You’re using a weird definition of profit, which to most people is some sort of financial gain. Saving money isn’t the same as profiting. You’re not turning a profit when you use a $1.00 off coupon on a package of Oreos at the grocer just like you’re not turning a profit if you download a movie.

Also, go look up criminal copyright infringement. That’s what is defined as a crime legally, and downloading a movie or a CD doesn’t meet that threshold unless maybe you’re torrenting it and therefore distributing it. Morally, well you can argue that, but not everyone is going to agree with you.

I guess it’s up to you if want to trust it or not. He doesn’t share all the details, but he (at least in the past) shared enough details on his blog that I felt pretty good that he knew what he was talking about it.

I will point out that he was one of the very few aggregators in 2016 that was saying “hey look, Trump has a very real chance of winning this”. Which is why I find it so amusing when people say he got it wrong in 2016 when in actuality he was one of the few that was right. After 2008 there were a bunch of copycats out there trying to do similar things as Nate Silver, and many of them were saying things like 99.99% Clinton. If people are going to criticize, that’s where I would direct it.

Well, you can think that but realize that you’re in the minority if you think breaking copyright for personal consumption is the same as breaking copyright for profit. That’s like saying stealing a loaf of bread because you are hungry is exactly the same as stealing a car so you can strip it for parts for resale.

Also, despite what the RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe, downloading a CD or DVD for personal use isn’t illegal, which is why it’s a civil matter when someone is busted. There’s a line that needs to be crossed before the criminal justice system gets involved, and it’s above that sort of thing.

Sure, you could present your model and the data it is based upon and everyone could make their judgement.

You can’t really falsify the claim “Clinton has a higher chance of winning”, at least the way Nate Silver models it. His model is based upon statistics, and he basically runs a bunch of simulations of the election. In more of these simulations, Clinton won, hence his claim. But we had exactly one actual election, and in the election, Trump won. Perhaps his model is just wrong, or perhaps the outcome matched one of the simulations in his model where Trump won. If we could somehow run the election hundreds of times (or observe what happened in hundreds of parallel universes) then maybe we could see if his model matched the outcome of a statistically significant number of election results. But nevertheless, Nate Silver had a model and statistics to back up his claim.

As for Michael Moore, I’m not sure exactly how he came up with his prediction, but I get the impression it was mostly a gut feeling based upon his observations of what was happening. Nevertheless, Michael Moore still could back up his statement by articulating why he was claiming that and the observations he had made.

Though one crucial difference is still the whole prediction thing. Michael Moore actually made a prediction of a Trump win. Whereas Nate Silver just stated that Clinton had a higher chance of winning, and once again that was not a prediction. So you’re really comparing two different things here.

The thing is, Nate Silver did not make a prediction about the 2016 race.

He said that Hilary had a higher chance of winning. He didn’t say Hilary was going to win.

That may be how you see it, but that’s not how the law works.

The pirate is looking to save money with their copyright infringement.

These AI companies are looking to make money from it.

Your average pirate isn’t looking to profit from their copyright infringement.

In a similar way, someone getting busted for downloading a movie is a civil matter, but if they get busted for selling unauthorized copies on DVD then it can become a criminal matter.

As far as I’m aware, they had to stop doing that some time ago.

The primary was rigged before it even began. Typically when there’s no incumbent you’ll see several politicians make a run for the nomination. But 2016 was different. Hilary and the DNC went around to all of the presidential hopefuls in 2015 and basically told them to sit this one out because it’s her turn. Hilary was supposed to waltz her way to the nomination uncontested because they didn’t want a repeat of 2008. The only reason we got the Hilary vs. Sanders contest at all is because Sanders was an outsider so he didn’t get the memo (or perhaps they didn’t consider him a serious threat).

I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.

First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.

Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.

While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.

As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.

My guess is one of the upcoming major updates will either refuse to install, or will try to install and fail, if you try that route.

Something like that happened with a 2006-era laptop I have with Windows 10. It ran Windows 10 fine for several years, but finally one of the big updates decided it no longer liked some of the Vista-era drivers I was using. The update would try to install, fail, and roll back. And since Windows doesn’t let you turn off or disable updates, a few days later it would try again only to fail in the exact same way.

Any new computer sold that has a copy of Windows preinstalled means Microsoft is getting a cut.

Probably the biggest threat to us would be the rogue planet kicking some largish objects out in the Oort cloud into new orbits as it passed through. Some of the orbits would go into the inner solar system and could intersect with the Earth at some point.

I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.

I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.

So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.

I especially like how they’ve always loaded the full page in the background behind their popup with their little ultimatum. So they’ve already paid the costs in bandwidth and resources to serve up the page anyway, only for me to just close the tab on them.

I’d be fairly certain the washing machine has a few sensors and a fairly simple computer program (designed by humans) that can make some limited adjustments to the wash cycle on the fly.

I’ve seen quite a few instances of stuff like that suddenly being called “AI” as that’s the big buzzword now.

Clearly Palin would be the second-worst pick now.

I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.