DrScientist

3 ms·

1.
by DrScientist 5d ago
Did the police have the appropriate license to play those disney songs in a public space?
2.
by DrScientist 5d ago
Indeed. The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online. Naming and shaming require
3.
by DrScientist 10d ago
It's European countries that are taking this strategy, any Russia sabotage is aimed at deterring this widening of the conflict - not to encourage it. Originally Europe didn't want to supply tanks, then it was only short range miss
4.
by DrScientist 11d ago
Not sure how MH17 shooting is relevant here. While the consensus is that it's likely a Russia controlled/allied battery shot it down - I'm not sure anybody thinks it was anything other than an accident, not an intentional act
5.
by DrScientist 11d ago
The ideal scenario is everyone suspects it's you but can't prove it. You have both the desired threat, but no concrete biases for an official response. Also an uncertainty limits action - it might be a random event, it could even
6.
by DrScientist 12d ago
Frankly if I was China, I'd be conflicted about the mid-terms - Trump is currently leading the US to disastrous wars - kinetic and trade, pissing off his closest allies, under-mining the dollar, and making China look a sane and stable
7.
by DrScientist 12d ago
For quite a long time, graphics card driver quality and performance has been much better on the PC driven by the larger PC gaming market. Very hard for Apple, or Linux to do much about that - especially when Nvidia considered it's driv
8.
by DrScientist 15d ago
Eh? They didn't/aren't using their stockpiles to anywhere near the extent the US has! There reserves are much bigger - they have about a years supply - yet they used less in absolute terms than the US! What they did was aggre
9.
by DrScientist 15d ago
Using that lens then you could view the Iran war is simply a failed ( so far ) attempt to grab Iranian oil revenues, perhaps emboldened by the relatively quick success of the Venezuela adventure. The truth is probably much more multi-headed
10.
by DrScientist 15d ago
Blaming the current situation on the actions of China is beyond bizarre.
11.
by DrScientist 16d ago
The original posters premise was the way to make government dragnet surveillance banned was to do a public one. In general it's a good principle however I'm not sure in this case. I can see how a public flock, which is just a quer
12.
by DrScientist 16d ago
Sure. That's a problem with the whole AI space - it's eating itself at a incredibly rate. Ultimately if they add value and behave well they might carve out a market - but anything in the software space right now is a gamble.
13.
by DrScientist 17d ago
As far as I can see there is no clear pricing once you go beyond the free tier - it's contact sales. This is actually a classic enterprise software approach - as there are no fixed per unit production costs to cover, the pricing is ver
14.
by DrScientist 17d ago
Your Harry Potter case is a good illustration. The world Harry Potter universe clearly borrows heavily on past literature - whether that be tales of goblins and wizards or tales of boarding school. So much so ( and the fact that she is very
15.
by DrScientist 17d ago
I'm trying to distinguish the collection of information from the use . Collection is legal - however there is no point to collecting it if you can't actually use it for anything. For example: https://www.pbs.org/n
16.
by DrScientist 17d ago
Another area that's also existed for quite a while is the crowd-sourcing of the positions of mobile speed traps. Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.
17.
by DrScientist 17d ago
It's legal to film publically - what's not necessarily legal is what you then do with that. There are already precedents - for example it's legal to film ICE agents in public spaces, it's not necessarily legal to use inf
18.
by DrScientist 17d ago
Good point.
19.
by DrScientist 17d ago
By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement. Isn't the way to focus o
20.
by DrScientist 17d ago
> It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed. I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it. For example if I buy a physical book, I own it.
21.
by DrScientist 17d ago
The fact that the laws of the land are more accessible to people/entities with deep pockets is true across the board - it's not specifically a copyright issue. That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics o
22.
by DrScientist 17d ago
> As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, That's an argument for no laws at all. There are murders so why make it illegal..... The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space
23.
by DrScientist 17d ago
What happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow. Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication? Or because I refuse to pub
24.
by DrScientist 17d ago
In a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers. What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
25.
by DrScientist 24d ago
Hmm - childlessness ( note this is different from reduced family size ), almost doubled for women in China between 2010 and 2020, and over a similar period the female suicide rate has halved. How do you explain that? Sure having children is
26.
by DrScientist 25d ago
I think war caused by conflict for resources is a much more probably cause of societal collapse, and indeed extinction. Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that. Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate ch
27.
by DrScientist 25d ago
I was responding to 2 assertions, used to justify an argument, that clearly don't hold water. ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy'
28.
by DrScientist 25d ago
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not. Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population
29.
by DrScientist 25d ago
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here? You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constra
30.
by DrScientist 1mo ago
> trackpad quality This

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