It’s a myth that the GDPR is a useful tool in such cases. You know the expression “protected by copyright”? That’s how lawyers protect data.

The GDPR grants people rights over data concerning them, similar to how copyright grants rights over data. That means 2 things.

1. It’s rarely obvious that some data processing is illegal. It’s not obvious if it happens without consent. But even so, you often don’t need explicit consent to use someone’s data. EG when we write about French president Macron, then that is Macron’s data under the GDPR. Of course, you don’t need his consent to discuss or report on politics, and so you usually don’t need his consent to discuss his person.

2. Enforcement is difficult and expensive. Think about the problems the copyright industry has. Surveillance tools like Content ID can at least rely on knowing what exactly they are looking for. Besides, much of the world has similar laws supported by influential industries. Little chance to do that for GDPR.

Basically, using GDPR to protect actual secrets is like using copyright for the purpose.

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

/futurama

The Devs pulled out of France because of government pressure, but it wasn’t banned.

https://proton.me/blog/grapheneos-france

Good thing the EU has the GDPR, which solved this problem once and for all.

Sensible strategy for both sides, though I think Disney was a bit more desperate for a deal. Licensing characters makes it easier for Disney to win Fair Use cases. Meanwhile, if Fair Use is beaten back, then OpenAI may be able to finally create a moat for itself. Challengers would have to either obtain a license or employ expensive filtering. Both would make it rather harder for start-ups.

People want goods and services, as well as jobs. Politicians need to make that happen, and so they listen to the people who know how to make that happen. Sometimes that goes wrong because eventually employers don’t have quite the same goals as their employees. There is no good alternative, though.

One player that clearly had a lot of input is the (news) media. EG the press publishers want to license their old news articles for AI training. They can do that thanks to EU copyright law. That’s free money. But news articles talk about living people, which means they contain personal data.

Despite competition from social media, the trad media, including press publishers, is still extremely influential. Politicians need their favor to get votes.

I don’t see how Big Tech is getting much here. Of course, NGOs need the media’s favor just as much as politicians. Pointing the finger at some nebulous forces from outside is certainly the safest choice, politically speaking.

Plutonium-238’s half-life is 87.7 years, Americium-241 is 432.6 years. Which… is almost 5 times longer, so… not sure why that’s cringe?

What’s cringe is the word “staggering”. Natural radioactive isotopes have half-lives on the order of billions of years. All elements heavier than iron are created in supernovae. Billions of years have passed since the novae that created that heavy elements now on earth. Anything with shorter half-lives is no longer around. (More correctly, one should talk decay chains.)

What’s staggering is that these isotopes are available at all. They are artificially created in nuclear reactors. Mass production of Pl-238 began only during WW2 for bombs. That’s almost a half-life ago. The shorter half-life makes the availability of Pl-238 much more impressive.

I believe they’re referring to the fact that it’s not an element of major topic. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it.

There are over 100 named elements. I don’t think I could name half of them. Americium is relatively prominent because of it’s use in smoke detectors. And while I’m at it: Americium is the element. Americium-241 is a specific isotope; a specific variant, chemically identical to other variants but with slightly different physical properties.

There are a number of isotopes suitable for RTGs. It’s a matter of trade-offs. There’s half-life, which is basically how fast the properties of the material change. There’s also energy density and how bad the radiation is for the device. And always, there’s cost. Fun fact, in Chernobyl they did try robots, but the electronics could not withstand the radiation. People don’t withstand it either, but there’s a lot of them.

Yes.

Shout-out for The Radioactive Boy Scout. (RIP)

Yes. And also:

Its half-life is a staggering 432 years, five times longer than plutonium-238.

Cringe…

AI slop?

My suspicion is always the copyright industry. That’s where you got a gazillion dollar financial interest in controlling the flow of information. Indeed, the lobby organization “Thorn” is a Hollywood creation.

It’s noteable how the language around copyright infringement has changed. The industry used to call it “theft”. Now they use the language of sexual assault and talk about “consent”. It’s very sexist, too. Poor, helpless women become victims of so-called “digital violence”. Kinda fits with that recent prosecution of a Redditor.

GEMA was created by the Nazis to take over pop culture. There’s a certain logic there.

Of course, under the Nazis you could be sent to camp if you belonged to the wrong subculture. So there is a difference. The rebels of the time listened to jazz, to swing. “Negro music” was the social media of that age, corrupting the youth.

Huh. I thought it was weed doing those things.

It’s weird, seeing this praised on Lemmy.

I’m wondering if the Fediverse has a future in Europe as such laws spread.

Nice try. But this is explicitly the “Authors’ Guild” and others.

Interesting to see the reactions here; how they differ from other lawsuits that pit “authors” and “artists” against tech companies.

I was just a little surprised to see the familiar name but I don’t quite remember why. Maybe because of the downvotes.

Oh. By Bruce Schneier.

Maybe it’s time to have a little think about that word, “influencer”, and how that is a job with which people make money.

Translation:

For when you have to move fast

The Böcker Agilo transports your up to 400 kg heavy treasures at 42 m/min - whisper quiet thanks to a 230 V electric motor.

“so far”