ke9tv 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (191)

• On the post: GM Pinky Swears It Will Stop Selling Driving Data To Insurers After Lawsuits, NYT Bombshell

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2024 @ 10:34am

  If the OnStar hardware is aboard, it wouldn't astonish me if it phones home about driver behaviour even when the driver has not subscribed to the service nor agreed to such data sharing.

• On the post: Gov. Ron DeSantis Signs Age Verification Into Law Because Florida Is Supposedly ‘Free’

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2024 @ 10:30am

  I've even seen a right-wing argument that A4S4 must enshrine the political party because "Republican" is in the original Constitution with a capital R. (To Hell with the Fact that at the Time, English capitalized most Nouns, the way German does even in the present Day, and the Framers also capitalized Important Words.)

• On the post: Twitter’s Former Top Execs All Sue Elon Over Missing Severance

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2024 @ 11:54am

  Apricot. Emphasis on the 'ape'.

• On the post: Ridiculous: Journalist Held In Contempt For Not Revealing Sources

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 04 Mar, 2024 @ 08:21am

  I've heard fundamentalist preachers claim that earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, and so on are Divine retribution for society's tolerance of sin. The idea of a petty god exacting retribution upon the innocent for the sins of the guilty in their midst is quite often the justification offered for policing private morality. (I claim that a god so petty is unworthy of worship.)

• On the post: Protect Yourself From Sen. Mike Lee’s Anti-Porn PROTECT Act

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2024 @ 12:22pm

  The Rule of Goats gives rise, too often, to something that the ancient Greeks called a 'goat song.'

• On the post: Protect Yourself From Sen. Mike Lee’s Anti-Porn PROTECT Act

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2024 @ 12:19pm

  You remind me of a conversation with a Christian Nationalist: "Where the **** did you get that woke bull****?" "Uhm, the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6." "Liar! Jeezus would never say anything like that!"

• On the post: Why Isn’t Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned By The Public?

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2024 @ 12:07pm

  All that releasing the map will do is reveal that it's a lie. We already know that.

  Example: I know that Verizon is allowed to claim that they have fibre-to-the-home for the entirety of the township that I live in, because they have deployed FIOS in one tiny corner of it. Where I live - in an affluent suburban neighbourhood - they not only don't have FIOS deployed, they don't even have any working copper pairs for DSL. When my copper failed a few years ago, they simply gave me a deal on a wireless home terminal, and said that it would cost me some five-figure amount if I actually wanted my DSL repaired. Charter Spectrum lies about its deployment, but at least deigns to provide me with a mostly-working link, which is supposedy 300M/10M but actually performs about a tenth of that. And it's a mostly-working connection; it has at least an outage or two a month. (And its server appears to forget the MAC address of my cable modem about annually, necessitating a LENGTHY call with tech support to get it turned back on.) Their prevarication has been so bad that the state actually tried to revoke their business license a few years back, but was forced to cave because Charter was sure to retaliate by wrecking the network infrastructure on the way out, and so many customers have no alternative. (That is, the monopoly power of Charter exceeds the power of the state government to enforce the law.)

• On the post: A Swiftian Solution To Some Of Copyright’s Problems

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2024 @ 07:34am

  You can add me to the list of people that thought somehow the article was going to be about babies being served at fail-upwards brunches.

• On the post: Facial Recognition Rings Up Another False Arrest, Leading To The Accused Being Brutalized In Jail

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2024 @ 02:51pm

  The typos distract the reader - and I'm sure that Tim would rather fix them than leave them in place. I'll charitably assume that AC was ignorant of other ways to contact Tim that would have involved less public airing of the editorial gaffes.

• On the post: Cable Companies, Automakers Try To Derail FTC, FCC Quest To Kill Misleading Fees

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2024 @ 08:18am

  That will shift most consumer protection to the handful of states that actually still care about such things.

  Presuming that the Federal courts don't find that the Supremacy Clause doesn't preempt the state regulations. I can easily see certain Justices finding that nobody has enforcement authority.

• On the post: ‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 02 Feb, 2024 @ 12:28pm

  Name of my next garage band!

• On the post: Americans Received 55 Billion Robocalls In 2023, A 9% Jump From 2022

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2024 @ 01:09pm

  Uhm, that was Karl's point:

  we’ve somehow normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, and marketers have made the U.S.’ primary voice communication platform largely unusable.

