From the news I’ve read the most “embarrassing” things in his personal email are photos of him smoking cigars, holding a bottle of rum, and posing in front of a supercar. What a scandal…
Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant.
You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.
You're aware that surveys are a very small part of sociology? And that sociologists are very aware of the issues with them. The gold standard is register data, but sometimes that's not available.
Still, in the countries it is, that's the data that's used. And then the analysis can be repeated in other countries.
I wouldn't normally point out things like that, but you are repeating points already made, and aren't responding to anything specific I wrote. If your argument is a "no you", then it's not an argument, it's just "pretending" to be one.
>Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do.
Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.
There's been similar cases in physical sciences. E.g. all the room temperature superconductor stuff a few years back, Avi Loeb claiming that an object hurtling thorugh the solar system was alien technology.
There's also more fraud in medicine or health sciences.
You make some very handwavy claims about ideology, do you mean economy by this? It's the most clearly politicized of the social sciences, qnd the one that has been most funded by political actors. This I can concede. But don't throw sociology under the bus just because economy has a bad rap.
9-0 against the record labels. This effectively ends a long running strategy of trying to milk ISPs for people torrenting without a VPN. At the same time it likely puts things like the *Arr stack at more risk given their more tailored nature.
Ironically Sony wanted those artists online for streaming, and in those days the only way labels had to transport the music to distribution services was sending the CDs. So the CDs landed on my desk because they'd been rejected by the data ingestion teams. I had some more[0] stern words with a very apologetic man from Sony that day.
[0] they were constantly sending CDs that were fucked-up in totally new ways every time
I still haven't bought a Sony labelled product since... though I may or may not have consumed Sony content. They've definitely lost more than they gained.
That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any other item.
People barely remember the studio getting hacked and releasing a film
They faced multiple lawsuits and had to do product recalls, so clearly they lost something. What exactly did they gain? IIRC you could avoid it by just turning off autoplay in Windows (which any sane person already did, or you could hold shift I think), and they were otherwise valid audio CDs (otherwise they wouldn't work in players), so it did exactly nothing to stop the CDs from being ripped and shared. And back then everyone knew about p2p so it really only took one person ripping it for it to spread. So even ignoring the lawsuits, even one person boycotting them probably makes it a net loss. Actually the development costs probably made it a loss.
Not sure how interpreted what I said as anything other than the implied you. No matter how much money you did or no longer do spend with Sony is not anything they'd notice. The caveat being you were a flagship purchaser from them which I doubt was the case.
You assumed it was a point of ego, even said as much.
I don't have to buy shit from Sony if I don't want to, and you can't make me.
They definitely lost more on potential hardware sales the past few decades than I would have spent on content... even if it's not enough for them to notice.
The media industry has already decided that it should be allowed to turn copyright enforcement into a revenue stream and I doubt they're going to stop their extortion racket now.
This ruling could mean that they'll increase their efforts targeting individuals with threatening letters demanding that they admit wrongdoing and settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars at a time or else get sued in court and be forced to pay a lawyer tens of thousands to defend their innocence. It could mean they actually take more individuals to court instead of dropping the case every time they threaten somebody with enough money to hire a lawyer to defend them at trial.
The media industry is also pushing for more control in other ways as well like blank media style taxes which would let them rake in a steady stream of cash without needing to make make specific accusations. They also still want to be able to force ISPs to instantly blacklist any IPs they accuse of streaming copyrighted content. They've got this power in many countries already and innocent users have already been screwed over by it. They may decide to focus their efforts on getting this pushed through in the US now.
I doubt this ruling will lead to the kinds of broad copyright reforms we need, but it's long past time the courts started pushing back on the insane power grabs of the RIAA/MPA. No other industry could get away with demanding what they have.
I had several roommates, and we each were responsible for a utility. I was responsible for internet, and Cox was our provider.
I received multiple e-mails from Cox about copyright infringement. I can't recall them, but I remember it being serious enough for me to tell people to stop.
Thinking back, I feel like Cox's position is right and fair; let users know they're being observed by copyright holders, and inform the user that they could be compelled to provide their identity to complainants.
But ultimately, the responsibility to "stop" the supposed infringement is on the holder, not Cox.
The *Arr point is the more interesting legal exposure. Cox wins because it's a neutral common carrier with no specific knowledge of which users are infringing. The Grokster contributory infringement standard is different — it asks whether the primary purpose of the tool is to facilitate infringement, based on things like marketing language, default configurations, and feature design decisions.
Radarr and Sonarr have default configs that integrate with known-piracy indexers out of the box. The marketing and documentation is explicit about what the tools are for. That's a harder argument to make as "neutral general-purpose software" than a Betamax-style defense.
The practical risk is probably low as long as development stays distributed across jurisdictions with no US-based entity to name as a defendant. But the Cox ruling doesn't extend the legal protection to application-layer tooling that's designed around a specific use case. If anything, this ruling clarifies that the legal liability isn't with the ISP, which shifts the targeting pressure down the stack toward tools that are less clearly protected.
And then the children of the admin are traveling somewhere and get yoinked as leverage by the UK/EU/Brazil/Whoever and all of the legal arguments in the world won't do you any good. There is only one law that matters in the real world as much as so many westerners want to put their head in the sand about it.
When you extrapolate out the political economy consequences of your hypothesis being correct the future looks very dark indeed. If you can make an unhackable game console it should be obvious to people on this site what sorts of dystopias you could also create.
unhackable brain-computer interface required for most daily activities (like phones are today) and with a killswitch "for the public safety" and 24/7 cloud monitoring. Obviously this is pretty out there science fiction today but will it remain so in a century? And if it doesn't, what kinds of political systems are likely to dominate? What will happen to those political systems that for one reason or another decline this capability? I leave these questions as an exercise for the reader.
Before we even get there, within 5-7 years new PCs will be Xbox-like, locked down devices. Only approved OS and apps may be installed, as it is a felony to run an OS that doesn't meet federal and state KYC ID requirements or even own a copy of one without a license, and no PC manufacturer wants the liability risk of being found complicit in the commission of such crimes. General purpose computing will be a thing of the past for the masses (who didn't really want it anyway). Server hardware will be exempt from these requirements, but to purchase it you need a D-U-N-S number and a statement of intended use in the purchase agreement.
Even if it were possible to find a vulnerability in the hardware, doing so without attracting the attention of law enforcement will be profoundly difficult, as Windows sends telemetry back to Microsoft about every instruction that runs on your hardware. Apple will claim to be more privacy-focused, at least for a year or two, but the M9 chip's NPU will just perform local inference on your activity and report you to Apple and the FBI if it detects attempts to break security.
I use Claude code for my research projects now, it’s incredible tbh. I’m not writing production code for millions of users I need to do data science stuff and write lots of code to do that and AI lets me focus on the parts of my research that I want to do and it makes me a lot more productive.
It's depressing to think that after the abuses people suffered during the lockdowns the response has been to embrace authoritarianism even more. It makes me fear how far this could go before people realize how bad it is.
Fundamentally I think that liberal democracy won't be able to survive compute, communication, and storage being cheap, combined with asymmetric encryption. I really think there should be an article illustrating just how much that last one is fundamental to making the apparatus of control cheap and effective in a way that 20th century regimes could only dream of.
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