Copyright should have stayed the original initial 14 years with possible renewal to 28 years. But like in France back then, also include the original authors (last one alive, if several) lifespan. Hence, a copyright would last either the authors lifespans or 28 years, whichever is longer.

Moreover, the patent system is being abused and does not serve the original goal of “any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement there on not before known or used.” It granted the applicant the “sole and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used” of his invention.. It needs major changes, including the requirement to have the “invention” be under examination by reputable third-party laboratories (such as Intertek, SGI, Underwriters Laboratories, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technischer Überwachungsverein, SGS - Société Générale de Surveillance, etc…) before being granted a patent. Nowadays, patents are given almost willy-nilly to anyone no matter how vague or obvious the supposed invention.

Nowadays, patents are being misused in Patent Ambush mechanisms and scenarios, meanwhile Patent Trolls and Hoarders whole existence is are to impede/obstruct legally and impose exorbitant levies/fees onto organization and companies actually innovating and developing useful art/process/devices. Even more incredible, there are Submarine Patents being hidden away to suddenly take hostage existing products and process of various companies by imposing extortionate royalties.

Thus, our human brain are incapable of grasping or begin to comprehend the scale and severity of the climate crisis with just soundbites, anecdotes, news-rants and tiktok videos.

Understanding complex systems is hard and requires continuous concentration over months and years. Even more so for the Hyperobject that is ephemerally understood as Climate Change.

We can barely begin to collectively acknowledge that perhaps something is indeed wrong with :

• all the burning forests just because of the smoke/smog “inconveniently” smothers our cities (occasionally burning them for being too close)

• atmospheric rivers drowning towns and cities in flash floods

• high altitude glaciers irreversibly melting and disappearing

• Greenland and Antarctic have only accelerated their ice loss from sustained glacier retreat

• the thermohaline circulation slowing down due to all that melted water (less dense due to higher temperature and less salt) staying on the surface of the water column

• the migration of millions of humans mostly from regions with latitude between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn due to drought, crops loss, famine, extreme storms, natural disasters and violence or wars

• the increase in frequency and length of heatwaves

Unfortunately, we will probably sooner or later go to war over made-up fantasies or leftovers of a ruined planet before finally collectively understanding and tackling the complex thing that is currently (for now) known as Climate Change.

Every ~3 to ~5 years I change my free email addresses (gmail, hotmail/outlook, yahoo, etc.). Although, I don’t use yahoo anymore.

I have turned a few of my old gmail accounts into spam mail trawlers as I “Gotta catch ’em all! ” and every time I have to make a temporary or single use account for a service I want to check out/try or I just foresee making only a single purchase I always use a gmail account+alias if they don’t have a guest checkout option. The old gmail accounts are checked quarterly on a if-I-remember basis but at least once a year.

On first contact with any business, services or people I have never met in person I usually give a newer gmail address I check biweekly in case my forwarding filter missed something important.

Moreover, I use gmail incoming mail rules to forward copies of important keywords and specific email address to my 2 professional (redundant) emails for which I enabled notification on my phone, main desktop and workplace.

Gmail is so ubiquitous and well trusted that I can pretty much use it in any input forms for registration or verification. Their spam filter is also pretty good (not always) to skip/pre-filter obvious phishing and scam emails.

Even though I have already moved away or avoided Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, TikTok, Wechat, Temu, PayPal, Sony, etc. I occasionally still have to indirectly deals with them on a limited case-by-case but specific situations.

By excluding so many excellent email services they are inadvertently making sure that Gmail, Outlook and other allegedly “reputable” free emails services slowly become a junk/spam/marketing email dump that few would want to enable constant notification for and fewer would want to delve into and sift through daily.

Sorry, this became a long rambling rant about all the layer of protections I have to use nowadays to just avoid wasting energy and attention on the profusion of spam/useless emails.

Gosh, 🤣 … the image of having carbonized and/or partially vaporized humans quickly switched my awe in the technology into repugnance.

