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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • The problem is that all of this happened outside the law. Calling it a “DMCA takedown” is misleading, because it’s not making use of the DMCA’s mechanisms. There actually are hefty penalties for false DMCA claims, but only if you file them with a court.

    I assume, Valve may be liable as well, for distributing copyrighted material (especially after they’ve been notified of it). At the very least, YouTube also has a system like that, where they allow claimants to bully creators with no repercussions.
    Basically, Valve, YouTube et al need their own copyright takedown system to be preferrable for companies, so that those use it instead of filing an official DMCA claim.

    Of course, the root cause of the problem is still the DMCA.


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzit's a long distance relationship
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    4 days ago

    I’m open for counterarguments, but I always felt this was a silly way of looking at things. You cannot measure stuff at the quantum level without significantly altering what you measured. (You can never measure without altering what you measured, since we typically blast stuff with photons from a light source to be able to look at it, but for stuff that’s significantly larger than photons, the photons are rather insignificant.)

    As such, you can look at measuring quanta in two ways:

    1. Either the quantum had the state that you end up measuring all along. It is only “undetermined”, because strictly nothing can measure it before you do that first measurement.
    2. Or you can declare it to have some magical “superposition”, from which it jumps into an actual state in the instant that you do the measurement.

    Well, and isn’t quantum entanglement evidence for 1.? You entangle these quanta, then you measure one of them. At this point, you already know what the other one will give as a result for its measurement, even though you have not measured/altered it yet.
    You can do the measurement quite a bit later and still get the result that you deduced from measuring the entangled quantum. (So long as nothing else altered the property you want to measure, of course…)


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzit's a long distance relationship
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    4 days ago

    The analogy that makes most sense to me so far, is this:
    You rip a photograph in half and put both halves into envelopes. Now you send one of the envelopes to your friend in Australia. You open the other envelope. Boom! Instantaneous knowledge of what’s in the envelope in Australia. Faster than light!!!

    In quantum terms, you “rip a photograph in half” by somehow producing two quanta, which are known to have correlated properties. For example, you can produce two quanta, where one has a positive spin and the other a negative spin, and you know those to be equally strong. If you now measure the spin of the first quantum, you know that the other has the opposite spin.







  • Well, there was an effort to solve it on a technological level, via the Do Not Track header (DNT). The idea was that when users actively signal they don’t want to be tracked, then even in weaker jurisdictions, you can’t justify doing it anyways.

    But Google and Facebook said outright that they would not honor DNT, which meant virtually no webpages could honor it, since Google Analytics and the Facebook Like-button were omnipresent on the web at that point.
    And then Microsoft killed it off for good by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer. That meant the DNT header did not anymore necessarily represent a user actively choosing to not be tracked, so it became meaningless in court.

    Well, and after that had failed, the EU came about with the GDPR to solve it with laws.
    But here it also needs to be said that a cookie banner is effectively only required, if you implement tracking.[1]
    But of course, the ad industry did not want webpage owners to realize they could avoid needing a cookie banner by removing ads or going for non-tracking ads, so they spread a whole bunch of FUD.

    And now we’re here, with cookie banners virtually everywhere, which are often not even GDPR-compliant either (like the PC Gamer cookie banner here), since it’s supposed to be just as easy to decline, as it is to accept. If it is not, then that’s not legally consent, because consent has to be freely given.

    TL;DR: Ad industry bad.


    1. Cookie banners are only ever relevant for personal data (because the GDPR is). And you don’t either need them when the user has implicitly given their consent, for example when they put something into their shopping cart, then they obviously consent to you storing their shopping cart contents for the purpose of purchasing those items. ↩︎



  • Yeah, and you don’t have to know which fork to choose. Only the compatible fork will show up in the search.

    (I was going to recommend that, but had something in the back of head, that you needed a manual step to enable the configuration. But I just saw that this is described in the Plasma 5 version, not the Plasma 6 fork, so I guess, it’s not necessary anymore…)



  • I believe, that’s something which became impossible with Wayland?

    But it wasn’t very good under X11 either. Even back then, it was much less clunky to use the various KWin scripts, which offer tiling. Well, and by now Plasma has built-in semi-automatic tiling, which those scripts basically just configure, so they do now feel quite smooth.






  • Yeah, one of the largest pieces of software humanity has created, next to Google Chrome and the Linux kernel, which are all around 30 million lines of code.

    To give a frame of reference: With a team of 5 full-time devs at my dayjob, we can dish out a codebase of about 20 thousand lines over the course of two years.

    A browser might be somewhat quicker to build, because the requirements are relatively clear at this point and you can start implementing many standards in parallel. But yeah, it’s still just an insane amount of code.