• On the post: New Year’s Message: Moving Fast And Breaking Things Is The Opposite Of Tech Optimism

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2024 @ 12:43pm

  About the only thing that I don't like about the treatment of offensive comments here is that I still get hit with all the backscatter. Please, guys, flag the trolls, don't feed them.

• On the post: Indiana’s Top Court Adds More Due Process To Forfeiture, Says A Jury Needs To Be Part Of The Process

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2023 @ 11:09am

  State forfeitures require a jury trial

  State civil forfeitures require a jury trial? No problem, just make all civil forfeitures federal.

• On the post: Judge Dismisses Most Of The First Of The Many ‘How Dare AI Train On My Material’ Lawsuits

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 01 Nov, 2023 @ 09:51am

  The lawyers for the plaintiffs are claiming victory because of the one claim being allowed to go to discovery, but this is a pretty embarrassing outcome for them overall.

  On the contrary, this is a major victory for the lawyers. There is at least one claim standing, so defendants didn't manage to have the whole case dismissed out of hand. The remaining defendants will now be subject to the ruinous expense of discovery and motion practice, with the prospect of statutory damages looming over their heads if they blink (because any stumble in the motion practice can result in a default judgment). Plaintiffs are now in a great position to extortnegotiate a settlement.

• On the post: Every Year Like Clockwork The Telecom Industry Lies And Claims Broadband Prices Are Dropping

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 19 Oct, 2023 @ 05:32am

  Verizon can't even manage to get a working wire to my house. (I had an old-school copper pair once upon a time, but it failed, and Verizon wanted a couple thousand dollars to fix it. Right up until it failed, they continued to bill me a 'universal service fee'; I don't know what universal service that supposedly subsidized.) A couple of companies claim that I'm in their 5G service area, but the wireless home terminal that kept my phone service going never detects it. So it's Charter Spectrum's aging copper plant, or nothing. Charter and Verizon both tell the regulators that my neighbourhood is provisioned with fiber. It isn't. But they get away with it because a couple of business on the opposite end of the township have fiber, so they can report provisioning the whole town. And this is a fairly wealthy and fairly dense suburban area, not out in the boonies.

• On the post: Every Year Like Clockwork The Telecom Industry Lies And Claims Broadband Prices Are Dropping

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 19 Oct, 2023 @ 05:23am

  For a while, some of the cable providers added on a service fee for a customer-provided cable modem, which was actually higher than the price of renting the modem.

• On the post: Court Dismisses Medieval Times’ Trademark Suit Against Its Own Employee’s Union

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2023 @ 08:13am

  There is but one Criterion: "One criteria" is inferia.

• On the post: It’s Beyond Stupid That Robocallers And Lobbyists Have Made Our Voice Networks Almost Unusable

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 26 Sep, 2023 @ 02:19pm

  I had a repeat scammer spoofing my boss's number for several months. It got bad enough that I told my boss, "please just text or email, I'll call you back," and explained why. This is why whitelisting doesn't work - the data on who called you (and had the call answered) has leaked from the carriers (owing to atrocious IT security) on a number of occasions, and the sophisticated scammers can buy it.

• On the post: Authors Guild, Jealous Of Other Terrible Author Lawsuits Against AI, Decides To Join In The Party

  

  ke9tv ( profile ), 26 Sep, 2023 @ 02:12pm

  The model of 'what words follow other words' winds up being complex and subtle, and in fact can pair words that never appear adjacent in its input corpus, because they appear in similar contexts to other words that do. If it were 'format shifting' as you claim, it would regurgitate entire paragraphs and pages from the corpus presented to it, but that's not how it behaves in practice. At the other end of the spectrum, if it were simply 'what words follow other words' without a deep model of context, we'd get Mark V. Shaney. Once a model has been built up out of the prose from tens of thousands of authors, I'd imagine that any author's individual contribution would be so minuscule a fraction of the whole that any infringement ought to be de minimis. But 'de minimis' appears to be a foreign concept to modern copyright law, in whch Authors' Guild seems to feel free to sue a human author for having the temerity to write a book after having read books written by its members. That sort of assertion brings to mind the mental contamination theory of USL v BSDI - which fortunately got laughed out of court.

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