gian

So you basically say that patents are wrong just because we have silly patents (and even sillier laws basically).

I don’t think that “my money/time” means “something unique” but I think that if I built something new spending my money and my time then I can ask to have it protected for some years in order to be able to make some money to recover the amount I have invested to build it.

The problem is that we should have a trade-off with patents: we need to somewhat protect who invest his money to develop thing from who just copy it and undercut him and be sure that the patents do not stop innovations.
Like your surgeon example, I think that there can be right way to have patents, a good way and bad way. Now we have patents in the worst possible way. A better way would be to allow to register a patent only if you sell a product that use it and only valid for a limited time, for example.

After all, why should someone invest, say, a couple of million $ to develop something and trying to sell it at, say, 100 $ to break-even in 5 years knowing that the moment he sell someone can copy it and sell it for 20 the very next day ?

Patents also do not simply stop “stealing” as you put it. If you and someone else both put in the effort to independently invent the “turns lead to gold” machine then whoever patents it first owns it. The other person, despite also putting in the effort and not even knowing you exist, just has to basically go fuck themselves.

This is an interesting point and I agree that there is no solution with patents, the first to arrive is the winner. We maybe can have something like a grace period (if you fill a similar or equal patent in the next 2 months than both are valid) but in the end it is a race and the winner take all.

But I’d push back on the idea of “The same code you made” being special. Code is just language and math put together. Take a sentence. “Hi, how are you?” under patent rules once someone patents that specific way to say this nobody else can do it. You can do the same function but have to phrase it differently. Like “Hello, are you well?” and eventually this just gets silly. Being the first to do something the most obvious way to do it shouldn’t give you a right to not let anyone else do it that way.

Why not ? In the end I used my money to come up with a way to do things, I would argue that I am entitled to stop someone else to simply stole it and I can always license you my work so we both can make some money, you selling something without the need to reinvent it, I selling you something so I can recover my initial expense. (which is the idea behind patents in the first place)
The point would be to not have silly patents in the first place.

They are certainly abused, but without them, there’s literally no protection from a big company stealing an entrepreneur’s idea and undercutting them. (Like what Facebook did to Snapchat.)

Fine, then you should be granted a patent only if you actually use it in a product you sell.

Patents are (now) a weapon for big companies to stop a potential competitor to even being able to compete.

I think that you need to use the GPL code to be found breaking the terms. I can show you GPL code and even suggesting you to use it but it is not my place to respect the use that you make of the code.

Same with the LLM, they can suggest to you some GPL code and you can choose if use it or not.

The big problem is that you don’t know under what license the code the LLM just wrote to implement a feature in your code is actually under, so it leave you with the short stick, so to say

The fact is that MIT license allow you to get the code legally, you don’t stole anything. GPL only force you to publish derivate works under the same license if you publish your project (ok, that’s not all, I know).

But I doubt that a simple change of license is enough to stop AI tools which don’t seems to bother with this “technicalities”. It can be a starting point to sue someone, if you have the money, but nothing more.

A simple search on Amazon return a lot of dishwasher with physical buttons (some with wifi options) in a price range way lower than $3k since they are about 500/900Euros which is pretty normal in Italy. Pretty the same prices in France.

The first time, the second time you will buy a normal washing machine that don’t need to connect to the network.

Maybe, but I think that they will not upgrade the system, even without this change there is no reason to use a 7.x kernel on a 30+ Yeats old hardware

On an unrelated news, Microsoft warns that water is wet.

That hotel Wi-Fi networks are not the most secure networks is nothing new to be honest…

Ok, but then it is perfectly fair also for a phone.

If requested by who?

IIRC by the seller, if you did not pay the montly check for your loan they were able to disable the car and then recollect it

That would actually be a fantastic security feature for owners to be able to do if their car is stolen.

Yep, it was a fantastic security feature for the owners but also a way to disable the car if you do not pay the loan.

In some way yes

I think to remember to have read something about the possibility for a car manufacturer to remotely disable the car if requested or defaulted, something like once you park the car and turn off the engine it will not start again so no security problem, but I cannot pinpoing when/where i read it or if it ever went beyond the stage of an idea.

Here we are talking about things not completely paid off. If you use a loan to buy something (a car, a phone, a house, whatever) until you paid off all the loan the thing is not yours.

If you don’t pay your car loan, they can reposses it, if you don’t pay your phone loan they block it, if you don’t pay your data plan they close it. I don’t see anything strange here.

