If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
Stuck a wire in a power outlet.
Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.
At least Oracle Weblogic is being useful for someone.
Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.
Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.
Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.
Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.
Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.
So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.
I have little hope that Biden, Harris, or (obviously) Trump will actually change course on the US’s Israel/Palestine policy—but to be fair, we shouldn’t expect the current vice president to openly say she would reverse the current president’s foreign policies even if she intended to.
The Shaggs, but I enjoy them anyway.
I’m left-handed myself, but I never notice if others are.
It seems like it used to be a bigger thing a few decades ago, when writing by hand was more common.
If we’re going for “cool story” rather than “admirable person”, then the Byzantine emperor Justinian II.
The only time I prefer physical books to ebooks is when there’s a heavy focus on maps, diagrams, or other illustrations. In those cases I generally want the physical book to be as large as possible, which usually means hardcover.
They mention two papers and a press release, but don’t provide links or titles. Also:
For example, the first mammals evolved out of the reptilian order Therapsida.
Therapsids weren’t reptiles, nor did they evolve from reptiles—they were a separate clade that evolved from amphibians alongside reptiles. Some early subclades resembled reptiles, but they were a separate lineage.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke would be a good one.
When a few exceptions of Soviet literature emerge out of the iron curtain, it turns out to be some anticommunist rambling, just like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
Most good literature is critical of the society in which it’s written—in the west, anticapitalist novels tent to be better than anticommunist ones, but we shouldn’t assume the same was true within the Soviet Union.
Rather than creating a custom terminal app, could you create a user that only had permission to run the restricted commands, with a profile script that gets run at login and offers a menu of common tasks?
I’m sure the thinking is that art appearing in both Europe and Indonesia suggests that they both inherited it from their common ancestors in Africa.
But when the earliest art was thought to have been European, the idea that art first appeared in Europe and spread from there via cultural diffusion was considered a reasonable hypothesis. Now that earlier art has been found outside Europe, the flip scenario—that art spread from Indonesia to Europe via cultural diffusion instead of shared ancestry—isn’t even mentioned.
“This find reinforces the idea that representational art was first produced in Africa, before 50,000 years ago, and the concept spread as our species spread.
Representational art arising first in Africa seems plausible, but how does finding art a quarter of the way around the world reinforce that location specifically?
So they talk about this as if it were a new innovation at the time—but could it be that this kind of woodworking was more widespread and this was just the only example to survive? Could it have been a standard part of the Acheulian toolkit?
Ok, but protests need to be done “without distraction”? That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
For the Greek gods, the greatest sin was attempting to be like them.