The commonly used optical disk technologies degrade over time. CD-RW more rapidly than CDR. It’s even worse for higher-density media.

Paper doesn’t last centuries. Anyway, punched cards don’t have a storage density that’s adequate for modern data volumes. You need something that’ll durably store nanometre-sized marks.

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

In some cases we do. For example, the documents at Pompeii, those at Qumran, and other rare instances where documents have been preserved from the time they’re written. It’s also true that we have far more copies than originals, and that we’ve lost most of the works of many ancient authors.

They got Robert Maxwell for it. He wasn’t at all poor.

Gaining money from someone else by lying and/or deception. The legal term for that is fraud-- in this case, wire fraud.

Only if Guido developed Python with the specific and exclusive intent being that it should be used for that purpose, and even then it wouldn’t be an open-and-shut case. And since it was developed over 25 years ago, that’s more than a bit unlikely.

The “selling things online” idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That’s not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it’s often the case that it’s not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it’s executed.

He also would have to make sure the distribution of song plays over time looks like what would be done by actual humans. Once every 5 minutes, 24/7 is easy to detect. And there should be abandonments, interrupted sessions, etc.

And yet Xitter, Farcebook and similar platforms still publish their stats as if all their users are real human beings. So why isn’t that fraud?

Maybe it is in the contract or EULA that you can’t do this sort of thing already though

Then that would be a civil matter and he wouldn’t have been arrested for it.

If some hawker comes up to me and pushes a bunch of flowers in my face while I’m out walking, I’m not obligated to pay for smelling them. And if they’re sufficiently aggressive, they’re committing assault.

They are being paid by third parties to shove something in your face that you didn’t come to see in the first place. They’re not entitled to earn a cent from that, regardless of what bait they choose to place in the trap.

Who elected them and who consented to this manipulative, intrusive arrangement?

If they want payment, they can require registration, agreement to payment and authentication. Nothing’s stopping them. If they put something on the open web and try to monetize it, nobody owes them a living. If I put a display in a shop window, and include wording that says that looking at the display means you’re obligated to also hear a sales pitch, everyone will rightly tell me to fuck off.

Choosing not to load potential spyware, malware and bloatware while looking at free content is no more piracy than is crossing the street while shopping to avoid a tout.

If someone puts up a billboard containing advertising, I have no obligation to look at it.

If there’s a full-page ad in a magazine, I’m perfectly free to tear out that page so my parakeet has something to shit on.

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

The main cause of fatal accidents is driver distraction. Anything that adds to it is moving in the wrong direction.

They should also ban the use of tablet computers in place of proper displays and controls in vehicles.

Most of the microplastics in human bodies come from the wearing down of car and truck tires.

Special knowledge that comes from media that millions of people are exposed to, in a form that any anonymous asshole can easily fabricate. Really fucking esoteric.

A series of null results is all we have regarding the hypothesis that winged monkeys can fly out of my arse as well, or the hypothesis that the pyramids were built by those same winged monkeys in exchange for pastrami sandwiches from Canters. Beyond a certain point, absence of evidence can be construed as evidence of absence, particularly when the test is specifically meant to detect a particular phenomenon.

Hmm, in that case, it sounds like detrumpification will mean Haldol for every MAGA.

Dream on, mate.

I’ve known people with basic scientific educations who still refuse to accept the fact that a few milliwatts of RF energy cannot ionize anything, let alone tweak your somatic DNA. If that did happen, broadcast radio and TV would be thousands of times more deadly, and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.