Posts by doublelayer

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Stick

That's certainly a choice you can make, and people do. However, the choices are generally four:

Get well-paid skills, live in expensive area: get paid a high amount.

Get well-paid skills, live in cheaper area: get paid a moderate to high amount.

Don't get well-paid skills, live in expensive area: get paid a moderate to low amount, which may be insufficient for the lifestyle you want.

Don't get well-paid skills, live in cheaper area: get paid a low amount, which might be better or worse than the higher pay in a more expensive area.

In many cases, having the skills means that you'll earn more no matter where you are, even if you could be getting a higher salary in a place that's expensive or inconvenient.

Re: Stick

"If it was like you say, then companies would have just hired overseas. After all who cares if the worker is in the bowels of Slough or in Bangalore, no?"

With outsourcing to a different continent, you have time zone problems and may have language and management problems as well. You also have international regulations to deal with. There are costs there that businesses can understand exist, and businesses that jump to that solution without solving those problems usually end up the worse for it. It's often like updating a large technical system that's not broken. With several months of concerted effort by many people, you can likely build something that's better and cheaper than what exists now, but people don't want to take the costs of doing that right now, and there's always a risk that it fails with 80% of the time and resources wasted, so it's often put off indefinitely.

Moving from one part of the UK to a different, cheaper part of the UK does not introduce any of that, especially if they keep some of the same workers, just on a lower salary as they're free to move to some cheaper part of the country. Not that we can really prevent that from happening, although the theorized regulation would make it more likely.

Re: Stick

"Unfortunately idle government won't update the employment law so that employees doing the same job are paid the same wage."

No problem. Businesses will be happy to pay all of them the same wage, as long as that wage is what they're paying the lowest-paid employee. If you can't afford to live where you're living for that, then they'll suggest that you can work from wherever that person is, after all, when you're working remotely then they don't need you to be working from where you want to live. Employees have sometimes gotten higher wages to live near an office which costs them more, and if you mandate that they not do that, then the finance department will try everything they can to make sure that it's the people being paid more going down rather than the people being paid less going up. This won't end well for the employers, because some people will end up quitting to work at a place which pays better. It also won't end well for the employees, because they'll be the ones facing changes in their and their colleagues' wages that they won't think fair and anyone who doesn't quit will have to deal with the chaos from those who do.

Making wages fit your preferences isn't that simple, even if we assume that we can entirely ignore the rest of the business.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: biases and vested interests

"The big stumbling block is the nature of the neutralising text in the prompt box. Who can be trusted to formulate that correctly?"

And the block behind it for you to fall on is that the language models receiving the prompt don't read that neutralizing text with an understanding of its meaning and they don't follow it with a code of ethics. It changes some weights, maybe in a helpful way, but not in a testable way.

Re: No problem

This really depends what "AI target acquisition" ends up meaning. That could cover everything from "We use machine learning on the infrared maps we collected to remove things like electrical infrastructure so they don't get in the way when someone looks at the map to figure out where buildings are" to "we wrote a program that decides who to kill based on posts that they might have made online, then sends a drone to their house, but someone still has to click an approve button to drop bombs on it". The term is so ambiguous to be useless in a discussion. Whatever they may be doing, we'll have to discuss it in detail rather than making any judgement based on the terms "AI" and "target acquisition".

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

"So you think assigning responsibility lets call it management to people who are without a clue is smart ?"

Did I say that?

I did not say that any more than you asked for anarchy. I pointed out the parallel. You decided to ascribe beliefs to me that I do not hold, strawman arguments that basically nobody holds, and are now happily attacking them. This makes it useless for me to bother describing my own opinions, because you have made it clear that you already have a set to argue against, even when I didn't provide any, and do not need or want my own.

You did not, but there is a parallel between those who call for anarchy and the request you have made for no management, since both involve the removal and not the replacement of a large part of the existing structure. Follow that parallel and you'll see the prediction made about your reaction to achieving it, at least assuming I've properly understood.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

"I use spaces now, but do so via editors which are set up to auto-translate my tab key hits into spaces."

I'm not sure that anyone does it differently. The argument is about the characters you use, not what key you have to push to insert them, and I somehow doubt that many people are pressing the space bar 24 times for lines with a lot of indentation.

