Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

Contingency plans. Yeah. Sure. I don’t think there are any that most of us can make. There aren’t any countries I could move to that would be any better I don’t think. I’m too old, I don’t have degrees, my only job qualifications aren’t particularly in demand because the training for them is fast, and the only family connection to citizenship elsewhere I had is insufficient because it’s too many generations removed from me.

I suspect the cast majority of people who would be even worse off than me under another Trump/Republican administration are in just as bad if not worse a position.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women’s bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not ‘roaming the earth’.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

Yeah, would be better if more people put in an accurate title instead of regurgitating the clickbait headline.

None of this makes sense, but you can at least follow the nonsensical chain of events if you know the full story.

It’s not implying he can’t be bothered, but that the machine can do a better job.

…which may be true, depending on just how bad he is at writing. Like, I was just watching this classic the other day. If this guy writes like some of those people, the machine may infact be better.

Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.

I’m kind of curious to understand how they’re blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to ‘hide’ things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?

Better to acknowledge it in a response. I prefer to do that myself if I’m wrong or something of that nature, post a reply acknowledging instead of trying to cover up that I was ever wrong in the first place.

It irritates me that so many forums and media sites allow you to edit your posts at will. There’s one site I go to that I like very much - it has a 5 minute edit window, and after that, your post can no longer be edited. You can’t change what you said, pretend you never said things, etc, once you say something it remains. It would be nice if more sites were like that. Or at least, if you edit/delete something, for there to be an option to check the history to see what it used to be, so if you try to delete some comment you made people can still check it. Whether it’s informational, or it’s because you’re trying to hide something you said that you realize was actually super shitty and people are getting angry at you for it, I prefer things to stick.

This is why PS3 is the last PlayStation that I owned, and I didn’t even buy it retail.

After they discontinued the backwards compatible model I sought out and bought one secondhand, and swore never again to buy a PlayStation product unless they release one on which I can play all my PlayStation games all the way back to 1.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.

Too fucking bad? The purpose of IP was to give the public access to novel ideas and art, not to increase the control creators had over it.

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.