I bet petty crime is the least of EU’s problems.
I bet EU has the same level of problems US does with elite deviance, the white-collar guys who want all the marbles, and will start wars, hook eveyone on toxic drugs and wreck the habitat just to own it all and swim in their vault like Scrooge McDuck.
No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.
It’s intended to reduce porn use, often to fuel conservative hate-driven ideology movements. Sexually frustrated people are more eager to endorse violence against marginalized groups.
It’s pure sociological manipulation.
You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.
According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.
(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)
Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.
The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.
This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.
It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die but for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.
With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.
They’re cute! I approve!
Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.
If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.
I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.
Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.
AI training should qualify for fair use.
Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.
It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.
We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.
But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.
And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.
Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).
Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.
Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.
(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)
What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.
So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.
Which means finding a personal purpose for using the spark radio, that way it remains a side-effect.
Might me time for some electrical experiments.
Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.
Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.
It begins with Apple’s petty reasons to prohibit The Binding of Isaac from the Apple store.
LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.
But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.
The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.
In the 1990s solar flares were a known problem we’ve yet to solve. Without the earth’s magnetic field or eleven feet of concrete, a CME bakes astronauts crispy golden brown.
With the moon shots, we just timed them with solar minimum and hoped to get lucky. But instead of a couple of weeks, a mars shot is nine months in space. So we’re going to need some new materials with which to make our crew compartments CME proof.
And this is one of hundreds of problems we need to fix before we can send people to mars. It’s going to be a while.
One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.
This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.
When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.
However, we’re absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn’t muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we’re looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It’s so tricky we’ve been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn’t feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we’re using now that it’s practically free. It’s the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don’t exist.
Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven’t finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)
As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.
There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it’ll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.
Sure. Which is why autocrats turn to fascism (that is a mythical history of an in-group and out-groups) to redirect that outrage against other races, other ethnicities, other religions, women, LGBT+, countercultures, teenagers, immigrants, etc. And it works because the naked ape is already frustrated with society being too big (hundreds of thousands rather than dozens), and is always looking for common traits among bad drivers and untidy neighbors.
And it works every time, since it takes effort to be rational and practice tolerance. Mostly the lumpenproletariat (simple folks who are not politically savvy) are the driving force behind hate campaigns, but the rest of us start wondering if so many people are negging on the Jews, maybe there’s a point. And rumors like blood libel and groomers helps those feelings along. 24-hour propaganda on FOX News and OAN helps too.