- >That's literally impossible. Answer me 2 things that will tell me if it's the lowest slavery in the world.
>1. What is the criminal conviction rate in Japan?
>2. Is there penal labour in Japan?
If I'm reading this argument correctly, it's that because Japan has a high (>99%) conviction rate and uses mandatory penal labour, Japan, therefore, has a modern slavery problem.
There's a few issues with this, the generally accepted consensus for Japan's high conviction rate is that it can be explained almost entirely by the fact that Japan's prosecutors are underemployed and overworked and this is something that can be trivially seen, e.g., while the 42% of US felony arrests result in prosecution the figure in Japan is only 17%, or while the US prosecutes 75% arrested for murder Japan only tries 43%. The implication is that the conviction rate is a result of prosecutors being incredibly selective of which cases they bring to trial, only selecting cases with strong evidence of wrongdoing with a high likelihood of a guilty plea in exchange for a more lenient sentence, rather than any nefarious corruption or underhanded tactics like wrongful confessions.
The second issue is that if the high conviction rate is a result of a need or desire for prison labour then it would also be visible in the incarceration rate, however this is not the case. Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. To emphasise just how few people Japan actually jails, let's look at some other countries countries. Incarceration rates are per 100k population: US: 639, England and Wales: 130, China: 122, Spain: 122, South Korea: 105, Canada: 104, France: 93, Hong Kong: 90, Italy: 89, Germany: 69, Japan: 38. Japan has half the prison population that the UK does while having twice the population, if they are jailing people with the intention of using them for slave labour they are doing a terrible job at it.
The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the conviction rate is irrelevant to the discussion, and while it's still entirely possible to argue that Japan has an unintentional modern slavery problem as a result of prison labour it seems less of an argument against Japan specifically and more of an issue with prison labour in general. But if the problem is with Japan specifically, just how big of a problem is it? Using the globalslaveryindex[0] mentioned in a parent comment we can take a ham fisted approach and simply assume that all Japanese prisoners are slaves, add the Japanese prison population (around 50k) to the estimated number of modern slaves, and, well, Japan still has an incredibly low number of modern slaves, lower than the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and South Korea despite being roughly twice the population of any of these countries, and a quarter of the number of modern slaves that the US has despite being half the population. While I don't agree with prison labour I also don't think it's modern slavery, but even assuming that it is it's incredibly hard to come to a conclusion where Japan looks worse than any other comparable country.
[0] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc...
- The paradox itself is that if the universe is both infinite and eternal then we shouldn't have a dark sky. This is 'trivially' solved by demonstrating that either of those conditions aren't true. The article opts to use the explanation given by Edgar Allan Poe to demonstrate this, which is that the universe has a finite age and the speed of light is finite so there's only a finite amount of observable universe, which gives us a universe which was darker in the past and one that will only get brighter in the future as more of the universe becomes observable. This has some problems of course and the model Poe would have been working with would have been one of a cyclic universe of eternal growth and decay. This leads us to the Big Bang theory.
>> The redshift hypothesised in the Big Bang model [...]
>Doesn't sound to me like it's more than a hypothesis, but I could be wrong.
The way the Big Bang theory resolves the paradox is similar to that of how Poe resolved it, with a finite cap on the age of the universe there's only a finite amount of observable universe, and similar to Poe's explanation it presents a problem in that a younger universe would have been immensely bright. However this new issue is resolved through the explanation of the expansion of space which can be observed through the redshift of distant galaxies.
As we do observe a dark sky we know the hypothesis that led to the paradox can't be true, namely that the universe is both infinite and eternal, so the question is less about why we have a dark sky and more about what possible alternate hypotheses resolve the paradox. While the Big Bang theory is just a theory it's important to remember that proof is reserved for maths, a theory is a hypothesis backed up by observational data. General relativity led to the hypothesis of an expanding universe and this was something that was later observed from redshift measurements and from it we derive the Hubble–Lemaître law, that galaxies are moving away from earth with speeds proportional to their distance, in some cases faster than the speed of light, this alone fully resolves the paradox and crucially the Big Bang theory is not incompatible with this observation.