I'm not much bothered about which character is used, though I only use spaces unless told to do otherwise, but neither do I care that much about various indentation-based style guides. I do tend to object to 8-space indentation, especially when it also goes along with an 80-character line limit, because it leads to worse code readability. Either you get an expression that's split across eight lines when it could fit onto one or two, or programmers avoid having to do that by contracting all their names so it fits again. There's something very depressing about seeing code that looks like t *x = rcProd(cs[i][j], tb->x, n, &z, cl). You know every other line will look like that and that you'll be spending a lot of time trying to remember what each of those symbols means, even though the compiler is perfectly happy with names that don't look like that.

Re: Every single time

"But you underestimate the director. In future he will just go to the patchbay and move some wires around."

That's why, if you're not going to try to teach them to do it properly so they can successfully do that, you always leave out a few steps so that they know that you did something but not how to repeat it. That's if you think they're smart enough to realize that they don't know which cable to move and where to move it. If you don't think they will get that, you must introduce some new step to make it clearer.

Before we move the cable, we first have to retrieve the switch address from the VLAN database under Juniper Cisco in the general server. I'll do that using this terminal session. Now this is my secret access key, so don't tell it to anyone.

> cat /dev/urandom | base64 | head -1

Re: speaking of usb

And it seems likely that the ones they're talking about are the PS/2 connectors. Possibly they're calling them circular to express a complaint about them. In my experience, the round aspect was quite annoying because, if you were connecting one of them by touch because it was on the back of the computer and you weren't, you had to rotate it a lot to get it to align properly. At least with USB, there are only two ways of positioning the plug that feel remotely correct. It was also quite annoying that the keyboard and mouse connectors felt basically the same but were really not.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

I take it you're deriving that statement from this rather different one from the Wikipedia article:

"In 2010 The Guardian accused The Register of misunderstanding climate science and misrepresenting a paper from the journal Nature in a manner that deliberately minimized the climate impact of human emissions."

Not quite the same as what you said, is it? I've now read the Guardian article in question. I think they've got it right; the article from El Reg from thirteen years ago was misinterpreting a paper quite badly. That doesn't follow that they were told to do so by anyone in particular. It may be the author's biases or even simple laziness, and the author concerned doesn't work here anymore. It also doesn't mean that they've been taking instructions from advertisers "all the time", since you haven't proven that they did so even once.

I'm also not really sure what this has to do with Musk's actions, since he's not taking any instructions from advertisers, even as they stop paying him. He's attempting to give them instructions along the lines of "you don't understand, you have to keep paying me, I have a right to your money".

Re: Advertising Money

That's a pretty simplistic way to interpret the decision to comment. They can easily care about something while not caring about a different part. For example, they could care about the chaos being caused while not caring about the success of Twitter in the long term. That is basically my position; if Twitter fails or doesn't fail, I still won't use it so either is fine with me. However, I am getting some entertainment from watching the chaos from a distance, so I do care enough to keep looking at it.

Maybe comparing this to a different subject will make my point clearer. We've had articles discussing the switching of corporate-supported open source projects to proprietary projects, and I tend to comment on them because the license issue is important to me. Sometimes, that's because I use the projects in question. However, even when I don't and wasn't planning to, I still care about the general licensing thing even if the specific codebase in question isn't important to me. I don't think those views are inconsistent.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

Re: A special case?

"If you make a straightforward request for a copyright work, it will normally refuse, or proffer a summary.

The question is how those cases are internally different."

They're not. A while ago, it would eagerly quote copyrighted works as well. OpenAI realized that that would be a pretty convincing demonstration in court, so they patched it to reject queries that look like they're asking for copyrighted information. If you try weirder queries, it sometimes doesn't realize that you've done that and quotes again. They and their supporters have started to pretend that regurgitating copyrighted information is impossible or extremely unlikely, assuming that judges will be easy to confuse when the distinctions and reasons are explained by boring machine learning lectures.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: A special needs management nightmare

I think they meant "poor" in the sense of "worthy of sympathy" rather than "lacking in money". Not that I feel much sympathy. She should have known what she was getting into before signing on, and I hope she was smart enough to do so and request something that was worth the effort.

Re: The interview is lengthy...

"Do you think a rocket that suffers a massive explosion has a special bomb proof radio that sends the "stage 2 exploded" message?"

Not that I think this is very important, because I don't really see why three minutes makes much of a difference, but if you do want to know earlier then it might be worth having observation and telemetry systems that aren't on the rocket. That way, if it blows up or the equipment fails, you can get more information in general and have that information quicker.

Re: more ads means more users ????????