Darn, why does amaizing technology often end up with horrifying set backs and adverse effects?

Oh no‽

Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).

Any viable/preferred alternative?

Man, is this seriously going turn into into the Iraq has WMD boondoggle/fiasco:

“Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, in which he detailed false intelligence gatherings provided by the Israeli government regarding Iraqi WMD.”

Source 1: Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence

Source 2: Israel knew Iraq had no WMD, says MP

I forgot it was Israeli Intelligence source back then 🤔. I only remember Bush insisting there are WMDs and Colin Powell’s declaration at the UN. All of it was proven fake of course, and 20 years later it has become the biggest and most expensive Intelligence blunder.

Hopefully, I am wrong and we were smarter to verify everything before repeating the same reckless mistake.

I try to not comment on controversial issues particularly when I don’t have any qualification or first hand knowledge/experience, however this is looking more and more like an unmitigated overreaction.

All these first-past-the-post voting systems (here in Canada too it’s a problem) need to be relegated to a bygone era, it’s so bad that even placings names on a board and throwing darts blindfolded for every MP positions would probably give a better and more representative outcome.

Welp… it will probably be after something akin to world war 3 that we (the ones luckily still alive) would all sit down and set out to fix the many obvious and perhaps not so obvious issues with governance, lack of immediate consequence to lying, independently peer reviewed education system absent of political/religious/vested/private interest or influence, broken taxation system enabling billionaires, the lack of thorough independent study of environmental or health concerns before even granting any permit (problems tend to always be discovered long after it was commercialised/contructed/).

Sad to see the state of affairs in every country 😰😱, nevertheless just as we can see/imagine/iterate/improve our ideas of what each one of us would consider better systems, we should implement, test, cross pollinate, evaluate (scientifically, quantitatively and qualitatively) and keep what works better than before and reject/shun/disqualify what obviously causes issues or collateral damages.

Hmm… how will a return work? 🤔

Put it the car back in a box and drop it at the nearest dropoff store or UPS/FedEx? 🤣

Will there be a 30% restocking fee?

What if the car just doesn’t work after delivery? Missing parts?

Will there now also be a Amazon Warehouse Deals for used cars?

Yup… and just after they are done setting up their manufacturing plant or tech hub, they will act all surprised (surprised-pikachu.jpg) when some made up excuse are fabricated to shake down their newly minted “investment” just like Several foreign businesses have been raided by the authorities. and cry how could this possibly have happened, all offended, while demanding for a bailout or a loss carryover of their future taxes.

Then there is the multitude of spying and theft: Allegations of intellectual property theft by China or through their Thousand Talents Program by offering high salaries, privileges and rewards to the chinese diaspora in various countries to bring back sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data before leaving their previous workplace.

Unfortunately, China is at the crossroad of multiple extraordinary challenges it had been delaying, exacerbating or skipping for the last few decades :

• demographic collapse, whereas population over 65 will increase from 200 million today to 400 million by 2049, while the overall population will decline slightly caused by the one-child policy since 1979 but also the high cost of raising a child in China to be successful

• hundreds of entire cities of unproductive tofu dreg construction and litany of unfinished projects (roads, bridges and train lines to factories, airports and houses) causing huge insolvent debt among Chinese property developers, all amounting to a beleaguered US$55 trillion property sector, which accounts for between 22% and 29% of the Chinese economy

• numerous environmental challenges that have only accelerated, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and dealing with increasing local natural disasters (flashfloods, heatwaves, heat domes, droughts, soil erosion, desertification, typhoons, etc…) due to Climate Change

• feeding 22% of the world population with 7% (and decreasing) of their global arable land

• youth-unemployment crisis whereas millions of well-educated graduates (21,3% of jobseekers between the ages of 16 and 25) are struggling to find decent white-collar jobs in urban areas

• prevalence of corruption, nepotism, grift and extortion by every level of governance and institutions (local, city, regional, medical, education, police, etc…)

All of the above while an ongoing China-U.S. trade war.