- The struts of the secondary mirror cause diffraction spikes on all 18 segments which combine to give the final pattern seen, the horizontal spikes are caused specifically by the top strut in particular. This video mostly covers how JWST was focused but from 01:15-04:00 it has an excellent of how the pattern is formed.
- The term 'transmission line theory' (or even 'transmission' for that matter) doesn't appear to have been mentioned in the video at all[0], and this is a complaint that was also raised by Dave Jones[1] in his critique of sorts. The video is fundamentally about transmission line problems and the term is mentioned both in the description and the word document containing further analysis, but its omission does lend some credibility to the complaints in the parent comments that the video style is intentionally pedantic (it is a pure physics vs practical electrical engineering take after all) and presented as a controversy which comes off as a bit shallow as a result.
If one were to put on a tinfoil hat it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that the plan was to have a follow up video to settle the controversy with the gist of the video being about transmission line theory and concluding with a practical demonstration of the effect.
[0] I don't have the time to carefully watch a 15 minute video to verify this, and demonstrating a lack of evidence seems difficult, but the subtitles for the video can easily be downloaded with youtube-dl and then grepped or opened with a regular text editor. Note that these subtitles are manually written and not auto-generated by youtube, and while it's possible there's some differences in the script and what is said it seems unlikely.
youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
grep -i 'transmission' 'The Big Misconception About Electricity-bHIhgxav9LY.en.vtt'
[1] https://youtu.be/VQsoG45Y_00?t=1013 (16:53)
- The way gun suppressors work in movies and TV is complete fiction, in real life suppressors can attenuate gun shots by maybe 15-35 dB SPL at best. 140 dB SPL is the threshold at which sound causes pain, 120 dB SPL is the threshold that risks instantaneous noise-induced hearing loss, and most rifles and handguns using standard ammunition are in the 140-170 dB SPL range. Even with a suppressor the volume a typical gun produces is enough to be painful and to cause permanent hearing loss if no additional hearing protection is used. In the typical best case scenario using an extremely underpowered subsonic .22LR round with a suppressor a gun shot will still be in the 120 dB SPL range, and for reference, hunting even small muntjac deer with a .22LR would be considered inhumane and in many parts of the world (including many American states) it is illegal to do so. It is a round intended to shoot rodents and birds.
I realise this comment is a nitpick but it's something that needs to be brought up any time suppressors are brought up. The only relevance suppressors have on the gun control argument is that their use and sale means that gun operators have less risk of suffering from hearing loss (especially when shooting indoors in a range) and people living near shooting ranges are less likely to complain about noise, i.e., there's no public safety argument here, it's purely ideological, and that's fine if it's what you're going for but it's not a compelling argument or one that holds up to scrutiny. As a point of comparison, there's very little controversy over suppressors in Europe and typically no additional regulations are placed on their ownership beyond the regulations necessary to own the guns that they're used with.
- There's a good reason why criminals don't carry lockpicks around and that's because they're regulated, in much of the world mere possession of them outside of your residence is a criminal offence and even in places where you can carry them legally they not only show prior intent, their use in criminal activities carries a charge just like breaking and entering. I'd also argue that being stuck picking a stubborn lock for 2-3 minutes is significantly more suspicion arousing than the literal seconds it takes to break a window but that's neither here nor there.
On the rationality of having locks when criminals can very easily break a window, the old saying that locks keep honest people out rings true. Locks do serve a purpose even if they do very little to slow criminals down. To bring the analogy full circle fingerprint readers always seemed like windows to me in how easy they are to bypass, luckily they're more of a luxury than a necessity. :-)
- I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when applied by certain people to certain languages or peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45 minute talk he did on the book as well (0).
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
(0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds
(1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf
(2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...
