bleepblorp

The DMCA was intended to give large content publishers a big stick to extract rent from third parties without needing to do any work. It is functioning as intended and is very unlikely to be reformed to favor the public interest.

If anything, the next DMCA will be tilted even further towards publisher interests. The latest EU publisher payout copyright 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of buildings and skylines -- is the most likely model for the next US copyright 'reform' measure.

Congress only passes laws that large piles of money pay for[0], so the only prospect of copyright reform is if someone puts up a billion dollars in campaign contributions (bribes). Further money may be needed to re-stack the judiciary to ensure a reform will survive the wide-eyed fanatics on the USSC. This scenario is deeply unlikely as piles of money large enough to afford to spend a billion dollars purchasing legislation are very happy with the law as it stands.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

Copyright law is illegitimate and should not be respected.

The stupid thing is hosting youtube-dl in the Untied States.

American reliance on high-skill immigrants to build value-generating businesses is reflective of long-term weaknesses, both due to increasing hostility to immigration, and due to domestic high-skill talent being pulled into zero-sum economic sectors that extract economic rents but create no value. Unless the US is prepared to address these weaknesses, they will gradually erode US standing vs. China.

The question of what constitutes 'shot up' is too pedantic to be worth considering further.

Why are you so invested in defending an extremist conspiracy theory from criticism?

Protecting against the tyranny of the majority is just a politer term for enabling the tyranny of the minority.

The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken.

Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.

Updated. The QAnon bomber was, indeed, a different incident in Illinois. The Hoover Dam incident only involved firearms and an armored vehicle.

And what term other than 'shot up' would you use to describe a deranged person recklessly discharging a firearm as part of a targeted attack?

There are so many COVID-19 denalists/disinformation sources on HN that it wouldn't have hurt to be clearer about your intentions so you weren't mistaken for one of them.

QAnon material has been retweeted by Trump and a QAnon-connected person is expected to be elected to the US congress. A QAnon believer was convicted for blocking a major dam while making terroristic threats[0]. Another believer was arrested for attempting to bomb a religious display in Illinois. [3] A believer in the QAnon predecessor, Pizzagate, shot up a pizza restaurant[1]. The recent attempt to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister was perpetrated by an individual with Qanon leanings[3]. These incidents are not isolated and are part of a larger pattern of QAnon-connected violence[2][3].

QAnon is, politically, an auxiliary of the Republican party. This, combined with the willingness of QAnon followers to use violence, means that the movement has the potential to be a proto-brownshirt movement. This is not something to dismiss lightly.

QAnon is not a self-contained trash bin, it's a cancer that has metastasized into both violence and into the mainstream of American politics.

Hello, QAnon downvoters.

[0] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/1...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/police-man-with-assault-rifle-d...

[2] https://www.ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-secur...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-violen...

What would lidar focusing give still photographers that current hybrid phase-detect + contrast-detect autofocus systems can't? Better low light performance?

Managers taking steps to prevent their employees from contracting a disease that will prevent them from working for weeks or months is 'trendy?'

A workplace that's shut down for weeks because of a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is a workplace that's not making any money. Taking all reasonable steps to minimize employee exposure to infectious diseases just makes good business sense.

There is no evidence that cutting coverage in rural areas will reduce prices elsewhere.

The Canadian situation is bad-to-zero coverage in rural areas and the world's most expensive cell phone service (think of plans that charge $10 CAD per GB of data) in developed regions.

The money that Canada's two cell phone networks didn't spend covering rural areas didn't reduce prices; it disappeared into shareholder pockets.

Canada's population density figure is deceptively low because most of Canada's landmass is completely uninhabited. Most of the Canadian far north has an even lower population density than the Sahara desert.

Canada's population is tightly clustered into a small number of urban areas that have population densities comparable to places like Philadelphia or Vienna.

Despite this, Canada's population centers have nowhere near the quality of public infrastructure of Vienna.

In contemporary American politics, "filter bubbles" that suppress facts--as opposed to providing a slanted interpretation of the meaning of facts--are exclusively a product of conservative politics.

If there was concrete evidence of malfeasance involving either Biden, actual media outlets (NYT, WaPo, CNN, ABC, CBS, etc) would report on it. They might downplay it, but they would report it.

In contrast, conservative media gleefully provides politically motivated "alternative facts[0]" -- more properly known as 'lies'[1] -- and fails to report on stories that are politically harmful to conservatives. Conservative media is not intended to inform; it is intended to keep people ignorant of actual, objective, facts.[2]

Has your filter bubble told you that Trump was impeached specifically for attempting to blackmail the Ukrainian government into framing Biden?

Has your filter bubble told you that this kind of conduct is not normal in a democracy?

Just because conservative media lies to people to further a political objective does not mean that the entire media ecosystem is equally bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/jan/29/punditfact-ch...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/11/21/fox-news-v...

If anything, an anti-trust prosecution is more likely to go ahead in the unlikely event Biden takes office. The Democratic party has a much greater willingness to engage in regulatory actions against large businesses than does the GOP.

The GOP pushing a rushed (and therefore, weak) case now smells of a designed-to-fail effort that will only strengthen Google's position by poisoning the well against effective anti-trust efforts in the future.

It may also be partisan. Facebook has received considerably less attention from Washington as it has become more cooperative with Republican demands that conservative-oriented fabricated news remain on the platform[0]. Google has made no such commitments and might be in the GOP's sights as a result. While the DOJ is playing to lose, defending the case will cost Google money and this could be a lever to encourage them to follow Facebook's lead and give preferential treatment to conservative fake news.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-d...

Ignorance is no excuse. Fortunately, it is curable.

