Loosely defined legal terms. A “computer program” can be copyrighted. You can write your own that does the same thing but you cannot copy the other code and slap your label on it. With a lot of imagination and bending the words of the shitty outdated law, you could say a website is also a “computer program.” You cannot just go into the code and change it, e.g. by blocking ads. The lower court ruling didn’t take this possible interpretation into account and now has to rule again with this in mind. Nothing’s been decided yet. We’re running a little hot in this thread on misleading headlines.

You would be building it on pretty much the same legal foundations. So it will just be history repeating.

Let’s take a deep breath and consider what’s happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.

It’s entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it’s not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it’s eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.

So the headline should read more like “German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement.”

The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.

Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture.

“Random” “Random, with rules”

Me: They’re the same picture.

Having to learn about genetics made me drop biology as a subject as soon as I could in school. I might have been able to wrap my head around it slightly better than OP but not by much.

[Find in Page:] “Parent”=0 “Parents”=0 “Father”=0 “Mother”=0

It’s their job to guard their kids from this content first and foremost. It’s their job to put it into context for their children. But the article doesn’t even mention that any of this is a humongous failing of parents.

Next this commissioner will want to outlaw computer mice because they’re used to click pornographic content without verifying the age of the finger on the button. And roads because adult content actors use them to get to jobs.

The way forward is not banning or making worse all sorts of useful tools as collateral damage in this “think of the children” campaign. It is to get all adult content everywhere behind a barrier toddlers cannot break. We were fine with porn mags partially obscured on the top shelf at a news agent when that was a thing. And the salesperson making sure the customer wasn’t a minor. The solution isn’t closing all digital news agents.

And it’s quite telling that the existence of VPNs didn’t play a bigger part in this UK online safety initiative. Like it wasn’t obvious that when the west entrance to porn central was closed off, people wouldn’t naturally look for the ones in east, north, and south.

Edited typo

I’m not a geneticist, I don’t even play one on TV. But i’m fairly confident in saying: evening out? That’s not how this works. When your daddy’s sperm combined with your mother’s egg, a whole host of chance processes happened to make up your genes. It’s random as far as I can tell. It isn’t just averaging out between them.

Touché. If I were in your place I would still try and find another forum, even if you ended up giving all your data to Discord or something like that.

One of the reasons is adversarial policies. They will sniff out you’re using a VPN and they will throw stuff at you. Oh, weird activity from your account. Oh, change your password. Oh, we need to get a proper ID from you. Unless you’re getting $$$ betting info, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

I found Heliboard with the added files for swiping action just as good or bad as Gboard.

Just out of interest: what’s on FB messenger that makes all the things you are willing to do to circumvent the grubby data tentacles worth it? I’m just asking because I came to the conclusion not to use FB a while ago and I haven’t looked back.

It took centuries to get to disposable contact lenses while trying to figure out the physics, both in optics and in manufacturing any sort of spectacles, at the same time.

Will the survivors of the apocalypse be able to pick up where we left off or will they essentially start from scratch? That depends on the apocalypse and on the survivors. Do documents and knowledge survive, perhaps in a stash or in digital form? Do the survivors include an optician or a material engineer? Chances look good if that’s the case. If no, life will get a lot harder for many people.

Germany is a collection of regions and former midieval fiefdoms that pretty much all hate each other. Munich and surroundings is representative of Munich, not the whole country. But a lot of the stereotypical things Americans think of when thinking of Germany will be there. Most of the South was occupied by US forces post WW2 and all the lederhosen, Oktoberfest, and Neuschwanstein Castle should feel just right for you. And that pisses off the Germans in the rest of the country like telling a Texan their BBQ is trash.

Somebody said Germans aren’t into smalltalk. That’s probably true by comparison to the average American but by comparison to their countrymen in the North they are positively chatty in Bavaria.

Bring cash or research at least two ways to get your hands on it while in the country. Just in case one method fails. A lot of places do not accept credit cards and that will probably extend to US debit cards that run on a cc system.

And yes, especially intercity trains are a clustereff of neglect and wear and tear and timetables are not to be trusted at all.

Don’t rent a car and just floor it on the autobahn. Take it at 120kph/75mph first for an hour before you put your pedal to the metal. Get a feel for the road and the rules first because Germans love a rule. And it decreases your chance of hitting a concrete pillar. No speed limit areas tend to be between cities, not on the built up areas. Know that speeding tickets will be charged after the fact or they will follow you by mail.

The staring people refer to here may be, to a large extent, that if there are no Chinese tourists in the area, American ones will be the loudest ones around, carrying their cute little fear of dehydration made manifest water bottles around. You look funny to us and we can’t help it. Don’t buy bottled water, tap is fine to drink. But there aren’t drinking fountains around. A lot of drinks in bottles and cans charge a deposit fee you’ll get back when you return the empty container to the supermarket - your kid will know the drill.

If you’re planning to cross borders be prepared for actual border checks. Our version of ICE crackdowns is making the federal police force delay EU cross border traffic with pretty much EU-illegal ID checks. We spend absolute millions of Euros, accruing a gazillion hours of overtime to catch two illegal immigrants or thereabouts. Political theater with waiting times for all.

