Best I’ve been able to explain it is that it’s a country build on hope and dreams, which are not compatible with reality and truth.

Well, who did you trust to build your hardware?

Depriving Russia of nuclear scientists, or capable people in general, might well be worth whatever wages they brought home.

If you want to bring the inter-european war into it I’m not sure if we can afford to be unpragmatic about this. By all accounts letting Russia bleed manpower in exchange for some small wages is well worth it. If you want to deprive them of money you really need to strike at their ability to export gas and oil at inflated prices. Advancing knowledge about fusion aids that goal, though the effects are likely (hopefully?) too late to matter.

That same description applies to downloading a zipped file.

And at this point it’s also code for ‘machine learning’.

Which really is just fancy statistics. Sometimes it’s barely more advanced than plain regression.

Reminds me of the time I did roughly the same thing trying to get people to move away from internet explorer.

I won’t pretend that its popularity is in any way proportional to its quality, but I enjoyed it and so did many others so she must have done something right. Calling a work that many people enjoy trash just sounds a bit elitist to me.

Feel free to call the author whatever you want though, at this point I’ve no respect left for her.

Just so I got this clear, making it illegal to tell advertisers when their ads are running next to dangerous or illegal content is a freedom of speech win?

I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.

I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.

Please tell me someone thought about a switch to take them offline.

Technically he was 19. Also under Dutch law the term rape would imply the use of force, which was either not the case or not considered proven hence why the sentence ended up being lowered.

Still awful. Just trying to get the fact straight so people can judge for themselves.

I think humans are mostly carbon-neutral, but decomposition might release gasses that are worse than just CO2. Burning them directly would probably be better.

The reason they have to include the type of tech in the law is because that tech made it possible for unskilled bad actors to get on it

Yeah, and that’s the part I don’t like. If you can’t define why it’s bad without taking into account the skill level of the criminal then I’m not convinced it’s bad.

As you point out defamation is already illegal and deliberately spreading false information about someone with the intent to harm their reputation is obviously wrong and way easier to define.

And is that not why you consider a painting less ‘bad’? Because it couldn’t be misconstrued as evidence? Note that the act explicitly says a digital forgery should be considered a forgery even when it’s made abundantly clear that it’s not authentic.

Fair, but then this law serves no purpose. The thing it was designed to prevent was already illegal.

The worrying aspect of these laws are always that they focus too much on the method. This law claims to be about preventing a particular new technology, but then goes on to apply to all software.

And frankly if you need a clause about how someone is making fake pornography of someone then something is off. Something shouldn’t be illegal simply because it is easy.

Deepfakes shouldn’t be any more or less illegal than photos made of a doppelgänger or an extremely photorealistic painting (and does photorealism even matter? To the victims, I mean.). A good law should explain why those actions are illegal and when and not just restrict itself to applying solely to ‘technology’ and say oh if it only restricts technology then we should be all right.

Unless you use a digital pen.

I’m not too sure being non-religious from the start would lead to better education. Seems to me that religion was quite a big driver behind early education. You’ll also have some trouble separating history religion and science at that point, people told each other stories about things that happened or how they thought things worked. Some of those stories are rather more fantastical than they needed to be, but how would you tell if there’s nothing to kickstart intellectual discourse in the first place?

And the whole religion stops crime through fear idea seems overly simplistic. It’s the same reasoning that bigger sentences would lower crime, and so far that hasn’t worked terribly well.

Possibly, but as long as they are not completely server-side (which they can’t be, they want to target people) then they are fighting on hostile ground.

Of course there are attempts to lock down PCs so that ad companies can tell it what to do (probably with some DRM argument), but we’re not there yet.

Well the upside is that they’re not actually trying to get it to stop, they’re just making an effort to please their customers.

That doesn’t sound like much of a change from the situation right now.