Hence, my doubt on foreign investor’s (voluntary, well informed and rational) return into a unfriendly and drastically changed Chinese economy.

I hope I am wrong and I absolutely wish for the best for China and the everyday peoples of China currently struggling to eke out a living due a series of unfortunate natural and/or preventable human caused disasters, all amplified by a leadership prioritising ideology over effective governance, or control over pragmatism.

I wish there was a cheap simple laser engraver that could just “burn” black the surface of generic bulk printer paper. As in an inkless monochrome printer.

A bit like How to Cut, Score, and Engrave Paper With a Laser but without the need to use dedicated laser cutter.

With the explosion of interest in 3D printing, machining and laser cutters, I’m just eager to get hold of a printer like that and forever give up on liquid ink and toners of all sorts.

Small question (perhaps dumb on my part as I haven’t slept yet), do these desalination system remove other chemicals such as PFAS, arsenic, lead? I think I read that they use nanofiltration membranes to remove almost everything. How about molecules that are smaller than water (H₂O)? Do they get filtered?

It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.

Then there is general intelligence (g factor or general intelligence factor) which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):

Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.

Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.

Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.

Neat question indeed. 😆

The established publishing “vampires” such as :

Elsevier

RELX plc (the abomination created from merging Reed International and Elsevier)

John Wiley & Sons (another gluttonous monstrosity acquiring anything and everything on its path)

Springer

Taylor & Francis

Allen Press

etc…

Will never let go of their grip on their oligopoly unless suitable legislation is in place forcing publicly funded research, studies, discoveries or developments to remain within the confines of public domain in perpetuity (or freely accessible national/academic archives in case of predefined sensitive research).

Wow, thank you for expanding my vocabulary in ways I did not imagine possible.

I did not need to know that 🤢.

Perhaps it may come as a surprising opinion but I have met and known a lot of great Americans that are kind and polite to a fault while knowing some Canadians that are petty warmongering ignoramus.

Nevertheless, I can understand that I probably haven’t met enough Americans from every States to have an overview of the ignoramuses that exist accross the border (beyond what is depicted, often exaggerated, in the media and memes — excepting the whole neverending Trump & Friends saga). Not that I absolutely want to meet them either, I have enough to deal with easily Facebook duped and misinformed relatives and sometimes colleagues.

I somehow felt like sharing my general experience after seeing that funny comparison of perceptions.

Here we go again… 🤣

https://lemmy.world/post/5730713

The result last time:

Sad to see another country descending into perpetual civil war and slowly turning into a failed state (hopefully not, and I’m completely wrong).

The people deserve better, but old power cannot let go of their darn solid gold toilet (metaphor).

Good for them for fighting back, but it should not have gone this far. As too many innocent are being sacrificed.

Please freeze your credit file at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. It’s free and you can unfreeze it anytime you want (or whenever you judge its a valid credit check for something you actually requested yourself).

Whether you have a low/medium/good/perfect credit score and are satified with the credit cards and mortgage/loans you already have or lived without ever having a credit card and loans, it is of utmost importance to freeze your credit files to preempt any future identity theft from becoming a life upending disaster.

Some helpful links:

American Express | How to Freeze Your Credit at All 3 Bureaus—For Free

nerdwallet | How to Freeze Your Credit

Federal Trade Commission | What To Know About Credit Freezes and Fraud Alerts

For the fellow Canadians reading this, freezing your credit file has been enshrined in law in Québec since February 2023. I have frozen mine on the first week of February. However, I am unaware of the availability of that option in other provinces, please check with your bank or provincial service bureau (equivalent to Services Québec here) or directly contact Equifax and TransUnion.

I got Dragonborn (middle-ish) and druid (right) while parsing vertically.

Does that combination even work 😯?

Excellent writeup! With constant updates to boot 🥳

I’m saving it for future reference.

Thank you for putting your time and effort on this.