Much of Europe (ie the rich parts) is free of terrestrial rabies because of such programs. Bats really get around, though.

I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

This was, altogether, a remarkable experience - both in its sudden onset and its extraordinary course. It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.

Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. I will leave it to others to explain all the ways in which this is absolutely hair-raising.

It was 1943 and even in Switzerland fuel was not to be had. Incidentally, it was the same day that the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began.

Today, LSD would never be discovered. Guy didn’t even use gloves and lived to 102.

Huh. I thought I did check OED. Maybe it’s cause I don’t have a subscription. Or maybe I just mucked up the search.

The physicist who named the particle apparently liked to come up with nonsense words in his head. Later, when trying to decide the spelling, he came across a quote by James Joyce and spelled it “Quark”. Unfortunately, the particle rhymes with fork, while the german cheese rhymes with Mark.

According to his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects, and “quork” (rhyming with pork) came out at the time. Some months later, he came across a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he has not got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

The line struck him as appropriate, since the hypothetical particles came in threes, and he adopted Joyce’s spelling for his “quork.” Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark, bark, park, and so forth, but Gell-Mann worked out a rationale for his own pronunciation based on the vowel of the word quart: he told researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that he imagined Joyce’s line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” to be a variation of a pub owner’s call of “Three quarts for Mister Mark.” Joyce himself apparently was thinking of a German word for a dairy product resembling cottage cheese; it is also used as a synonym for quatsch, meaning “trivial nonsense.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/quark

However, there is another interpretation of the quote.

This passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.”

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=quark

This sounds very learned and all, but I can’t find that standard English verb in the dictionary.

It used to be, you got 3 quarks for a mark, but then it was 6 quarks, because the euro was 2 marks. Now you only get 2 quarks, though, because of inflation. It’s always just up and down. Stupid cosmologists.

I have no intuition for how hot or bright these trees would be. They certainly would be very different from the sun. The sun is literally incandescent; white-hot glowing. Trees would presumably use a mechanism comparable to glow-worms to generate radiation only in a very narrow frequency band. The fair skin color of elves suggests that they do not come from a high-UV environment.

Somewhat less than half of the sun’s energy reaches us as visible light (43%). There are a few other factors that might allow the trees to glow brighter than the equatorial sun at noon. Unfortunately, the intensity per area diminishes with the square of the distance, so that doesn’t get us far (no pun intended).

It would be much better if that world was basically rectangular (with reflective sides and top); basically a terrarium. That would also explain why you would place 2 light sources at 1 end. The length of a long rectangular box would only be limited by absorption of the light. The trees should glow brighter at the top. Plants, animals and structures on the surface, near the trees, are hit with only “mild” power, while the high-intensity light near the top of the box is absorbed or scattered by the atmosphere over a long distance. I’m not sure how to work out how long such a box might be. Mainly, I don’t know what assumption to make about that high-intensity light at the top.

Anyway, we should consider that elvish anime eyes originally evolved as an adaption to low-light environments and only later became useful for seeing over long distances, because originally there possibly were no long distances.

Hmm. That should allow us to estimate the size of that world. The light of the trees must not be so bright as to cook everything in the vicinity; just make it nice and balmy. But, on the opposite side of the world, there must still be enough light to see. Having the occasional photon bounce back would eventually be enough to make out a static scene, but, apparently, it’s possible to see things happening in real time, yes?

Does flat mean that we are talking about something like a simple disc here, or just that a beam of light travels parallel to the ground? The latter would imply a rather strange geometry, which I can’t wrap my mind around. It would make more sense, though, as, obviously, we couldn’t assume that light intensity diminishes with the {ETA:] square of the distance.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It’s impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?

This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don’t have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don’t have a choice but to stock these journals. It’s a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.

All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.

I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.

You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.

Come to think of it. That DMCA argument would really wreck fair use.

It’s illegal to remove “copyright management information” (CMI). In this case meaning the FOSS license. The argument was, that when copilot spits out verbatim snippets of source code without the license, this constitutes removal of the CMI. The point of the argument was that fair use is not a defense under the DMCA. These verbatim snippets are pretty obvious fair use to me, so countering that defense is important if they hope to get anywhere with their suit.

By the same argument, any meme image is illegal. They are taken from somewhere without the original license or attribution. Yikes.

Don’t listen to me on that. I have no idea how the community feels on copyright or fair use. Whenever AI comes up, the most dogmatic copyright maximalism dominates. On other subjects, the debate is more nuanced. I don’t know how that fits together at all. But I guarantee you, if Alsup ruled on a case like this/OP, they would… Well, most comments would not like the ruling or him.

Yes, I know what you mean. But looking at the comments here, Fair Use is not a popular concept. I remember that Alsup specifically quoted the copyright clause in his ruling. I can’t imagine any argument that would make him rule, on the whole, for the plaintiffs in a case such as this.

Judge William Alsup.

Now I remember that guy. He decided oracle vs google. I can’t imagine he has many fans here.

Wow, long take. I didn’t want “much the same” to bear a lot of meaning. In the german inquisitorial system, in a criminal case, the judge takes over the (police) investigation from the prosecution. When the police become aware of a possible crime, they inform the bureau of the state attorney. A state attorney is responsible for the investigation and for uncovering the truth. But once the case goes to court, the responsibility goes to the judge.

In a civil suit, the parties are basically in charge and not the judge. It’s true that the judge has a more active role in German civil procedure. While the court is not supposed to run its own investigation, it can request additional evidence if it’s necessary to judge the arguments of either side. I am not clear on the details. Where matters of fact must be determined by an expert, either party can request the court to provide one. But they can also make their own arrangements. The court can also solicit an expert opinion on its own, if necessary. Typically, the expert’s opinion is given as a written statement. An oral disposition may happen when questions remain. Afaik, it’s unusual to depose an expert without having first requested a written statement. Either party or the court may question the witness.

Hmm. In what way is the German system more effective? I know of some hair-raising cases. Me, I blame the law-makers and not the judges, but others see it differently. I can’t think of a single related case, where I’d say that the judgement served everyone’s interests.

ETA: Bad question. You explained how the German system is more effective. I’m wondering about cases where I can see this in action. IE: “well-informed and incisive decisions on anything in the computer hardware / EE or computer science fields.”

You should emphasize more that the difference adversarial system vs inquisitorial system exists in criminal law only. In civil/private matters - eg copyright disputes like in this instance - continental Europe handles matters much the same.

It doesn’t work like that. A copy is a copy. Only if you can make it credible that you independently produced the same code, can you get through with that. Hence, clean room implementations. It’s not strictly necessary but deters lawsuits.

Apparently there’s some confusion here what the judge ruled. This particular part is about claims under the DMCA, not copyright infringement. The relevant sections can be seen here: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html [edit: link fixed. The claim was that “copyright management information” was removed; prohibited under these sections.]

Here’s the original text for those who want to know more (link via The Verge): https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24796955-github-copilot-claims-dismissed

I’m categorically unable to name a justice or court jurisdiction anywhere in the US that consistently makes well-informed and incisive decisions on anything in the computer hardware / EE or computer science fields.

Can you name one in Germany? Just asking.

Anyway, at this stage of the trial only legal experts are involved. The judge examines if the legal arguments are sound, assuming the allegations are true. Whether the allegations are actually true will only be determined in the future. That’s also when Fair Use comes in. At that point, you need outside experts to advise on the non-legal aspects.