Em Adespoton

Well, I’d say that trust in the police and the 911 system is also at an all-time low, which could result in fewer crimes being reported to them.

Not that I think it’s actually a significant enough amount to account for the notable reported decrease, but you asked….

Basically, yes.

The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.

I remember when I had to set my VCR to record a program I wanted to watch; if YouTube gets that bad, I’ll just do the same thing; pre-record the video stream and skip the commercials.

So… Joe Biden is America’s Thin Blue Line?

“Charity” should be a question answered by “do they have a registered charity number?”

What’s considered a charity will differ country by country.

They don’t recommend them because of what the homeowners can do with them?

I’m much more worried about the fact that they’re a constant feed of activity accessible by anyone who can bypass or be let through Amazon’s access controls.

…because pledges have always worked so well in the past.

I always found them annoying in the first place.

Back in the day when forums were mostly listservs, they made sense as the sig was where you stuck your finger info, so others could look you up.

But once things switched to real forums with user profiles, the original purpose was redundant as that information could be found linked to the username. So people started cluttering them with little digital billboards instead.

At that point, it served no real purpose and wasted data and (with the advent of mobile browsing) screen real estate.

A lot of people misunderstand the purpose and implementation of copyright.

To make things even more confusing, most people only understand the US version of copyright. The US has worked really hard to get the rest if the world to align their copyright law with the US, but they’re all subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, different, even before you get to the different legal systems used to interpret and implement copyright law.

The first thing is: copyright is about the right of a human creator to control how a copy of their work is made available (publicly in some countries, any in others) for a limited time. In some places that right can be temporarily or permanently assigned or sold to someone else.

So when it comes to AI, one group argues that unless the rights holder licenses the work to be part of a training set, it’s not allowed to be part of a training set.

Another group says that it doesn’t matter; if the human creating the training set got the work legitimately, they can use it to train a model.

The models themselves do not contain any copyrighted material and so are outside the discussion.

Copyright is flexible; for music, we have different copyright rules for recording, reproducing, and performing music for personal or public consumption, with different copyright for music and lyrics and associated video.

This could also be applied to AI, with training models being a new “recipient” of copyrighted content. We could enshrine in law how this can be done legally. But so far, we haven’t, so it falls back to “is this fair use?” and “are different copyright permissions needed when a human is not consuming the work?”

The end bit, that AI created works aren’t copyrightable, is already settled. However, any work a human does to tweak or select AI generated content, if it is itself creative, is copyrightable.

So yes, copyright should exist. People need to re-learn what it actually is though, and additions may be required to the laws in order to enable AI generated art to promote valuable skills and knowledge.

I’m just waiting for

“After moving all features behind a paywall, Musk hides the Login button.”

At this point, he’s obviously just trolling.

Well, I switched to Edge for work with the latest Chrome update (since internal apps were Chromium only), and was pleasantly surprised. It actually let me turn off almost all the junk, and is responsive in a way I haven’t seen in a Chromium browser in years.

Safari and Firefox for personal use though, and nothing compelling to make me change that.

My grandfather had two habits drilled into him in the Army: never put your hands in your pockets so they’re always ready for action, and always park your vehicle so it’s ready to go.

This means he always backed in, and always parked as close to the exit as possible. And he did post-drive checks to ensure fluids, lights, brakes etc. were as they should be and the vehicle was ready for immediate use.

And he wasn’t even a getaway driver after the war.

Yes, but obviously they don’t, and legally the definitions are blurry.

Honda at least differentiates between marketing material from their sales department and marketing material from their maintenance department (which they don’t consider marketing).

Where I am at least, their automated texts come with a link to manage the messaging you want to see from them, with options to choose exactly which types of messages (if any) you want to see.

If she was spending campaign money, it wasn’t her free time. If it was, that’s misuse of campaign funds.

Putin/Russia calls for a cease fire any time they need to reposition their troops. When they’ve moved them to their advantage, they call off the ceasefire and resume the unprovoked attacks.

Remember Chechnya… and Georgia.

Exactly this. It’s called a “hook” and when the phone is “off the hook” that’s the thing it is off of. Being off the hook means the phone is powered up and connected to the local loop. When the phone is “on hook” that means it is disconnected from the loop and awaiting the pulsed ring signal.

Desk phones have a reversible hook so that it keeps the button depressed when the phone is in the cradle but doesn’t catch when you attempt to pick it up.

On modem signals in the old days, the + was equivalent to “flashing” the hook, or quickly disconnecting and reconnecting to the loop, and the AT command H1 told the modem to go “on hook” while H0 told it to go “off hook”.

Back before the DTMF network, when everyone used pulse modulated phones, the “pulses” were caused by going in and off hook in a specific pattern. You could actually make a phone call from a rotary payphone by flashing the hook in the pattern that mimicked the rotary dial pulsing the line as it rotated back to home position.