"There are 609,234 voters registered as Libertarian in the 31 states that report Libertarian registration statistics and Washington, D.C." [0]

"Koch-funded think tank offers schools course in libertarianism." [1]

"Koch foundation proposal to college: Teach our curriculum, get millions."[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_Stat...

[1] https://publicintegrity.org/politics/koch-funded-think-tank-...

[2] https://publicintegrity.org/politics/koch-foundation-proposa...

Data lock-in, due to proprietary file formats, makes switching software extremely difficult, especially for companies that interchange data with outside entities.

For instance, companies that do design and/or A/V work have no real alternatives to paying Adobe monthly--regardless of how little work Adobe puts into Creative Suite--because it's an industry standard and there are no alternatives that offer friction-free interoperability.

It's Orwellian to advertise a service as 'unlimited' and then characterize people who expect you to live up to your advertising by using the service as unlimited as abusers.

Expecting vendors to live up to their marketing claims is not abusive behavior; it's the cornerstone of markets based on informed decision-making by both buyers and sellers.

> Commercial software has an incentive to pump out new features to get more customers.

Not if it's SaaS.

Vendors of rented software have no economic incentive to develop new features, or even fix bugs, because they get subscription fees without needing to do any work.

I've repeatedly tried, but I have not been able to get Jami to work. At all.

Text messages sent between a Linux PC and an Android device are delivered less than 25% of the time. Neither audio or video calls will connect in either direction.

There are several open bugs on the Jami Gitlab page regarding similar problems on Android but there are no fixes available.

I can't say if Jami is useful in situations where both endpoints are computers and/or iOS devices, but it's completely useless for use cases where one of the parties involved in a communication could be using an Android device.

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Are there any working ad free, commercial surveillance free, video chat tools out there? I'm currently self-hosting Jitsi Meet, but that has no video support on Safari and has an artificial video quality limit of 360p on mobile devices. Is there anything better?

Libertarianism is very much a fringe ideology propped up by billionaires who find it useful to promote an ideology that justifies their refusal to give back to the society that made them rich.

Dissolution of the US into Red and Blue sovereign countries isn't likely to happen in the foreseeable future. The blue and red portions of the US are too economically interdependent for dissolution to be readily feasible absent a catastrophic political crisis, such as a military coup or a Republican president declaring himself dictator for life.

However, if dissolution did happen, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Most of America's current political strife and dysfunction is caused by incompatible, and increasingly divergent, visions for America's future. Splitting the country is the only way for those two visions to get what they want without persecuting (or killing) large numbers of people.

I think you might find The Road to Serfdom interesting:

http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files...

There's a long tradition of the notion of collective responsibility in conservative thought. Even Hayek agreed with this.

Stuff like Spooner and Rothbard is very much fringe and likely would have no audience if not for heavy promotion by Koch-like entities.

True. I don't dispute that absolute safety is impossible.

I'd argue that the socially accepted response to influenza in the west is an awful lot weaker than it should be, however. People who have flu should be self isolating and wearing masks if they must be in public.

To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an answer.

Might I suggest that you take advantage of open course syllabi from a major college/university and do some undergraduate readings on the history and moral foundations of law?

There is far more to philosophy and jurisprudence than Ayn Rand.

It's generally illegal, outside of narrow circumstances, to fire guns in populated areas largely because stray bullets will kill people.

Stray respiratory droplets exhaled by people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will also kill people.

Presumably you're OK with rules that prevent people from firing guns in public. Why are you not OK with rules that are intended to reduce the risk of people unnecessarily spreading fatal infectious droplets in public?

Your right to shoot firearms ends at my body. Why should your right to spread a fatal disease extend into my lungs?

And, before you say that I should take some 'personal responsibility' to protect myself against infection, should that premise extend to wearing type IV body armor in public just so others can shoot guns in populated areas?

Generally, forced reboots caused by applications are due to a need to replace shared components that are in use by background processes.

Unless you're using something like LivePatch, it's a misnomer that Linux (especially Linux on the desktop) doesn't need to reboot--or need to restart so many components that the system might as well reboot--for updates to take effect.

Linux can install most updates without rebooting but updated components won't be used until they are restarted. E.g. if Firefox is updated while it is running, Firefox will need to be restarted (indeed, FF will force you to restart it) for the new version to come into effect. When low-level components (e.g. kernel, libc) are updated, the system must be restarted for these updates to take effect.

Running Linux without periodically rebooting after installing updates is little different from never installing updates at all.

Enterprise still does forced reboots.

The only way to completely prevent them is to completely incapacitate Windows Update and forego all updates.

It's not a good idea to discuss techniques to disable Windows Update in open fourms as Microsoft has a habit of sabotaging anti-update techniques that become too well known.

Unhinged people have a bad habit of seizing power and building authoritarian despotisms that impose the consequences of their psychological defects on others.

Neither Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot did what they did out of an overwhelming desire for personal enrichment.

Sociopaths don't have to have reasons that make sense to the rest of us.

There are some very limited situations where a pill that can change someone's ideology could have some ethical uses.

Imagine a would-be ideologically-motivated terrorist concocted a plot that would kill hundreds of people but he was arrested before he could harm anyone. In the course of the plot, he committed enough crimes that he will be put in a supermax prison for the rest of his life.

Is it more ethical to keep this person in a solitary confinement--allowed out of his cell only one hour a day--for the next forty years or give him the option of taking a pill that will make him stop wanting to murder people in the name of his ideology and instead put him on parole until it's clear the pill worked?

I'd argue offering the pill is far more humane than life in solitary confinement.

A tool like this obviously should not be used to "reform" people who are socially different (e.g. Alan Turing); the scenario I propose here is only applicable to people whose violent politics make them too dangerous to let out of prison.