That's a really good example about the dogs, and a useful phrase to know, as well. Thanks!

I would expect as much. Can anyone even make a good case for the existence of "Journals" -- as companies that get to sell access to research they didn't fund? I don't believe any scientists are getting rich off royalties from them, right?

They seem to me to be like a worse version of the record label racket. It seems like peer review itself should provide enough signal (drawing on the reputations of who decided to review it) to distinguish a Serious Paper that Really Matters from some slop fabricated by a conspiracy theorist in their basement. And surely the bandwidth costs etc. are so low as to be borne by the universities themselves, either by each of them self-hosting, or by funding a cooperative to host them all in one place. Or whatever Arxive is, of course.

The only problem with this is you have to go stand in the sunlight to charge it.

You probably made that comment as a joke, but if I had mod points I would certainly not mod this as 'Funny', but as 'Insightful'.

This.

And the actual damage of calling ppl communist or nazi when they are not, is that when an actual communist or nazi stands up, too few will be reacting to the real 'cry wolf' since they have been desensitized by all the false alarms.

I watched the trailer for the PC port and agree that the visuals look underwhelming at best.

As to a: probably. You will probably not fool most Bach-fans with generated Bach-like music. With the risk of being compared with someone who buys 1000$/meter speaker cable: AI 'Bach' just sounds ... weird. It 'feels wrong'. Bach seems too complex for AI. But for other types of music: I did hear some almost decent AI generated techno. Techno is a lot simpler than Bach, but even there the result sounded a bit far fetched for me.

I do think that most techno-heads could enjoy AI generated techno though. So for me the answer to your question would be a counter-question: is Bollywood music closer to Bach or to techno?

In this case I side with: ridiculed. Does a hijacking or another action of bad faith depend on a pair of scissors from a shop? I doubt it. There are far more useful tools than scissors. And there are ways to get them onto an airport.
So the whole cost of this risk mitigation, including this false positive, is far worse than the cost of what it is mitigating.

Reminds me of that case where a team wrote a piece of software in a couple of months. That software automated 4 hours of relatively simple and easily verifyable manual work at years-end.

Mass media platforms and politicians... Ok. So off course there were scientific papers or articles in media outlets (respected by boffins) that showed the mass media and the politicians were wrong. Correct?

They were there, these articles? So you could reference them in an argument like this on /. for instance? Because without respectable science to back up your extraordinary claim, you run a high risk of simply looking like the town's fool here.

So the boffins at NASA and all sorts of organisations world wide are either wrong or deliberately lying (on the Dupont payroll) when it comes to atmospheric ozone? I find that hard to believe.

That is one very valuable tool for SkyNet.

Beliefs are the problem if they form the basis of the actions of people.
How many wars have been started, people have been killed with the perpetrators shouting the equivalent of 'my deity is the best'?
Now compare that to the ones where the perpetrators shouted 'there are no gods'.

Also: you do not need religion to teach empathy and compassion. At all.
I don't really trust empathy and compassion when that somehow stems from a fear of retaliation from a deity, or from the promise of a reward in some afterlife.

These types of draconian laws will ruin the internet if they are ratified.

Left wing? Hmm. From where I am standing (NL, Europa) you have two political parties. Both are right wing, albeit one more than the other. Both tend to the plebs due to your strange 'winner takes all' voting mechanisms.

China has only one political party. The US has -for all practical purposes- only two. While that is slightly better, it still leads to very suboptimal situations. There is too little feedback in the system. As a voter, what can you do when your choice is between a giant douche an a turd sandwich?

This is not a 'left-or-right' issue, it is a 'stupid-vs-intelligent' issue. The whole 'left-vs-right' is nonsensical in the US. You have two political parties doing stupid stuff. The duopoly guarantees lack of meaningful feedback. I suggest focussing on fixing the duopoly instead of which party shows which stupidity.