(3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...
- This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian speakers view the world differently because of the separation of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language speakers) blind to the colour голубой as it's grouped together with 'blue'?
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.
- I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
- It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow. Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used: light, dark, red, and yellow.
After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
- When looking at nutrient rich vegetables serving size has to be considered, it's going to be difficult to eat 100g nuts or of parsley in a meal for instance. This is less of an issue with things like potatoes or bulky leafy greens like kale but is still something to keep in mind. Another thing to consider is overlap between what types of nutrients you're getting, it's sensible to say that diets should be balanced but when you're talking about fruit/vegetables it's a necessity as they're often not good for broad nutrients or mineral content.
In terms of nutritional value let's start with 100g of cooked kale, you're getting vitamin a/c/k and some manganese but not much else. Broccoli has vitamin a/c/k/folate. Bell peppers vitamin a/c/k/b6. Potatoes vitamin c/b6, potassium/manganese. Tomatoes vitamin a/c. Avocados have vitamin c/e/k/b6/folate/pantothenic acid and some potassium. Olives have iron and copper.
At this point a pattern is emerging, significant amounts of vitamins a/c/k, some folate, some b vitamins if you're lucky, and mineral wise it's mostly manganese and potassium. Spinach and mushrooms are much more interesting, with spinach having vitamins a/e/k/riboflavin/b6/folate, calcium/iron/magnesium/potassium/manganese. White mushrooms have vitamin riboflavin/niacin/pantothenic acid, iron/potassium/copper/selenium.
It should be noted that these are all 100g servings (cooked where appropriate) which might not be ideal. So while kale is indeed incredibly rich in vitamins a and k (1021% of your daily value in just 100g of kale!) it's really, really not useful to you if you're already eating even just reasonable amounts of vegetables, as leafy greens especially usually contain lots of vitamins a/c/k. Something that is lacking in most of these is minerals in any significant quantity, nuts in general do a lot better with a 100g serving of most types of nuts providing 15-85%~ of your DV in minerals, but it shouldn't need to be explained that eating 500 kcal of nuts to get close to your DV in minerals isn't ideal.
When compared to meat or animal products liver would be the gold standard, with 100g of beef liver containing significant amounts of vitamin a and all of the b vitamins as well as folate, along with large quantities of iron/phosphorus/zinc/copper/selenium along with some manganese and potassium. With just 100g of liver and 100g of kale you're going to get roughly >85% of your DV vitamin and mineral needs with the exception of vitamins d/e and magnesium/potassium. Other cuts of meat (beef/chicken/pork) or animal products aren't quite as good but you'll still be getting decent amounts of b vitamins (sans folate) and iron/phosphorus/zinc/selenium and calcium from cheese specifically. With fish/seafood it depends on the type but sardines are a particularly good example providing lots of vitamin d/niacin/b12 and reasonable amounts of calcium/iron/phosphorus/potassium/copper/manganese/selnium.
This comment is all over the place so to try to conclude and put it more succinctly, the common deficiencies that vegetarians face (vitamins d/b12, calcium, iron, zinc, omega-3) shouldn't be dismissed so easily especially when trying to make the point that meat contains 'minimal' nutritional value. Even nutrients that are commonly used to fortify foods (calcium, iron, thiamine, niacin, folate, vitamin d, iodine) are all readily found in meat/animal products with the exception of folate (it's abundant in liver but common in vegetables).
- If you're comfortable working with sqlite files it's an incredibly simple process to bypass any account registration or need to ever connect the device to the internet, this should work on all models new and old.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1998068#p...
- It could go several ways but I can't see a judge wanting to entertain complaints that a new GPL version isn't to your liking if the changes are minor, especially so since it's always going to remain valid in GPLv3.
