nymwit

Absurdity indeed!

Like a kid with a restriction. 1 minute to comply or an hour to figure out how to technically comply but get around it.

... But it was the organizers self censoring their entrants based on just the idea that the Chinese govt would take interest in/offense to some of the stories from what I can read. Haven't seen any reporting suggesting the Chinese govt was actually involved at all. My thought is, why would the organizers hold the event in China if it was going to cause them to act the fool like this?

That was bad but at least short. I can't ever hear "we're going on an adventure" again without flashing back to that nightmare of a sequence of events.

It's stupid but the article says why:

In the Alabama case, a hospital patient wandered through an unlocked door, removed frozen, preserved embryos from subzero storage and, suffering an ice burn, dropped the embryos, destroying them. Affected IVF patients filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the IVF clinic under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The case was initially dismissed in a lower court, which ruled the embryos did not meet the definition of a child. But the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that "it applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation." In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.

I can't believe I ever trusted consumer reports after I read up on how they purposely distorted their Suzuki samurai testing. The CR own record video shows they were determined to roll it.

I think the photocopying thing models fairly well with user licenses for software. Without commenting on whether that's right in the grand scheme of things, I can see that as analogous. Most folks accept that they need individual user licenses for software right? I get that photocopying can't be controlled the same way software can but the case was in the 90s? I mean these things aren't about whether the provider of the article/software faces increased marginal cost for additional copies/users but that the user/company is getting more use than they paid for. License agreements. Seems like a problem with the terms of licenses and laws rather than how they were judged as following them or not. Their use didn't seem to be transformative and the for profit nature of their use sort of overruled the "research" fair use.

I also think the mp3.com thing sucks, but again, the way the law is, that's a reasonable/logical outcome. Same thing that will kill someone offering ebooks to people who show a proof of purchase.

I don't know the solution to the situation with NYT/open AI. It's a pretty bad look to be able to spit out an article nearly verbatim. We do need copyright reform, but I think that's at the feet of the legislators, not judges. I only need to see the recent Alabama IVF court ruling to be reminded of the danger of more... interpretative rulings.

I'm with you. Ads are annoying but I sort of wish there was (maybe just more around here?) acknowledgement of that's just how the service gets paid for. I don't adblock anything. If I can't stand the ads I don't use it. I just ignore them. Maybe I'm old and grew up with broadcast tv. I'd rather be subjected to internet ads than have to pay (real currency) at every site I go to. Folks can Adblock all they want but I don't see how that's any better than corpo short term quarterly earning thinking vs long term wide range impacts consideration.

Maybe don't hold it in China again if they're so worried about this sort of thing? They didn't think that through did they? You think they might with, you know, science fiction often commenting on real life things through speculative analogues. They cowardly caved to just the idea of repercussions. Nothing in the article says the committee was actually under pressure from anyone to do what they did. Weak!

pixelscript@lemmy.ml got it, but basically lasers are pretty inefficient. The article I just found said (in a different run of this facility) they put 400MJ into the laser to get 2.5MJ out of it. So that makes the whole firing system what, 0.6% efficient? Your fusion reaction would have to give more than 400MJ to truly be in the positive for this particular setup/method, but again this facility is a research one and not meant to generate power - there isn't even a way to harness/collect it here.

I can't read the full article (paywalled for me) but it references the National Ignition Facility so the way it goes is super lasers blast a tiny hydrogen thing and that creates a tiny bit of fusion that releases the energy. The energy of the laser blast is what's being called the input and the fusion energy released the output. What is misleading is that a greater amount of energy was used create the laser blast than the laser blast itself outputs. If you consider the energy that went into creating the laser blast the input (rather than the laser blast itself), then it's usually not a net positive energy release.

Microwave transmission is what's usually said, then someone says anything in the beam's path will get zapped, then it's pointed out the energy density isn't that high. Just wanted to shortcut that for ya