It's probably some tracking script that somebody installed, not understanding what it was doing or how it worked. None of the test machines, neither of them, had an ad blocker on it, so they assume it's fine for everybody. That would be my guess. Then again, I've been surprised to see some companies with Google ad frames on them when that really doesn't fit with the rest of it, and only a few days ago, there was an article about Google ads being on the website of an Iranian steel company, which you'd think wouldn't need the extra revenue, so maybe they are just dumb enough to go for those few pennies.

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

There are now a lot of different ways to get an IQ measurement, and all of them have one thing in common: a lot of researchers think they're crap. Like a lot of other tests, there's some correlation between scoring higher and being generally smarter, but when you try to be any more specific than that, the logic breaks down really fast. They include arbitrary correct answers, weights that are there for no real reason, and then they take those results and put them on a curve. As we all know, changing scores to fit a curve is likely to introduce a lot more chaos into a grading system than having a previously-decided standard. We'll probably never get over wanting to have a convenient number to measure intelligence, though, and I don't think any other test will end up being perfect, so I expect IQ to stay around for a long time.

Re: Delusional narcissist

As I understand the rules, they just skip anyone who doesn't meet all the criteria. So maybe it would work if everybody on the list except for him died, because then they'd need someone to fill in during the emergency, but if one of the other twenty or so on the list was around, it would go to them instead.

Re: Delusional narcissist

There's also no guarantee they'll keep doing that, rather than keeping the accounts sans "verification". The accounts can be free, and when a company has already decided to stop paying for advertising, the question of why we still pay for that gold mark has got to come up soon. It won't be immediately, since they've made their decisions about advertising very recently and corporate inertia is certainly a thing, but I wouldn't count on them staying gold mark customers either.

Re: Delusional narcissist

Because keeping open an account is free, and it takes more work than shutting one down, and because they probably wrote a bot to make social media announcements on a variety of platforms about a decade ago and don't see any reason they should take Twitter off that list. Whether they have an account or not isn't doing much for Twitter's revenue, certainly not as much as their advertising was. Maybe it will keep some users on the platform, but I don't think that many were hotly anticipating the next Tweet from IBM.

Admin of $19M marketplace that sold social security numbers gets 8 years in jail

Re: Call me crazy

And instead they will use what? They want something that uniquely identifies people. If they can't use that number, they'll find something else, and chances are that won't be any harder to compromise. If you ban them from using every government-issued identifier, then you'll probably see them come up with a private identifier that, in practice, everyone will have to register for because employers and financial institutions will demand it. I'm not supporting this number or the similar ones used in various other countries, but if we're going to ask for its replacement, we may want to have some idea of what we make them replace it with before they decide on their own.

Roblox investor plays hardball over 'weak' parental controls

Re: Reading between the lines ...

Probably by hoping that parents would ignore small enough transactions made by their children, assume that they didn't have those rights, or assume that actually collecting refunds based on those rights would be prohibitively difficult. And, apparently, it worked out for a while. It unfortunately turns out that scamming people makes money successfully. I'm a little surprised that parents gave their children access to accounts that had active payment methods and the codes to use them, as it's not that hard to have either an Apple or Google account without a payment method or one that requires a separate password to spend any money, and either should remove the child's ability to pay without the parent's knowledge.

I can't tell if the investors are mad that the company didn't tell them they were scamming people and would eventually have to stop, mad that they aren't scamming people now*, or just want them to have included a statement in the IPO documentation along the lines of "Notice to investors: some of our business model relies on scamming people, so if anyone does something about that, we may make less money". Their lawyer's statement doesn't sound like option 1, but I'm really hoping that's a lawyer writing it badly because that's the only acceptable option.

* Not scamming anymore, some terms and conditions apply, do your own investigation to determine the extent to which this claim holds.

China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

Re: Fake benchmarks though

"Neither the author of the story nor the presenter at the conference made any claims about their 2.5 GHz chip matching an Intel 6 GHz chip in terms of performance."

It wasn't the comparison mentioned in the article, but yes, they sort of did. Specifically, the Intel Core I5-14600K running at 2.5 GHz. 6 GHz is an exaggeration as that chip only clocks up to 5.3 GHz, though. They did make that comparison, as limited as it is. Before accusing someone of making up facts to support their biases, you may want to check whether those facts are real and check your own biases.

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

It sounds like they built in an escape hatch, Apple has activated it, and Goldman wasn't getting what they wanted from it so is probably happy enough with that. Building in an early end option is also professional if you do it at the point where you negotiate, rather than demanding one be added.

Re: I just don't get ..