Doesn’t difficult very much depend on what you think matters? You’re instantly missing out on anything app, anything QR-code related (ordering food in some restaurants, links, etc.), membership cards that no longer exist in physical form. Some places sell certain tickets online only and then you may need a printer or you’re SOL. I’m sure in missing something so that’s not extensive.

But at the same time, if you have a dumb phone, you can still stay in touch with friends and family. You’ll be missing out on images being sent that are bigger than 2 pixels. But you wouldn’t be completely out of the loop. And if you have an internet ready computer at home or at the next door library, just not on you at all times, I think that’s crucial. Without that you’re ending up in all sorts of trouble.

I would say it’s doable if you are good at not giving F’s. If at the same time you only want to use cash or just no credit cards you’ll be making your life much harder though.

We must hang out in very different circles then.

Everybody draws their own vague red lines in the sand. There is no universal law. If you like it and it doesn’t feel icky, go ahead and like it. If it feels icky, don’t. Or make sure they get no money out of your enjoyment.

However socialized your health care system is, whoever works in it is more likely than not overworked and, the lower the rank, underpaid. I feel comfortable claiming this to be true in general.

This is one study in Poland. You could draw a number of conclusions from it that isn’t just “so-called AI makes doctors dumber.” It could be just as well that so-called AI has an edge over human eyes in finding cancer. It could also be that these doctors are relieved to have a tool that’s reasonably reliable so they can focus their medicine brains on improving care in another area that this study didn’t look at. They only have so much bandwidth and they are only human too. It’s too early and too simplistic to leap to one conclusion.

And don’t get me wrong. I have no trouble imagining that the dumber conclusion could be true. Practice makes perfect so I can see if they don’t work that recognition muscle they’ll lose it. Which would eff us all when computers break or greedy companies make access to the models financially impossible. This should sound alarm bells for the educators. But once again it is too early to say the sky is falling. And it may be the pressures of the health care system that at the very least aggravate the observed effect.

Flip a coin or start both on Duolingo and see which one interests you more. This is only a hard decision in your head. If you’re not planning to move to somewhere where they speak either, this is just a hobby.

They are both romance languages so you’ll find mental handholds in either language that can help you with the other. Similar conjugations, spellings, irregularities, etc.

The French you’ll learn with internet resources or most text books will most likely be French French. As a learner, that will probably still make understanding the Quebecers an extremely hard task. It’s like somebody from a Louisiana bayou talking to a Scottish highlander. On paper, they are both able to speak English but there are accents and differences in vocabulary that increase the level of difficulty, even for native speakers.

I want to live in a world where not everything this man baby says becomes news.

I don’t think it will be a big win for the Palestinians. One reason why this hasn’t happened in the past is that there is no reliable, functional government in place that governs over all of the territory. You had Hamas in Gaza and the PLO in most of the West Bank and they don’t see eye to eye. This hasn’t changed. It will be difficult for these established governments to cooperate with a a fractured non-functional one so the benefits for the Palestinian people will only be patchy and homeopathic.

So I fear recognizing a Palestinian state is actually an impotent, diplomatic gesture - like: “we see what’s going on there, it’s horrible, and we don’t have the resolve to do anything else to bring Israel back to the status quo ante.” It’s finger wagging at Israel more than actual support for the Palestinians. It’s a gesture that can easily be reversed as well, like the orange one moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. And I think that’s why these announcements of recognition fall on very deaf ears in Tel Aviv. It’s political theater for the audiences in the countries whose governments have announced this. “Look, we are doing something! (But we’re doing not that much really, we could do other things as well, isolate the Israeli government and/or cut it off palpably from necessary economic and military supply chain support. But we won’t. It’s a complicated conundrum, that Middle East. And we’re not quite ready to jeopardize the existence of Israel over this.)”

Become active in your local politics. That’s where this urban design sausage is made. I’m gonna go ahead and doubt that your post here will reach many decision makers and urban designers.

The reason why you can’t angle that parasol is because it will cost more money. Anything the public can use will be abused and then broken. We cannot have nice things.

Fixed typo

I think it is hard though, legislatively, as the RTBF already proves. It’s a terribly vague set of rules that put search engines in the position where they have to evaluate a claim and then sit in judgement over it with little to no oversight and then only a public form of objection if this somehow ends up in a court. This is not a good process. Adding more reasons to use a bad process doesn’t sound like a great idea regardless of how well intentioned they are.

An issue I see are massive Streisand effects. One is occurring if you need to take a Google to court for not following up on your RTBF claim. Nobody really cared about your drunk driving incident from 2019 until you fill the headlines with your court proceedings. Now everybody knows. The other is this: let’s say Roberta became Robert. Calling him Roberta would be dead naming him. But if every time I framed it as “Robert Streisand (known until 2023 as Roberta Streisand)” I’m merely stating fact and I don’t see how many courts will intervene against that. Why can virtually everybody still dead name Chelsea Manning? Because every time her name was mentioned post transition they added this factual context. So all you will achieve in the end is that all trolls and dickheads will just use the legally defendable boiler plate phrase. And hang a much brighter lantern on the issue.

Just to be clear: I’m not defending anybody deadnaming somebody else. I’m just looking at this issue, the RTBF, and I’m thinking of that road to hell and with what it is paved.