about it.

I think Beau of the Fifth Column’s hot take is more likely – Wagner wanted out of the war for a host of reasons, they especially didn’t want to be taken control of by the MoD and essentially dissolved into the state apparatus. So Prigozhin decided to gun for Moscow in order to be able to force Putin’s hand and let Wagner return to Africa, doing the PMC stuff that Wagner has been running around doing for years. This has probably been something he’s been trying to negotiate for a year or so, but it all just came to a head with Bahkmut and the new contracts MoD was trying to push.

Having indefinite trademarks will mean we will eventually run out of names, as every name will eventually be taken over many years.

This, I think, is the core of the issue for you, correct?

That’s not how trademarks work. There are plenty of authors out there with the same name as other authors (like, literal authors, not in the general sense of creators of works). There are plenty of companies that have the same name as other companies, be that essentially the same or actually the same.

This ticks off the Joe example. Atari is a brand, that brand is IP, so that’s a separate issue. I’m not sure what you’re even trying to say about Atari there, though I’m pretty sure if the Atari trademark disappeared immediately on Atari’s collapse you’d just see another company start trading as Atari, which under your prescription would be legal, and the world would be functionally identical in relation to the Atari trademark.

As a software engineer, well, it would be remarkably difficult for my industry to pay its workers if copyright didn’t exist.

Hold up. What purpose, exactly, does having trademarks expire on the death of the author have? What do we gain from that?

Trademarks? Why…? All trademarks do is ensure consumers know who made a given product.

If I make cola, even if it’s the same as Coca-Cola, shouldn’t consumers be able to differentiate between my cola and Coca-Cola’s cola?

If the answer is “I am cis” or “I am trans”, what is the question?

The question would, to be blunt, be “are you cis or trans?”, because “cis” and “trans” are just shorthand for “cisgender” and “transgender”.

It’s a question of very limited scope – even if you were to reword it – because in modern society, the exact detail of if someone is cis or trans isn’t really practically important. If someone is a man, say, society cares a lot more about them being a man rather than being a cisgender man or a transgender man. (I’d say the same about women, but there’s obviously a subset of society that is in the process of demonising trans women, so…)

I think the core issue you’ve found is that cis/trans-ness is something that only makes sense in the context of something else, the gender identity of the person in question.