I know someone who works in a university group related to privacy issues. He refuses to have a smartphone because of the ease which which almost anyone can track you and your activities. I think he has an old flip phone.

“Whatabout…”

But how much do IP laws actually protect the little guy? When a large corporation can bankrupt me by prolonging litigation until I have nothing left, what leverage do I really have?

There are certainly cases where small creators and inventors were able to overcome this disadvantage, but I suspect that they are the tiny minority, celebrated when they do achieve it.

I guess if you can’t rely on human intelligence, you have to hope that artificial intelligence can do the job.

Lovely troll!

They have also announced that if they have to reduce or stop production because of the current tariffs, they will continue to pay all of their employees.

All of their ice cream is also made in nut free factories, so that people with nut allergies can safely eat it. I’m not sure, but that may be the only ice cream that makes such a guarantee.

When I go into a Costco, I take a minute to look at the board showing the pictures names of long-time employees. At my local one, they have about 15 people who have been working there for over 30 years.

Met a woman who had been a Costco employee for 25 years. In addition to everything else, she got 6 weeks of paid holidays a year. How many other retail employers come anywhere close to that?

It’s incumbent upon every member of society to protect the weakest and most powerless, or else you are complicit in wielding the boot.

Isn’t the money from selling microsoft products enough?

“Enough money” is a phrase that simply doesn’t make sense for a lot of people, especially the sociopaths that run companies.

When I was in grade 9, in 1977, my science teacher told us about his solar panels. He was projecting that they would pay off the investment in about 20 years. How much better must that be now (and we are talking about Ontario, Canada, hardly the best place for solar power)?

• We Have Ways of Making You Talk
• Battleground
• The Rest is Classified
• The History of English
• Ehrman Podcast (Christianity from an atheist expert in the New Testament)

Definitely a thing for days like Valentine’s.

I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.

Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).

I hate when a website allows me to deselect corporate partners who have access to my data, but rather than deselecting all of them it offers me the chance to manually select 600 or 800 one at a time.

I suspect that it was a defense mechanism due to her experience of many older men trying to hit on her. Better not to even open the door.

My ex, visiting Canada from Japan, once complained that there are too many trees.

Because he has the knowledge and experience to completely understand the final product. It used an approach that he hadn’t thought of, that is better suited to the problem.

Even if he works twice as much as one of his employees, which I do not concede, he is being paid 500 or 1,000 times as much. For that much money, I would expect nothing less than 24/7.

I was talking to someone who does software development, and he described his experiments with AI for coding.

He said that he was able to use it successfully and come to a solution that was elegant and appropriate.

However, what he did not do was learn how to solve the problem, or indeed learn anything that would help him in future work.

Have you paid any attention to the political scene in the United States? There is no way that a billionaire could be convicted of any crime. In the rare event that they are charged, they can delay and obfuscate so that they die before any repercussions must be suffered.

I don’t think that the truth of the two-tiered American justice system has ever been so clearly delineated.