If the FSF goes rogue and changes the GPL to be incredibly restrictive (i.e., allowing proprietary redistribution, and I realise this can be considered permissive..) it might be possible to get it to be ruled invalid defaulting to the more permissive licence, especially if you have deep pockets, or if the FSF change the licence to be ridiculously permissive like 0BSD then it's not going to be legal in countries like Germany, either way any major change is likely to result in an international enforcement nightmare.
- I get that the point here is that perf could relicence to GPLv2+ to resolve this issue (although this works both ways, libbfd could dual licence as GPLv2+/GPLv3+) and it could be left at just that, but I have to nitpick this:
>The blame is pretty clearly on the people who editted the license text to be GPL2 only.
They edited the licence, yes, but the FSF explicitly wants you to do this to make your intention clear(1). When you licence software under the GPLv2 (or 3, etc) you have a choice of 'GPLv2 only' or 'GPLv2, or any later version', however since the licence text only states 'Version 2' with the old short labels being just 'GPL-2.0' there's some ambiguity on whether you mean GPL-2.0-only or GPL-2.0-or-later.
The default assumption should always be v2-only, however as (at the time) the FSF were still recommending the short label of GPL-2.0 and the issue of using v2-only or v2-or-later wasn't really an issue you had a lot of v2 licenced software and patches using the default unedited licence with the FSF short label of GPL-2.0 and this is purely the fault of the FSF. It wasn't until the GPLv3 came around which some people didn't like (notably the Linux kernel, which is probably why perf is v2-only) that you got people editing their licences to make the intention clear, although for many projects they had no choice in the matter as changing to v2-or-later would require permission from every copyright holder that had contributed code to that project, again this is partially the fault of the FSF for not having enough foresight or making the choice of -only or -or-later more explicit and clear.
P.S. if you already know the history and context here this post probably seems a little patronising and I apologise for that.
(1) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/identify-licenses-clearly.html
- The east/west distinction probably isn't useful here beyond the observation that black mustard seeds are the hottest followed by brown and then yellow mustard seeds, and that western mustards tend to use yellow only or yellow and brown seeds. Something like English mustard is notoriously hot for instance.
- Slightly off-topic and two days late to the conversation but: every single country in the world(1) restricts private ownership of guns, it's not a useful metric when talking about gun ownership.
In England and Wales guns are heavily restricted but aren't outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain. Effectively every adult that isn't disqualified from owning a gun (medical reasons, >3 years in prison, etc) should be able to obtain a smoothbore shotgun licence provided the security/storage requirements can be met, this may be very difficult for younger people living in shared accommodation or in very developed city centres but still. Once a shotgun licence is obtained you can effectively own as many shotguns as you can securely store.
The firearms licence in comparison is much harder to obtain, you need to demonstrate a legitimate reason to own each specific firearm (i.e., land you have permission to hunt on, sports shooting at a club), the local police issuing the licence have a lot more say on whether they issue licences or allow amendments to the licences (i.e., owning more firearms), etc, but it's in principle not much different to a shotgun licence and if you already hold a shotgun licence you very likely can obtain a firearms licence for a very limited number of firearms. In American terminology a shotgun licence is shall-issue where a firearms licence (and amendments) are may-issue.
When it comes to stats on whether a licence is granted(2), in 2019 98% of shotgun licences that were applied for were issued and 97% of firearms licences that were applied for were issued.
This is a very different story to guns being outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain, gun ownership in the UK is low partially because of these restrictions but also because there's no gun culture to speak of. In comparison to countries like Iran, China, Japan, much of Asia and Africa, etc, we're extremely liberal with gun ownership, private gun ownership in Japan is almost unheard of and it's effectively prohibited for the general population for example.
These things have to be taken into account when talking about whether a country restricts/bans guns, because otherwise there's only a handful of countries that have no restrictions on guns. Gun ownership may not be trivial in the countries you've lived in but it's at least legal for the general population.