In the really old days, the hand crank served much the same purpose, but actually supplied electricity to the local loop; when the phone was on hook (which was a big metal thing the earpiece sat in) someone else turning the crank would make all the phones on the loop ring; you picked up if the ring matched the number of rings for your extension.

This isn’t helped by most websites reinventing themselves every couple of years so the old links 404 even though the content still exists.

Not sure where you’re hanging out that you’re seeing infighting.

Also, I’ve been living in the Internet you describe since 1990. All it takes is intentionally saying no to the corporate offerings; there have been self-hosted and crowd-hosted communities the entire time.

Every once in a while I miss Fidonet though.

I feel like Ars left out the end of the title: “…with your tax dollars.”

I guess it was implied though.

And there’s also the fact that in the US, you have the party of the far right and the party of everyone else; centrist is to the left of a lot of Democrats at this point.

One thing I haven’t seen yet: if you can, loop your parent(s) in on this. They know the situation better than the Internet does, and if someone tries to turn the situation into something weird, they should have your back. And they’ve got some life experience to help you with your note.

Let’s just ouster the hardliners. Let them go form their own party.

If he’s really ready to go through with it, it’s not an empty offer?

And he’s willing to exchange places with the knowledge that it may result in his death. That’s more than the majority of people in this community would likely do.

It seems pretty clear that the Fulton County Sheriff’s office holds the copyright here; the only real question is in what constitutes fair use of a mug shot.

Which towels are we talking about, and how frequently do they get used?

Bath towels, hand towels and dish drying towels will all get dirty at different rates, and get/stay wet at different rates.

Towels should smell clean (clean, not perfumy) and be dry and not feel like they’ve got something on them. The more time a towel stays wet, the more often you wash it. If it gets noticeably dirty, you wash it. This could be anywhere from once a day to never, if it’s just decorative and you never use it.

I don’t recommend buying a nothing phone because of iMessage integration. It’s unlikely to last long, and they obviously haven’t explained how they’re pulling it off while not breaking E2E encryption and account privacy.

All DMCA takedowns have the perjury clause. What is the penalty for perjury in a US federal court?

Because it’s about time we saw it enforced here, setting a precedent to be used in the many other cases of DMCA misrepresentation that exist.

Here’s what I received today… first time I’ve visited Reddit in over a month:

Hello from Reddit,

We're reaching out because you have Reddit Premium and/or Reddit Coins on your account.

TL;DR: We're making updates to awards and coins on Reddit that we'll complete by September 12, 2023. As part of this, we made a decision to move away from Reddit coins and awards. This includes the 700 monthly coins* and Premium Awards, which are currently part of the Reddit Premium experience.

You'll still be able to use your Reddit Coins until September 12, after which they'll be removed from your account.

Note: all other current Premium perks will still continue to exist, including the ad-free experience.

As we looked at our current awarding system, there was consistent feedback from redditors that stood out – particularly around the clutter from awards and all the steps involved with awarding content. We also learned that redditors want awarded content to be more valuable. With that, we are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. We will have more updates to share soon.

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But does it scale?

Brave had a workforce? I thought it was one guy’s pet chromium/blockchain project….

Just because something is unique doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

Some people are just discovering this.

It’s in the article; newer gen chips will have extra DRM that will prevent the hacks from working.

Oh, you meant when will the anti-hacks stop?

Bless your heart….

Death by opioids happens because you need an ever increasing dose to achieve the same effect. Eventually the dose required is higher than what’s needed to kill you.

People turn to black market opioids because they’re often cheaper than prescription, and while the dose just keeps going up, so does the price, unless you can find a cheaper supplier.

Cheaper suppliers are usually cheaper because they don’t have the same quality control, which again leads to accidental overdose or poisoning.

Because alcohol isn’t directly addictive and the same concentration will usually have the same effect per body mass, it doesn’t carry these issues despite overdoses still being deadly.

So what exactly is the Senate doing while they’re refusing to appoint secretaries?

Along with the other comments on UDID, IMEI and MAC, I’d just like to point out that phones don’t have phone numbers.

On land lines, the number is assigned to the line that goes to your house from the local operations center; on mobile phones, the number is linked by your carrier to THEIR SIM card that you stick in your phone.

eSIM almost gets there; instead of a physical card linked to the phone number, all the logic and secrets are stored in a secure enclave on your phone and THAT is linked to the number, which is in a directory managed by your carrier. It’s linked to the phone itself because of the phone’s IMEI.

The big one for me is: how do we preserve online games? The ones with a server-side component?

Even bnetd had issues, although I think that time is over; but what about when we the public never had access to the game core in the first place?

I switched over to Apple Maps from Google Maps around 5 years ago. Still go back for certain kinds of details, but in general Apple’s offering works better for navigation for me.

Yes they do… including not holding a charge when the differential drops too far.

The real wins are in battery-backed capacitors. Charge the caps fast, then let them keep the batteries topped up.

Terrorists need funding. Doing so is illegal, and can show up in tax filings.