In my case, I don't care whatsoever about the interest rate or penalties as I don't pay them. I use a credit card effectively as a debit card; I need some method of transferring money and I can't send cash over the internet, so that card works. When you take these away, picking a credit card just comes down to whatever incentives or typical usage fees there are. It's possible that Apple's has some benefit that people either want to use or think they will.

Time to take action: Google's inactive account purge begins Friday

Which Android phones require an account? I've set them up without signing in before, and while you lose a number of useful features such as the antitheft systems, you can do it, still use the phone, and still get updates to the basic apps from Google Play. Are there some models that don't let you do that?

Oh, and unless you've specifically taken actions to disable Google services, you're almost certainly announcing the account's activity every time you turn on the phone. For example, the built-in mail client is probably periodically checking for emails on that account, and that counts to keep it alive.

Japanese tech startups testing cash incentives for office return

Some times, I do, because some of the people I've worked with have become my friends. However, people working in the office isn't being done to make friendships. It's being done, ostensibly, because there's supposed to be some benefit to the work you're doing. Whether there is or not is difficult to prove, although I'm sure you have an opinion and are very sure that any other view is incorrect.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

Re: False premise

They don't need a local office to be collecting revenue. They have two major sources, both of which are available in Australia. That would be payments for advertising and anyone who subscribes to the various levels of check marks. Those payments, coming from Australians, have to go somewhere, and if they're going to be flouting Australian law, Australian law enforcement can act to confiscate or block those payments. Twitter could simply shut down their entire business in Australia, or they could operate the discussion part without any of the parts that bring in money, but I don't think either is that likely. Of course, people can go around an Australian attempt to confiscate payments, but few would. I think the most likely outcome is Australia not actually doing anything to collect on the ever-growing fines, but if they decided they were willing to go to some effort, they could be successful.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: Postal Service

If I had to guess what they are asking, I'd hypothesize that they disapprove of specific targeted strikes. This is less common in various countries, where workers strike, not against their employer, but against somebody else they don't like, for example the postal workers refusing to deliver because they don't like Tesla but they don't have any strike against the postal company going on. I'm not entirely sure that's what they were saying, but it is my best guess.

Re: FFS

Are we reading the same article? The unions are targeting Tesla. That's the entire point of what they're trying to do, hence why they're not delivering license plates specifically to Tesla, not anyone else, and a different union is only refusing to unload Tesla vehicles. So when he says that Tesla is the target of the union's actions, he's completely right. Not that he does anything right after that bit, but that part of his statement appears undeniable. This makes me wonder why you express a different view. Did one of us miss an important fact here, or are you making a point I'm not understanding?

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

Re: shuttle to mission control SAY AGAIN

Presumably, they are set by the company admins before they dispatch the device to its eventual user, not by Amazon before they deliver it to the company. Therefore, the user would not need to set them when they start it up, and time from receiving the device to logging in would be short. At least, that's what I think they were saying.

I can't really see why a business should bother. You can run everything on a $100 Android tablet, but not very well, which means you'll probably end up outsourcing some of it to a remote desktop somewhere. If you're doing that, why not spend slightly more on the computer and have most or all of that run on that instead? Similarly for the choice between a tablet and a laptop. Why use a cheap tablet and separate peripherals when, for around the price of all that stuff, you can buy a laptop which has all of those and is more easily transportable?

I imagine that any cost savings on the hardware will be wiped out by getting all the software to run well in an Android environment and more frequent hardware replacement. I, for one, do not want my business software running on the average Android tablet running who-knows-what software, no security updates, and no ability to apply a reasonable corporate standard to the above. Not to mention that many businesses are willing to buy laptops, Windows, Mac, or Chrome OS, that are much more expensive than they really need. If they're willing to pay 50% more than they need to, maybe the cost savings on a one-off purchase for several years isn't very concerning to them.

Re: Er, is this article 15 years old ?

But Amazon wasn't building them then. It's not that the concept is new, just that another company has decided to make them, and maybe they'll have more success as they also provide the remote desktops and surely somebody must be running them. Meanwhile, I've worked at companies using AWS but they aren't using AWS-located desktops any more than anyone was using Microsoft's Azure remote desktops.

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

Re: Landlords

You had to make some large unsubstantiated assumptions in order to reach your predetermined conclusion that their study must be wrong. If you read it, you might be able to come up with reasons it's bad that sound more plausible, and if you read in detail, you might even find a real flaw with it. From a glance, I see a few possible complaints that would have held water. It's a lot harder to spot on an online forum than when you completely make it up, like you've just done.

