bdowling

Here’s the section you’re referencing: 17 USC 117. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Kids these days have been ungrateful little shits for generations now.

It helps if you realize that there are no arrays in Lua. Instead, everything is an optimized hash map that can be indexed by any value of any type. A single table can have some elements indexed by integers, others indexed by strings, function pointers (useful for a table of debug hooks), etc.

The few convenient things that expect tables to be indexed using integers starting at 1 are the # operator to get the number of elements, and the ipairs function, used in the common idiom “for index, value in ipairs(t) do . . . end”.

> The patent basically describes ...

Almost EVERY patent is basically something that has been done for many years, plus some improvement. Improvements are usually inconsequential, but sometimes they are very valuable.

This is God’s world, we just live in it. To think that you exist purely for your own sake is pure hubris.

> ... always start by finding something good and talking about that first.

It's sometimes called the "shit sandwich". (1) Say something nice about the person's work, (2) then shit all over it, (3) then say something else nice about it.

Note: To infringe a patent, the allegedly infringing activity has to match every element of at least one claim of the patent.

The restrictions are only against using protectable trade secrets or patented technology. Protectable trade secrets don't include things that are generally known within an industry or that the prior employer didn't treat as a trade secret (e.g., didn't take steps to prevent from becoming generally known).

The employees here have their own free will and are free agents, unlike fingers and toes.

If an acquisition fell through, it shouldn't be surprising that employees who were dissatisfied with that outcome wouldn't jump ship.

There appears to be a supreme court of Belgium (called the Court of Cassation), so maybe the bank has another possible appeal.

I’m sure it will be expensive.

The least bad solution for the bank is probably to close the customer’s account, because overhauling the system will surely be too expensive.

No, it’s not a good solution, but realistically what is the bank supposed to do?

"Third party" just means anyone who isn't a party to the contract. They're called that because most contracts have two parties (e.g., buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, service provider and customer). Contracts can have three or more parties, but they're not usually numbered. The TV trope of incomprehensible legalese involving "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part" is a joke that you won't actually find in modern agreements.

> done as courtesy and wasn't legally required.

Usually severance is consideration for agreeing not to sue the company, not taking trade secrets, etc.

Except for the Chinese clone primers (is that a spoiler?), which are acted by text-to-speech.

Didn't they notify buyers of the open source bios and share the code if a buyer wanted it? That may be enough to satisfy the GPL.

Whether a defendant can be held liable for false speech is a different question from whether the government can prohibit the speech in the first place.

My prior comment was a bit tangential and sort of off-topic, but I'll leave it there for context.

A terrorist to one person is a freedom fighter to another.

Misinformation is the same.

The article says they’re doing “showings” of the film, which makes me think that they don’t want it digitized, probably because the copyright is expired.

If they control all the copies, then they can charge people to watch it, even if the copyright is expired. If a copy leaks, though, then that revenue stream will dry up overnight.

Someone could reimplement CUDA for AMD hardware. That would be legal because copying APIs for compatibility purposes is not copyright infringement. (See Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. ___ (2021)).

AMD is unlikely to do this, however, because it would commodify their own products under their competitor’s API.

A third party could do it though. It may make sense as an open source project.

The U.S. Constitution refers to "the several States" in various places (e.g., Article I, Section 2).

Under U.S. law, therefore, several can mean 13 (the original number of states) or possibly 50 (the current number).

Is a throuple more or fewer than a treble?

You know, the rise in popularity of airsoft was probably driven as much by people coming from 3rd person shooter games as it was people wanting a more realistic military force-on-force simulation than paintball.

If the phone is semi-functional, then you should backup and factory reset the device before handing it off to be repaired.

Executive compensation is a drop in the bucket compared to the total salaries for all the rank-and-file employees.

According to your article the average hourly labor cost at GM is $60. Assuming 2,000 hours per year, that is $120,000 per employee. For 92,000 U.S. employees [0], the total is about $11,000,000,000.

Another way to look at it: If you distributed the CEO's compensation ($30,000,000) among GM's U.S. employees (92,000 [0]), you'd give each of them about $326.

[0] https://www.gm.com/company/usa-operations

It’s mostly about buying a future tax deduction.

(1) Buy this thing now for $100,000.

(2) Wait a few years.

(3) Donate it to a museum or other charity at a valuation of $400,000.

(4) Take a $400,000 charitable contribution deduction on your taxes.

> way too unnecessarily long missives like this

The punchline (buried way too far down) is that he calls himself a professional writer.

“I didn’t want to deceive the client, I was just pressured to do so.”

The general answer is that we can all be held personally liable for our own torts. For example, if a delivery company driver runs into a pedestrian, the pedestrian can definitely sue the driver. Usually, however, they will want to sue the company instead, because the company has more money.

The same logic applies here. The customer can sue the employee who falsified the records, but they’re more likely to want to sue the company.

> I see major development studios are fine with this change.

Even if they didn’t have their own engines, they’re all big enough that they would be paying huge amounts in license fees, and thus have enough leverage to negotiate a contract without BS terms in it.

In other news, the rental car company buying 1000 cars doesn’t do so on the same sales form used when a consumer buys 1 car.

If I pay the genuine price, then I want the genuine cheese.