snickms's comments

These collection societies are actually the opposite of the mafia.

They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).

They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).

What if in the future we could examine the contents of a particular rock from space? Have instruments sensitive enough to detect the remnants of Vogon breath from their visit millions of years ago?

A pristine planet has value beyond 'I want this' IMO - it is an opportunity to perform experiments in an almost perfectly isolated test tube.

As a human, I also find it beautiful. As you say though, this is an anthropocentric view.

This mission is an incredible achievement. The images are as advertised (stunning) and I'm sure all the sciences - and even art - will benefit from the data.

What I find a little sad is that we seem incapable of doing this without leaving a particularly human signature wherever we go.

We arrived on Mars with jets of pollution https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25672/black-and-white-smoke-... followed by the dumping of the two pieces of trash required to enable the landing.

For all the data we have gained, we have lost a pristine planet - which makes me wonder if we are doing this at the right time.

Spoiler alert -

If you were looking for the controversial 'Harold was smitten in the eye by an arrow' scene, its at the '57' mark.

I'll leave it for others to decide what killed him, but from the lower part of the tapestry, battles in those days must have looked like hell itself.

[Edit] clarity

They should have explained that copyright belongs to every author and singling out one industry as being worthy of compensation works against the spirit of the treaty.

They could then explain how their content uses excerpts of copyrighted material to direct the curious to the source.

It should have then asked for legislation on what constitutes fair use in this context.

If the government insisted on fees, then they should have asked them why news businesses are more worthy of those fees than individuals.

> ...used to control politics in three major large democracies

Five eyes my foot.

As you have noted, three of them appear to be completely blind. If they cannot protect us from this, then what are they there for?

> The way some people are angry at google here reminds of of Brexit.

Indeed. Both are the result of flooding the media with specious arguments designed to make people fight over irrelevant details.

'Google is a grifter' 'The EU are robbing us of our NHS'

Google is not rich because of news articles. The NHS was not underfunded due to the EU.

Quite a few people here think that this legislation exists solely to prop up various News Corp outlets.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/11/26/coalition-news-corp-fun...

My neighbour used to have a Dyson leaf blower.

I would wake up thinking I was in the men's room.

To be fair, the Dyson model claims to heat and cool the air as well as filter it - unlike the DIY purifier.

I've used podman-compose for a few web projects. Rootless means you can't bind to privileged ports etc. but after a bit of fiddling I can now spin up my choice of DB/server/mock pretty quickly - just like I could with docker.

The lack of 'cannot connect to dockerd' mysteries makes for a much-improved developer experience if you ask me.

If those damned Argentinians would just mine bitcoin exclusively, we could all get on with our lives.

We also need to talk to South Africa about Youtube.

True - and even with this tremendous waste, it pays for itself. We have never looked beyond monetary return to justify the existence of anything and i fear we are doomed to stay that way.

Thankfully, renewables are becoming more profitable. If we built enough, we could power the USA. Imagine that.

All the bitcoin, teslas and visa transactions you would ever want, with no squabbling.

I think both the article and this comment miss the point. If we generated power cleanly in the first place, there would be far less environmental damage everywhere.

The fact that Bitcoin now uses half the power of Youtube (from a terribly unreliable estimate) should not be such a distraction from the real problem IMHO.

Terribly unreliable estimate:

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO. Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons.

FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country':

Google Guatemala

Bitcoin Argentina

Youtube South Africa (unreliable data)

[Edit] whoops - no references

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+total+power+cons...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Lately I've seen boxes marked with just the penis - no 'Amazon' at all.

If there were one video we could archive to describe the world as it is right now, this would be it IMHO.

Would it make sense for these companies to make bets against their customer's trades?

My guess it that the customers are wrong most of the time.

I'm not convinced that a plot formed openly on the internet actually qualifies as a conspiracy.

I'm sure things would have worked out differently for Nixon had he distributed a press release regarding an up-coming DNC burglary beforehand.

Its a little trickier in New Zealand, where one pulse means '9' :)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Zealand_Rotary_T...