Re: "the video version also impacted nervous systems"

In my experience, watching someone else and being watched myself are pretty different, even if I'm watching someone else while I'm being watched. There is a similar difference if I'm participating in a meeting, where I'm supposed to be doing something, and watching something passively, where if I stop paying attention then at worst I have to rewind it a bit.

Comparing watching television or online videos and a video meeting is not going to get you far.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

I've had the more limited version of this, where the computer acts like a modifier key (it's never a normal key for some reason) is stuck down. The key is not stuck down. Pressing it once somehow unconfuses the computer and returns the keyboard to normal functioning, but for a while there, every letter you press is now executing some keyboard shortcut. This can leave you in a weird situation if you type quickly enough to rack up a few of those in sequence. I assume this is a hardware cause as it's not been limited to any OS, and it is compatible with the keyboard dome getting stuck somehow, but maybe it's our machines showing their mild revenge at how many times we blame them for our own mistakes.

This was a generic example, but look at it. Does this sound like product documentation? It looks a lot more to me like the documentation of an internal process. Yes, it would be nice if internal processes never had bugs that the documentation worked around, but it's much more acceptable there than in a released product, since the people using it can be required to follow the procedures.

In addition, the example phrase was a bug. It could have been anything else: instead of crashing, the "general type" or whatever we want to call it is undesirable but needs to be left in for some edge case. Or it is one phrase that refers to something outside the interface you're working with in the middle of a lot of text that all refers to that interface, so a reader assumes that everything they are doing is located in that interface. Basically, if there is some detail whose obviousness is significantly lower than the other details, it can help to accentuate it. When the details it's mixed with are extremely obvious, it can be logical to remove them and only state the nonobvious ones.

I disagree about the docs being identical, because if you actually do know what you're doing, it gets really annoying having to read through too much obvious stuff.

To make a new image, open the main interface, click on "Image", then click on "New". In the "Image Name" box, write the name of the image. Image names should be memorable. Set the scheduled build date for the image. If you want to release the image immediately, you can click on the "Now" button. Otherwise, set the day, month, and year to your release date and optionally set the time using the hour and minute controls. If you don't set the time, the image will be released on midnight of the date you selected [which the hour and minute box say]. Select the image location using the "Location" control. [Five more paragraphs of this]

After a while, you either skim or skip it entirely, and that means you miss the line in the fourth paragraph that says "When you're setting the image type using the Type control, selecting the General type makes the resulting system crash". Meanwhile, concise documentation for people who don't need to have every label repeated can just say "Create an image. Do not select general as the image type as that causes a crash."

Do we really need another non-open source available license?

Re: "source-available" or other semi open source licenses

I don't think we're reading the article the same way. The article is talking about open source licenses, including the GPL, which do not restrict your use of the software. It is also talking about semi open source licenses, like the FSL and BSL, which do restrict your actions. That is what I see the writer saying, and it agrees with the definitions with which I am familiar.

You have unilaterally defined GPL as source-available, even though the definitions the writer is using would categorize it as among the open source ones, not the source-available ones. I agree that the tendency has been to provide binaries, but nothing says that anyone has to and there are many projects where building it yourself is expected. And although GPL and basically every license allows you to sell it, one of the points of open source is that the user has so many freedoms that relying on being the only one who is allowed to sell it is not an option.

Re: "source-available" or other semi open source licenses

The part about not being allowed to use the software in a way that competes with the business. It's in this license. It is not in the GPL V3, AGPL V3, or any other version of the GPL, AGPL, or LGPL. That's the difference, and that's the point we're all discussing.

Re: Financialisation versus origination

That article is not the only source on what open source means. One major source is the licenses that implement it. Commercial uses are specifically mentioned in them.

"Use of open source without paying its contributors can be viewed as wage theft in the UK, however, there seems to be no appetite for regulators to enforce law nor I am not aware of any contributor taking companies using the software to court."

The reason they don't is that it's not wage theft unless you have some agreement that I'm owed wages. If you use the code I made available for free, I am not owed wages. If I do some work that is useful to you, but you didn't agree to pay me for it, I am not owed wages. I am owed wages when we've agreed that wages are to be paid or when I am mandated to work. Neither applies if a company uses available open source or if someone contributes to their open source software.

Re: "source-available" or other semi open source licenses

It's not. It's considered a fully open source license, at least based on the OSI definition. Things like the BSL do not comply with that definition, but you can see and modify the source, so that's why they categorize that as semi open source.

