I mean, as long as the enablement dialog is truthful…

All your fetish porn is about to be synchronized to your OnDrive at work. [Embrace] [Abort Work] [OK]

Throw the book at them!

I’m thinking Miku Miku oooweeeoooh.

I was under the impression that polyethylene and polypropylene microplastics don’t actual harm humans until they get out into the environment, absorb nasty substances, then re-release them when entering our digestive tract.

If you eat those plastics they just go through you (for the most part). The reason why we all have microplastics permanently stuck in our bodies is because we breathed them in. Not because we ate them.

It’s an important distinction, I think. Because a tiny microplastic thread that stuck inside a can of tuna can be 1000% worse than a tiny chunk of polypropylene or polyethylene that has only come in contact with your own food.

Also, polypropylene microplastics fall—they don’t float in the air so easily like polyethylene. So there’s a great big difference when it comes to the type of plastic bag (as far as this lawsuit goes… In terms of harm). I’m also not certain that a frozen or microwaved polyethylene or polypropylene bag would emit microplastics into the air at all. I couldn’t find any studies about it.

For reference, normally—to get polyethylene airborne in the form of microplastics—it needs to be processed into threads. Those threads then break apart into tiny strands that can float on the wind (because they’re so light). The type of microplastic you’ll get from a polyethylene bag won’t be a tiny thread like that. It’ll be a literal chunk (will look like a rough rock under a microscope).

Having said all that, there are some studies indicating the that microplastics in our guts can change the makeup of our microbiome (temporarily—while the plastic is there). This can cause a swelling response which is bad. So there’s that 🤷

I say all this because it annoys TF out of me when articles talk about “microplastics” like they’re all the same. They’re not, damnit! Some aren’t even a problem! PHA is harmless, for example and PLA breaks down within 3 years or so which is fast enough that it doesn’t really matter (because we don’t use it that much anyway so the rate at which is accumulates in any given spot is unlikely to be a serious problem).

Don’t even get me started on colorants! 😤

1 year for every book seems an appropriate sentence

No! An appropriate sentence would end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point!

To be fair, there’s nothing stopping someone from recording everything anyway via an endless list of alternative methods.

If you’re running a virtual Windows desktop from within Linux, for instance.

The security professional inside of me sees this as a major problem: It’s going to make a bunch of clueless users think they have some sense of security when they absolutely have none.

Of course, that’s Windows in a nutshell 🤷

Noted and corrected! 👍

No. Just a frikkkan american.

Who let Doctor Hamster into the female nurse enclosure?

https://www.itv.com/news/2014-06-06/guinea-pig-to-become-father-to-400-after-breaking-into-female-enclosure

The story isn’t finished!

Did the kid end up having his sucky carnival‽

She accuses it of admitting students who are contemptuous of America,

OK. So what?

Let’s logic out that statement:

• Educational institution accepts students that are “contemptuous of America” -> When the student graduates are they still “contemptuous”? Did they become moreso? No change? Less? None at all?
• Educational institution actively seeks to deny students who are “contemptuous of America” -> Did they produce “contempt for America” in their graduates? Same problem.

I wonder what would produce “contempt for America”? Maybe deporting people without due process? Or not recognizing human rights?

Maybe we should agree, then: Harvard shouldn’t accept students that hate the Bill of Rights. Reject conservative ideology that suggests that due process shouldn’t be followed. Reject conservative ideology that actively seeks to undermine the US Constitution.

Let’s get keep those people (conservatives) with “contempt for America” away from places like Harvard 👍

I dunno. A dinosaur that’s impossible to disarm sounds badass.

That would be nice… If companies still promoted people beyond the levels of, “beginner peon” to “senior peon.”

The Asstralians: Everything about them is upside down.

That’s actually an unholey workaround! o contains 100% more hole than -.

There is none. It’s bismuth as usual.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump said, adding that such a requirement would mean “we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials”.

Yes! Fucking exactly. That’s right. That’s why everyone since forever has been saying that illegal immigration is an untenable problem!

Except this guy… Who doesn’t believe in civil rights or due process.

In 25 years, 17% of Bangladesh will be under water. All these people are about to get real close to each other.

Ok let’s get this out of the way: Copying is not the same as stealing. Not in law or ethics.

So let me reword what you wrote to better represent what you’re saying:

So you think the people at fault are NOT the billion dollar corporations that copied much of humanity’s creative works into their servers to create and sell a for-profit product?

Let me ask you this: What is the actual consequence of copying something on to a computer? Loading it into RAM. Performing analysis on it. Doing whatever with that data, internally—without ever sharing it or creating a product or anything like that.

Imagine that AI doesn’t exist yet and some billion dollar company deems it worth their time to archive the entire Internet’s worth of copyrighted content. They don’t distribute. They don’t share it. They don’t even tell anyone.

What is the actual human consequence of that? There’s is none. No one was deprived of anything. They have misrepresented no one. They have not created anything at all. No one is reading it. No one is consuming it. It’s just sitting there—on a billion dollar corporation’s servers.

Now let’s change the scenario slightly: Suddenly Mega Corp decides to use it—internally. To analyse how all this content is related. They look at all the links and references within it in order to figure out how “cheese” related any given bit of content is. They announce the cheese search engine.

Is that a problem? They’re literally storing and indexing all the world’s content on their servers! They didn’t license it! They didn’t ask for permission!

What I’m saying—my argument in it’s purest form—is that it’s the use of the content that matters. How is it used? Is the use depriving someone of something? Do people lose access to cheese because of the existence of the cheese search engine?

Now let’s take it further: Mega Corp decides to transform the cheese data and allow people to request semi-random cheese recipes. Some of these recipes are nearly identical to patented and trademarked cheese products!

Do cheese makers now have a legal right to sue? Do they have an ethical argument to make?

Maybe.

What I’m saying is that merely collecting the data and screwing around with it is irrelevant. It’s not until that data is distributed somehow that matters. Because until that point it’s just bits on a machine somewhere—not impacting anything.

But instead the random people who use it?

Yes! If I make oil paintings for a living and someone asks me to copy someone’s copyrighted work it’s on me to make sure I don’t do that. Now think about it as a copier: Someone walks up to a Xerox machine and copies a book. Do we sue Xerox for providing that capability?

That’s what’s at stake here: Do we treat the AI like the artist or do we treat it like the Xerox machine?

Try the chips.