(1) We can get into the semantics of how restricted guns are in the USA and how this changes between cities/counties/states but as private sale/transfer of guns are effectively unrestricted and the right to gun ownership is constitutionally protected we can say that the USA (and Yemen, arguably South Sudan and Greenland as well) may as well not restrict private gun ownership
(2) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- Do you have a particular timestamp where you're hearing that? To me it sounds like he's pronouncing it the same way that Stallman does.
- Those are some of the hardest languages to learn but that's only really true for a monolingual English speaker.
When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.
For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.
- There are plenty of unofficial records and leader boards for typing speeds where qwerty typists are just as capable (more so even due to sheer availability) as Dvorak typists at hitting 200+wpm, and while that alone shouldn't be used to judge the quality of a particular layout it shouldn't be ignored that there's no difference in attainable max speeds done in short bursts. That says nothing about sustained typing of course, but I strongly suspect if you're already a competent and fast typist in qwerty you'll be comparably as fast in Dvorak and vice versa.
- It's easy to predict things correctly when you control what your son will use, e.g., 'my son won't use a landline', well yes, you cancelled your home landline before your son was born. The original prediction was that most people and most businesses would stop using landlines but he concedes his son might still use a landline in an office some day and yet still considers the original prediction to be correct. The same is true for phone numbers, dedicated cameras, mechanical harddrives, arguably prime time tv but I can't really blame him here. Theatres are considered TBD but it took a pandemic that also shut near everything else down for much of the world, many businesses are in for a rough shake up.
The crazier predictions are ones that didn't come to fruition line no more floating window managers or mice and people no longer building desktop pcs, or ones the author still thinks are going to happen like no more wired internet connections.
- Sorry about the links, if you have a library card from England, Scotland, or Wales your library most likely subscribes and you should be able to login using your library card number, outside of those countries there's a chance your library subscribes and you may be able to login but probably not. I did try to find an entry on Wiktionary but couldn't find one, although this time I found an entry on another dictionary that does appear to be accessible:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...
The quotations on the OED are in a similar Middle English time period from 950 to 1325, and the forms the OED lists are as follows:
Forms: Old English–Middle English wǽpman, wǽpnman, wǽpen-, wépenmon, Middle English wepman, ( Orm. weppmann), weopmonne, wepmon(ne, wapmon, wapman.
Etymology: Old English wǽpnman , < wǽpn weapon n. (= membrum virile ) + man man n.1 Compare Old English wǽpned adjective, male.
So it likely comes from 'wæpnedmann' but I couldn't find anything explicitly for that (or variations on spelling), maybe OE is a little too old for the OED or as you say maybe it just isn't that well attested, the closest I could find was the following:
OE tr. Alexander's Let. to Aristotle (1995) §29. 242 Ða gesawe we þær ruge wifmen, & wæpned men wæron hie swa ruwe & swa gehære swa wildeor [L. pilosos in modo ferarum toto corpore].
- Werman might be barking up the wrong tree but you do get wapman (literally penis man, same root as weapon) showing up alongside wifmann. That says nothing about how common it was or whether it was the preferred form over man, but it's something.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/229884 (woman): OE (Northumbrian) Lindisf. Gospels: Matt. xix. 4 Quia qui fecit ab initio masculum et feminam fecit eos : forðon seðe worohte from fruma woepenmonn & wifmonn geworhte hia.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/225576 (wapman): 1123 Anglo-Saxon Chron. (Laud. MS.) Forbearn eall meast se burh of Lincolne & micel ungerime folces wæpmen & wimmen forburnon.
- Various patches have existed for at least a decade but every time they're proposed some issue is found and they're not merged so the goal posts shift from 'just write your own patch' to 'just become a Gnome maintainer' with no guarantees that you'll get the assistance you need to implement the feature or whether it'll even be merged, and fair enough, the Gnome team really don't owe anybody anything, but in that case getting annoyed that the community keeps referencing a 17 year old issue is just a natural part of the exchange.