Re: Financialisation versus origination

Basically everything you said is wrong.

"Open Source has always been about free for personal use."

Most licenses, the ones that go back decades, specifically include the fact that you can sell the code, you can sell the use of the code, and various other clearly commercial rights. It's not new. They restrict how viable a commercial product can be, since you can't be the only one to sell the code, but they very clearly include it.

"Rather than taking an apprentice, they can publish "open source" project and let the public contribute. Then often if they like the work of some contributors they offer them work."

This has a right and wrong part:

Right: This is a way to get free work.

Wrong: There's any problem, legal or moral, with that. The only free work they get is from people who deliberately choose to do so. Nobody is making anyone do that. If nobody is interested in solving their problem, they don't get their problem fixed. They can hope that someone comes along and takes a liking to their code and they can snap that person up, but if that's their plan, it's not going to work too well.

Re: Isn't there an obvious flaw?

Yes, that can happen, and it has for most of the big cases. Amazon forked Elastic's products and made OpenSearch. Terraform has been forked to make OpenTofu. Basically, the quick switch to proprietary is not necessarily going to bring the cash the companies want, but it is virtually guaranteed to cause chaos in the community of users and contributors who now have to decide which fork to use. In Elastic's case, they deliberately introduced breaking changes to try to prevent OpenSearch from being compatible with their version, which caused some extra chaos for both projects.

Re: If Only

No, people don't see that as non-free, as it's trivially accomplished by not having a contributor license agreement that reassigns copyright or gives unrestricted rights. Linux, for example, doesn't have the copyright to every part of the kernel, and therefore can't change the license without some difficult effort. This might lead to a backlash against CLAs. At one point, a CLA made some sense because it allowed a central project lead to control the project even if you, the part-time contributor, got bored and left. Now that the concern is that the central project lead will switch to proprietary, giving them that control seems less desirable.

Re: "proprietary gatekeeping wrapped in open washed clothing"

"Nobody paying attention will run along with this. This is just Big Capital pulling the wool over the unwary."

The concern is that it will spread. When someone announces something open source, there's no way of knowing whether it's about to change license or not. If there's any corporate structure, then someone could buy or otherwise gain control of it and completely change the terms. If people start to avoid anything that looks too much like a company making open source software, you run the risk that larger open source projects get fewer users and developers. While it's always been possible for open source software to die, it usually happened by a slow loss in continued updates rather than an overnight switch to proprietary.

Author hopes to throw the book at OpenAI, Microsoft with copyright class action

Re: Zzzzzzzzzz

From the claims in the court case. If they had purchased a book, the case would have said something like "Defendant purchased a book but used it for purposes we believe do not qualify as fair use", but it doesn't say that. Their case agrees with the "we don't think it qualifies as fair use part" but includes the additional claim that they didn't purchase a book, and we know from many previous cases that they didn't purchase anyone else's book, so there seems to be no reason to expect that they'd have made an exception for this one. Of course, OpenAI is free to prove otherwise, in which case that part of the claim can be immediately dismissed. Do you see them making that very simple statement and getting rid of that claim? I don't, which suggests that they cannot.

Re: So what about all the students reading books to write papers?

The argument is that reading a book as a human and processing the book in a process called "training" aren't the same thing. Thus, just because one is acceptable doesn't mean the other is. It gets philosophical when we start to ask what the model is really doing with the text it is ingesting, but it should be clear that I can't use whatever copyrighted information I want just by calling whatever my program is doing training.

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

I think you need to look at a time zone map.

"Most of Spain is West of the Meridian."

True, and some parts use UTC+0, but most of it uses UTC+1.

"Portugal is the same longitude as Dublin."

And it uses the same time zone as Dublin. WET, UTC+00:00 during standard time. Exactly what you'd expect it to use.

"Greece, Romainia, Bulgaria are really in +2."

Oh, I should call them and tell them they have to stay there, then, because all three of those countries are already in +2.

In trying to prove a point that the EU insists on a single time zone, which it doesn't, you missed that all but one, if we're being charitable, of your examples are simply wrong.

Re: Rome or Vatican?

Of those states, one of them is not just a city, but a city and surrounding area including several islands without urbanization yet. It is a state that only has one real city in it, but not a state that's entirely enclosed in a city. Another is a state that is entirely enclosed in a city, but that city is not enclosed in another city, which is what they were talking about. So there is only one state that fulfills their criteria.