Which is something they already can do, just push an update and they are done. And after they simply go out of the market: nobody will buy their phone anymore.

But this is something different, here we are talking about something that is not different than reposessing a car if you don’t pay the loan you used to buy it.

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release and definitely it should not have a break in something basic just because the language used to write the command break backword compatibilty

Or maybe people finally understand that it is useless to swap the phone every year.

Stop going to these centralized services. The centralization of ownership is the problem, not any specific website or owner.

True, we need the Fediverse, but the Fediverse is only a little harder to knock down, not impossible.
Expecially in the US where fighting in court could simply (and often) bankrupt you. All it is needed to take down and instance is asking the provider the owner of the IP and then sue him for something. A company could fight, a private owner no.

Elections are run by the individual states (unless something egregiously unconstitutional is going on) which allows the governor and even local election officials to make decisions that affect how hard it is to vote almost down to a street level basis.

Same here, it does not seems to be a problem.

If you don’t want people from blue areas to vote, you just put in fewer polling stations, and make them in less convenient places for areas that skew blue on the map.

That assumes that you already know how people would vote. Yes, historical data could give a hint but not a certainty. It is some times that polls are spectacularly wrong.

So adding 30 seconds to the voting time doesn’t really matter for a rural station that might need to service 100 people in a day, but for an inner city location that might need to service 100 people a minute those 30 seconds per person really add up.

True, but think about who could spare more time when voting (hint, probably not the people you want to vote) and you will realize that it is a stupid idea.

I agree with you in principal, verifying your identity before voting is important because elections are important. We should be having a conversation about creating a system that is both comprehensive and also doesn’t impose a burden on people without means. For example, a lot of people don’t have an ID to satisfy the proposed requirements and would have a difficult time getting these credentials before election day.

That is your problem number 2…

In addition, in order to get these documents a person would have to jump through a lot of bureaucratic loopholes and pay fees. Many of these people are poorer and are more affected by the dire economic situation. The systems are complicated and despite being involved in this sphere for a few years I couldn’t tell you the steps and fees required to get all of the documents. This isn’t a simple system where a person can just walk into a government office and walk out with a working ID.

and that is you problem number 1.
It is inconceivable to me that a situation like this could even exist in the US.
I get that many US people would start crying about “freedom” and everything else but the basic line is that a ID should be mandated by law for everyone. And it should be easy to obtain, I mean how difficult could be to do it ? Seriously.

It seems to me that these are not real problem, other countries solved them dozens of years ago, it is just that you people (assuming you are from US) don’t want to solve them.

If we’re going to have a system requiring Secure IDs (I’m not sure the EU analog, but you guys have a similar secure identity scheme being pushed) then we need to make getting Secure IDs dead simple because the average citizen needs to be able to vote and also shouldn’t be subjected to heavy administrative burden in order to participate in the democratic system.

A card with a chip and all the information in that chip, to read it you need just a reader.
Or a qrcode with all the information encoded ?
Even the old Italian ID (made of paper) was secure, it does not seems to be a problem without solutions, just copy from someone who already did it.

As for the problem with electronic black box voting stations, yes, they are a problem per se irregardless of who propose or built them. They would be a problem for the exact same reasons if they were proposed by Biden. But I still belive that a selection of who can vote done as you suggest is impraticable, you have no way of knowing who vote what before. A massive refusal to allow a certain population to vote would be noted in the end.

The check in the US is done when you register to vote. Once you are registered, a variety of proofs of ID can be used to vote at your polling location.

And why the double check ? It would not be better to just go to the polling station, show your id and then vote ?
(I undestand that it is a simplification, in the US people move way more often that here and this add some other problems)

Requiring a passport and birth cert or some other strong ID are unnecessary at the actual voting site. The main reason for doing this is to make voting take longer,

Considering that if I have no one before me to vote, it take about 30 seconds from the moment I enter the polling station and the moment I am handed the cards to cast the vote I would argue that saying that this way it will take longer is not really true.
And, btw, we do the check of the document against a printed list who containt all the names of the people who can vote at a polling station, splitted between man and women.

and be more strenuous, which means that you can have a greater effect on election results by manipulating the number of polling stations for an area.

Every difficulty you build to try to make harder for your enemy voters to cast their vote is a difficulty you set up also for your voters.
And simply manipulating the number of polling station in a certain area give you nothing: people who want to vote against you will come anyway and you cannot know if they will come before your voters of after and which voters eventually will lose their patience and just go home without casting a vote