nybble41 @ nybble41 @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Historically speaking, people have gone to the trouble of manually digitizing hard copy books to distribute freely. There were digital copies of print books available online (if you knew where to look) before e-books were officially available for sale in any form. That includes mass-market novels as well as items of interest to historians. Ergo, your scepticism seems entirely unjustified.

OCR is far from perfect (though editing OCR output is generally faster than retyping), but even without it we have the storage and bandwidth these days to distribute full books as stacks of images if needed, without converting them to text. The same way people distribute scans of comics/manga.

The average person would just download it. Only one needs the equipment to digitize it. And that equipment isn't as specialized as you seem to think. For printed (mass-produced) books you can just cut the pages from the spine and feed them in batches through an automated document feeder, which comes standard with many consumer-grade scanners. Automated page-turning on an e-reader can be done with a software plugin in some cases, or externally with something like a SwitchBot. Capturing copy-restricted video is frankly much more involved, and that hasn't stopped anyone so far.

Phone calls are not the feature they would be most likely to disable. You're more likely to have passengers talking to you with their phones stuck in "driving mode" as they can't use them to quietly pass the time playing a game or reading or browsing social media or whatever else the driver shouldn't be doing with their phone.

with books there's basically no reasonable way to create an ebook from a hardcopy

On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It's quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.

In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.

Allegories aside, the Bible definitely has a few LGBTQ characters, even if they're not portrayed in a very positive light. I suppose that means they'll be banning the Bible from school libraries? Not to mention a fair amount of historical literature… including anything featuring Leonardo da Vinci, Florence Nightingale, King James (yes, that King James), William Shakespeare, King Richard I, or Julius Caesar.

It will be interesting to see whether this makes the history classes easier, for lack of material to cover, or harder, for lack of references.

Basically, if the personal information required is necessary for the business to actually do the service you're asking them to do for you, it's considered a legitimate interest.

Serving ads—any ads, much less personalized ones—is not "necessary to actually do the service" the end user is asking for. As proven by the fact that there is a fully functional (albeit paid) version of the app without the ads.

It shouldn't matter whether the data collection is necessary for AdMob to work—to serve personalized ads—since the subject of the data collection isn't asking for that.

Freedom of Speech primarily exists to protect thw press

Freedom of Press is a whole separate thing. Freedom of Speech is about public discourse in general, not just speech by members of the press.

Apart from that, however, you're on the right track.

The social contract concept is over-used by people who try to make it cover too much. It becomes a one-sided contract of adhesion which you're assumed to have agreed to simply by existing. This, however, is simple reciprocation—it's more like a truce than a contract. It would be unreasonable to expect tolerance from others while refusing to grant the same tolerance to them.

Of course there is no obligation to be intolerant just because the other person is; you are free to make a better choice.

A person can see a dog whistle and know it for what it is without being able to hear it. Also it's not only dogs who can hear dog whistles; some people just have exceptionally good hearing.

Citizens have their own limitations when their response strays outside the realm of speech. Boycotts are fine—you have no obligation to buy what they're selling. However, harassment is not okay, and bullying is not okay. These things are wrong (and coincidentally illegal) on their own merits, and not a justified response to someone else's speech.

Just luxury spending and underperforming investments. Essential spending can't be deferred, and worthwhile investments will outpace any natural rate of deflation. Forced inflation drives conspicuous consumption and malinvestment, but in doing so it increases monetary velocity, which helps bankers and tax collectors extract higher rent from the economy.

MongoDB is under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) which is not an Open Source license.

Unreal is "source available", not Open Source. There's a big difference. With any Open Source project you can legally fork the project, distribute your custom version of the code, create a community around your variant... "source available" has none of that. The Unreal EULA is more permissive than most game engine licenses (with the obvious exception of Godot) but it still comes with plenty of restrictions. For example:

You are permitted to post snippets of Engine Code, up to 30 lines of code in length, online in public forums for the sole purpose of discussing the content of the snippet or Distribute such snippets in connection with supporting patches and plug-ins for the Licensed Technology, so long as it is not for the purpose of enabling third parties without a license to the Engine Code to use or modify any Engine Code or to aggregate, recombine, or reconstruct any larger portion of the Engine Code.

Which pretty clearly does not satisfy the Open Source Definition.

You misunderstood. It's not a middle ground between "can regulate" and "cannot regulate". That would indeed be idiotic. It's a middle ground between "must judge everything for yourself" and "someone else determines what you have access to". Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it's worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).

The monopoly issue won't be resolved so long as there is artificial exclusivity over the content, i.e. copyright. That's the most critical monopoly of all. Different streaming services can't compete on how good they are at streaming because their content isn't interchangeable; you can't just swap one show for another even when they're similar in style and production quality.

The absolute minimum requirement to resolve this would be obligatory "reasonable and non-discriminatory" mechanical licenses allowing any streaming service to stream any content on equal terms regardless of source.

To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?

There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn't have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.

Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to "reputation servers" which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.