Manjushri

Aw! The Native Americans were so nice building that whole city for the European immigrants, weren’t they?

Anyone who hires a consulting company powered by AI doesn’t need to. Clearly they are capable of making their own poor decisions and don’t need to go to an outside company to get bad advice.

Pretty much correct. A 50% chance of A and a 50% chance of B equals a 100% chance of either A or B happening.

Huh… I didn’t realize that. I’m actually not sure how you would get it to take a new capture.

Not sure. I’ve only known about the site for half a year or so.

They want to be able to sue ISPs who fail to take block people they believe are pirates. Cox did not do that. They told Cox that these people are pirates and Cox didn’t block them. Do you really want your ISP to be able to cut you off just because some other company claims you are using the service to pirate content? I want them to have to go to court and prove a crime was committed before their ISP is required to block them.

Right now, these very publishers can file copyright claims against people on youtube and other sites for infringement. Those claims are not evaluated by youtube. The content is just removed. No proof. No court order. If SCOTUS sides with the guild here, then those same companies will be able to have your internet cut off just by telling your ISP that your IP address was used to pirate their material.

Frankly, I would like a court to be involved before what is now a vital utility is cut off rather than letting book, movie, and music publishers decide who should be cut off with no review.

Uhm… what do you think this is?

This is the Author’s Guild asking for internet providers to be able to block people without a court order. They want to be able to contact a provider and say, “This user downloaded a book without paying for it so you have to cut off their internet.” The provider should not be allowed to do that unless the courts order them to do so.

The linked article clearly shows this.

As our brief explains, when millions of people can copy and share creative works “quickly, anonymously, and across borders,” going after individual infringers one by one is nearly impossible. The only practical way to stop large-scale piracy is to hold accountable for the internet companies that provide the infrastructure—especially when those companies know exactly what’s happening and choose to profit from it anyway.

They can already go after individual infringers and web sites that aid in piracy. Now they want to be able to order providers to cut off users without the bother of going to court over it.

Uhm… they do. Fuck up badly enough and your license is taken away.

Yeah, by the courts. Fuck up badly enough, and you can be taken to court and a judge will take away your license. It’s not taken away by the local government. What the Author’s Guild wants is equivalent to requiring communities to take away the rights of some drivers to use the roads without bothering to take drivers to court.

The local government is not banning repeat speeders from using the roads though. The courts might do that by revoking driver’s licenses, but the engineers and local governments do not have the authority, and should not have the authority to do so.

In the same way, internet providers should not be the one’s who decide that a given user should not have access. That should remain the decision of the courts. If a copyright holder can show the courts that a user should be denied access to the internet, the courts can order the individual cut off. That’s where the power should remain.

Yeah, I for one have never eaten anything except chemicals!

Yelp is shit. I used to be a small business owner and they would call me trying to get me to sign up for a paid account strongly suggesting that they could ‘help’ with bad reviews. To me that means that businesses can just sign up and get bad reviews removed or pushed out of regular view. What good is a review site if the business can hide bad reviews?

They are captures of the same page at different times .

https://archive.is/5QFkF is the snapshot taken 7 Nov 2025 01:40 and

https://archive.is/TFqAx is the one taken 6 Nov 2024 17:08

I imagine that the Elon’s of the world see these movies only from the perspective of the rich oligarchs who are running those dystopian societies and think, “That is so cool! I want that world!”

Come on. Convincing people they need something and then selling it to them is what capitalism is all about. It doesn’t matter how stupid the idea is, if you convince people to pay for it then by their standard, it’s a good idea.

Not the user you were responding to, and you’re correct about these thermostats, but not all devices retain functionality without internet connectivity. For example, these $2000 dollar ‘smart’ beds.

Some reported on Reddit that they were woken up by their bed suddenly readjusting their preferred sleeping temperatures – some soaring as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Others say their bed became stuck at an extreme incline. According to The Washington Post, some beds also blinked flashing lights and sounded wake-up alarms.

These things became contorted, overheating (or freezing) bricks when AWS went down last week and the owners had no control over them without the app.

So either a new second world for unworthy creations to go when they end…

Hey, cool! It’s The Isle of Misfit Immortals.

I wish you well but you may be underestimating how far down we’ve gone. If you try to walk away or put up a fight, and you will be swarmed by cops who will take you to the ground with no concern for the injury they are doing. At the least you will be bleeding, at the worst you’ll get some broken ribs or worse.

Once they’re done beating on you, you will be detained, I won’t say arrested, and you will be taken to an ICE facility where you will not get a phone call or access to a lawyer or medical care. After a day or two, maybe less, you will be transferred to an ICE facility a few states away, or maybe on the other side of the nation. Your friends and family will not be informed and will have no way to find you until ICE decides you’ve had enough and let’s you go. Assuming they don’t just deport you for the hell of it.

Remember, until you prove you’re a citizen, you don’t get due process. And of course, without due process you can’t prove you are a citizen.

Particularly if those innocents are the “right” color.

Are you kidding? They’re proud of it. They honestly think it’s a good thing. Along with the recent article about ICE stopping brown people and using a phone app to ID them from a photograph , we’ve rocketed right past the Papers-Please phase of fascism into a high tech dystopian end game.

It never occurs to anyone that in almost every other country in the world, such a place wouldn’t be necessary.

Yep. It reminds me of this .

Every heartwarming human interest story in America is like “he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine” and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you’d need to pay to prevent it from being used.

No, they aren’t. With the number of bacteria that have lived over the course of life on Earth, compared to the number of non-bacterial life forms over that time, I would guess that the vast majority of organisms alive now have never been anything other than a bacteria.