Sculptus Poe

I mean, really, you probably have $0 worth of damages to worry about. If something in particular happens, like corporate espionage hurting your business that causes real damage, then you have the freedom to sue for that particular thing. (Supposing you aren’t locked out by the settlement.)

These are civil cases, buying your way out is all that happens in the best of circumstances in a civil case. It is just a matter of how much you have to pay to buy out. Punitive damages might do some extra justice, but what would that be? In the end you have to imagine that some radom person has sued you unjustly and decide how you want an innocent person to be treated, or perhaps they sued you with some small real point to their lawsuit, do you want the default to be that you are ruined? Maybe you didn’t intend harm, but want to either make amends or at least get past the lawsuit so you can get on with your life, do you want no recourse possible?

In the end, if Google was forced out of business, many(most) of us would be way worse off. That is not the ideal outcome. Ideally, the case brings enough money to the plaintiff to right any hardship caused and, in the case of punitive damages, does just enough hardship to the defendant that they are dissuaded from pursuing that course of action, but you aren’t trying to kill them.

Good gravy. 1984 wasn’t a guidebook.

Settlements only happen with the consent of both parties. I don’t see that as a problem. If you really don’t want a settlement, then opt out of the class action and bring your own case or do what you can to make sure the lawyer for the class action won’t settle. That I suppose is unlikely, as the lawyer will do whatever ends up being the most likely win case scenario in their opinion and the number of people in the class action will probably mean you have no individual say in it (not sure how that particular piece works but no class action suit that approached me gave me any options for what I wanted out of it).

Well, trash. I already knew about these, but as fossils. This headline made me think they found a branch of them just growing in Scotland. But no, it is just the thing we already knew about. Not sure how they got any information that confirms they weren’t plants or fungi from fossils, but I guess that is the only newsworthy thing here. (Tubes, mostly looking at the branching of tubes and how they differ from any fruiting fungus is what I gather after reading the actual paper. I do think it is interesting that they also focused on how they are different from crustaceans. It would have been pretty interesting if those were crab trees.)

Israel sold weapons to Iran when Iran wasn’t their enemy and Iraq was the main danger. They would have no advantage at all in squashing the uprising there. This whole article is misdirection and misleading, playing into the hands of Iran’s despots. (Reading the article closely, which is a difficult task considering the horrible website, Iranian despots are claiming that Israel gave ammo and guns to the ones trying to revolt. That does make more sense, but the way the article is written, you can tell the whole article is propaganda for Iranian despots, because they spin it as a bad thing to help the uprising and use that kid caught in the crossfire as rage bait. )

Hmm. Why organize with those fiberoptic wires at all when all programming is done by organizing isolinear chips in a grid?

(Also, as easily as those chips pop out, every time the inertial dampeners fail just enough for the crew to feel hull damage but not enough to turn them to paste, they would all fall out and require Data to reorganize them.)

People cheer every time something they don’t like gets censored, and then scoff and tell you you are just pro whatever-that-thing-was when you tell them why that is dangerous. People want 1984 to come true with all their heart and believe that censorship will always go their way while it is going their way.

I’m not anti-AI at all, but their LLM definitely isn’t ready for the top of a google search as if it is real information. Of course, posting promoted search results at the top of the searches as if it was a real result already devalued them. They at least need the LLM result to be an opt-in option with caveats. I would probably opt-in but I would like off to be the default.

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Really, allowing mods to permaban people in large major subs is worse than any of it. It gives those mods way too much power, and they mostly use it to ban opinions they don’t like.

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I just updated through Ninite and it went to 8.8.9.

But… But… Um… “BoTh SiDeS” … there, take that logical and totally reasonable arguement.

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I never ran back to the couch so fast as when I went to make popcorn during my Enterprise binge and forgot to bring the remote with me.

I would legitimately watch robot boxing.

The wizards had indoor plumbing starting in the 1700s. Most of the world didn’t have indoor plumbing until the 1800s. It would be hard to read the books and not know Hogwarts had plumbing. Your bad example notwithstanding, yes the wizards are ignorant of a few things that make no sense even though they use magic for every mundane thing, and it makes less sense since children would have to completely rely on their parents for any magical utility until they were pretty much grown. It doesn’t take away from the story, but if she did the worldbuilding like Tolkien, she probably would have noticed this and made small adjustments.

I’m going to have to read The Blazing World now. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of it.

Well, if you include Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), you would have to put Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story (2nd century AD) ahead of her.

I’ve listened to “A True Story” years ago but can’t remember any of it. Reading the synopses, I think all three are closer to fantasy than Sci-Fi. So I still Put Frankenstein as the first true Sci-Fi book.