Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
No because americans actually commonly call it the Gulf of Mexico (despite US government fiat dictating it should be called the Super Intelligent Gulf and anyone against that being double plus ungood), Japanese people don't commonly call it the East Sea. That's the difference.
Comment · 3 days ago
That's like saying bank robbers don't actually shoot guns, only people who use guns legally shoot them. It's still preservation. Or even more apt saying archeologists aren't archeologists they're tomb raiders. They may be tomb raiders but they are still archeologists.
Comment · 3 days ago
You are wrong, you are basically saying "black cats exist therefore cats can't be tabby", there are plenty of preservation initiatives that preserve works in different forms when the original media can not be practically preserved or displayed. Yes best practice is to preserve as close to initial state as possible, that does not mean that when you cannot feasibly preserve the work in it's original state (with digital it's often due to drm) that you just say screw it nothing we can do but chuck it in the dustbin of history.
Comment · 4 days ago
US case law may not be on your side there. Generally unless you require a login to access the site (and even then you can only really ban for terms of service rather than recover damages unless they hacked around login requirements) judges have found that using scrappers on publicly served data is fair use. It gets murkier with creative content (rather than straight data) in what they can do with it after scrapping but the scrapping itself would still be 'legal' in the they can do it without judicial consequence sense.

It's one of the reasons why sites that served a lot of data used to have APIs or back channels to get that data even if they technically made money by serving ads on pages of that data, because they were going to get scrapped no matter what, so having a legitimate way to get data that behaved nicely with the servers and was nicely readable by requestors was win-win or at least not lose-lose.

Comment · 4 days ago
Without getting into the much debated philosophy of restoration/display of preserved things and how restoration can often cause degradation to the original piece, consider that just preserving the data in the manner you suggest also requires preserving the original software if you ever want to view it. Which requires not just preserving that original software but also all the external hardware and software that original software relies on. Quite often that's a dead end as it requires preserving an activation/license server that the preservers don't have access to.
Comment · 25 days ago
It is worth considering that without being able to identify people then only unacceptable behaviour that rises to the level of needing and having an immediate response can actually be punished.

It's the qualitative change than comes with the change in quantity and ease of monitoring (and accessibility of that info) that means being identifiable is so much worse now days.

Comment · 26 days ago
The reason so many people used the deleted items folder as a filing system is exchange didn't set a quota on that folder and by default would only get emptied by a manual emptying. So back in the days when a user could have a 100mb mailbox quota 'unlimited' space could start looking very attractive. Especially if that quota was 5 years old because the server hadn't grown with the times, since what business wants to spend money on a 'cost center' that won't improve profits.

Then these people didn't change their ways when they were given adequate space.

Comment · 27 days ago
>> I can not think of anything a non-CS person...

Install an app. For apple you need to try test flight to find out too many people use the app so you need to be able to install in developer mode.

I can understand the argument that you should have some technical competency to evaluate that these programs are safe to install, but neither accounts for a technically competent friend/family member suggesting/helping you install an app. Apple requires expertise to even keep an app that doesn't pay to be on the app store installed longer than a week.

Comment · 2 months ago
People joke about a fire drills at work or their neighbour in the apartment building burning the toast and setting off the alarm. We don't equate that to people laughing about dozens of people burning to death (even if that's a possible reality of a fire) because to most of us it's not conceptualized like that.

This is a teacher in the US who would have had to sit through live shooting drills and never believed a live shooting would happen at her school (How much would you need to be paid to work somewhere where you seriously believed you had a 1 in 100 chance of being shot in the next 5 years, it wouldn't be a teachers salary for most of us).

Comment · 2 months ago
No because, some companies know they'll need ram, but they may have some leeway on timing (i.e. doing more to prolong the life of systems they'd typically replace). That means to guarantee ram they need to enter an agreement to buy the ram now. By setting the expectation that these prices continue or get worse companies that may have put off agreeing to these terms locking in prices based on demand rather than something closer to the cost of production. The agreements that these companies are being forced to make are upfront payment and then a top up to meet current market prices before delivery, there is no downside for these ram companies whether the price rises or falls (at worst they end up with supply that was already payed for by a bust company at a healthy margin and a glut in the market that would arrive anyway)

Competitors are going to come online anyway because of the threat of chip embargoes against China that mean they are investing in production regardless of what the outside world is doing.

Comment · 2 months ago
The broader tariffs are the worse they are. Targeted tariffs can have a function but if targeted at a country that function isn't an economic good for either country it's only good as a political tool. You could argue that industries that you are the second cheapest in compared to that country could reap some benefits from supplying local markets (but not if there are other countries cheaper than your own that aren't also tariffed that can supply more of the demand) and then a targeted tariff may make some (long term) economic sense.

Targeted tariffs can have more nuanced effects. You'll notice that Canadian politicians are talking about targeting red states with their tariffs. These tariffs will also economically hurt Canada, but you won't see a retaliatory tariff on things that hurt Canada disproportionately which would be the case with universal tariffs. You can expect them to pick luxury industries (like they did with bourbon) where preferences can be changed or industrial/commercial ones where (preferably) local or other suppliers are near parity with the US rather than say gasoline.

Comment · 2 months ago
Which is ridiculous on it's face, imagine claiming that stopping someone's income until you get around to reviewing it doesn't have a significant effect on someone.

The real issue is if uber comes away from this thinking they can do a rubber stamp review, because the point of the law was clearly to stop unjustifiable decisions automatically being made(protecting both parties), as uber will still be on the hook for unjustified suspensions but redress will need to go through the court making it worse for all involved.

Comment · 2 months ago
Anna's Archive is a controversial example with that as a stated goal. But more to the point most of the people doing it aren't seeking to profit from digitizing these books so the 'monetary value' of them is not the yard stick or motivator. A higher monetary value could actually make it harder for these projects as they can rely on donations of books or even waiting for someone who wants a book they bought so they can spend that on the next one (which is less useful if the next one on your list was bought to destroy by the same person who bought the book you finished scanning).

They're often books tied to a region, i.e. stories about a local fisherman's life and how they overcame adapting a boat to local feedstock, or the engineering that went into building the local train station. That's to say they can have little value to those outside the area but are still a rich read for locals, tourists, and those who move to the region or have a love for a place. I expect we'll see a concerted effort to organise to get these kind of book sent to regional mueseums for scanning now that people are aware they are actively being destroyed and they realise the timeline isn't how long the book can last.

Comment · 2 months ago
Which is what has happened over time now that humanity has the ability to digitize them. The problem arises when we are purposefully picking books where we know those scans aren't yet available and purposefully destroying them. There'd be less outrage if any of these companies made statements about guaranteeing the survival of the scans they are taking and the release or planned guaridanship in the case they can no longer maintain the data.

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