- Nobody is lying, the redacted agreements do indeed show that the UK agreement is dated to a day after the EU agreement but that says nothing about when money changed hands or prior deals or commitments. You get a 3 month difference between the UK and the EU because the UK had an agreement with AstraZeneca all the way back on the 17th of May (note: June -> Aug is not 3 months, that's sloppy reporting from your linked website) as can be seen here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/funding-and-manufacturing...
or here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/17/uk-plans-38m...
and this is on top of funding Oxford had received from the UK prior to the Oxford-AZ deal. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-03-24-oxfords-covid-19-resear...
Yet the publicly announced deal with the EU was on the 27th of August: https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/eu-pays-e3...
It should be noted at this point that France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had jointly negotiated a deal with AZ in June but my understanding is that after an EU27 vote the EC took over negotiations and you get the final (and first for the EU) deal in August.
Why the redacted UK agreement is dated 28th of August is anybodies guess but some things should be made clear, firstly that the UK started funding AZ in May and not late August, secondly that they did this a month before other EU countries had reached an agreement with AZ, and finally that the EC getting involved added a further 2 months to the negotiation.
- Minor nitpick but the UK signed a deal with AZ a couple of days before the US, it was the EU that was 3 months late to the party.
Clicking through your second link you get to the article about the US deal on the 21st of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-scores-1b-fr...
and again for the UK deal on the 17th of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-signing-up-to-deli...
- The GDPR wasn't written from scratch, we previously had the Data Protection Act which offered many of the same rights as the GDPR like the protection of personal information and prevention of disclosure to third parties, the right to access data a company holds on you (both of which date back to 1984), the right to opt-out of direct marketing, the right to removal of data that may cause distress, etc, which while a little dated is still far ahead of what most of the US has today.
The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.
- There's also Carpalx which is a parametric model rather than AI but in general goes into a lot of information on keyboard layouts in general.
- 11k Lines of code seems like a lot especially if you're insisting that it was just wholly ripped out of an existing codebase but that isn't the case here at all and even Oracle make that clear in their analogy:
>It says what Google has done is like taking key parts of those books — chapter titles, character names, the first sentence of each paragraph — writing a new book, and selling it.
If you're reimplementing APIs as Google has done then at some point you _need_ to copy the structure of the existing API, the method signatures, the names of the methods, the descriptions of what they do, etc, and while you may be able to dig out a thesaurus to claim enough original creative work at some point it's all for moot because there's only so much you can do before you'll start infringing upon Oracles creative expression of their API which severely limits what you are able to do with it.
If Oracle wins this case it will have huge implications for any reverse engineered work like Wine or graphics drivers where such projects will cease to exist, because it won't actually matter if it's 100% your own implementation as any interface to existing APIs or hardware _will_ infringe upon other companies copyright.
As far as Youtube Content ID goes it doesn't actually matter if it's 3 seconds or 3 minutes of copyrighted work, if it's matched then Youtube will let those companies claim revenue from your video which may be an hour long. The alternative here is the legal system and courts which may absolutely agree that 3 seconds of use in an hour long video is fair use, but you're still going to end up in court to defend that usage. It's unlikely that Oracle has enough sway to force Github to implement a similar content matching system but if they did it doesn't really matter what threshold the courts set for fair use for reimplementing APIs just like it doesn't matter for Youtube, best make sure all your repos don't use something like XMLHttpRequest() or your repo may disappear, and of course if Oracle doesn't have the sway to force Github into implementing such a system you're still going to have to go check through all your your repos because if they feel you've infringed upon their creative work they'll be able to issue takedown requests and your only recourse will be through the courts.
In a purely private healthcare system (which doesn't exist in the developed world) the politics are firstly whether you can pay and secondly how much you can pay. No point offering free dieting and lifestyle advice when risky weight loss surgery (which has a notoriously low success rate) offers instant success, got a bad back or knee? Try out this risk free* (*not actually risk free) surgery! It wasn't that long ago in the US that getting cancer without health insurance was a death sentence, and that again is a political choice, one that the US government reneged on.