I have frequently and repeatedly blamed Obama and Biden for many things, and as citation I give you Slashdot. You may crawl and/or search it at your leisure. Unfortunately there's no really convenient way to view a user's posting history any more; once upon a time when this was a better place, you could buy a subscription to bypass the last ad that you couldn't turn off due to good karma, and be able to search? or at least page back into the past of your own posting history.

At very best, he is an instrument of destruction of the country I live in, and so at very best I find him impossibly inconvenient. And he is not the best in any way.

I think Humpty Trumpty is of approximately average intelligence, and his superpower is being unburdened by approximately zero morals from any source which don't involve self-promotion. One can only imagine he received that mindset directly from his father, who was famously much the same person that he is, but unempowered by television due to some quite infamously memed shortcomings in the charisma department.

But I do not agree that his destructive actions are in any way coincidental or accidental, and I also do not believe that he is stupid or insane enough to not realize that he's doing nothing but damage. I think that's giving him too much of an out. Is he demented, yes. Is he being manipulated, yes. Is he complicit, yes. He always did terrible things. He doesn't need to be demented, syphilitic, or manipulated to be terrible, even though he may be all of those things.

All citizens benefited, as did many noncitizens, but some benefited a lot more than others.

Whoa there.

That paperwork was selective about who was actually a citizen, and any definition of citizen which doesn't include the right to vote in an alleged democracy including republics is absolute repugnant horseshit. Let us not pretend there was some golden age when America kept all of its promises.

I agree with you.

I don't agree with this on two levels, both directly and indirectly. Directly, no, something better could come out of the status quo with less suffering than this not just has caused, but would continue to cause even if it were stopped from doing deliberate harm today. Indirectly, no, I don't think we can reasonably expect to get something better than we had out of what is happening now.

To wit, this regime's actions are harming not only our present, but also our future. We could have had a revolution that didn't threaten our actual existence by turning our last allies against us for allowing this to happen.

I agree with every other part of your comment, but celebrating tearing it all down because you think that's the best way in which we could have proceeded is some selfish asshole shit.

Click bait is where you bury a stupid lede.

"Right, but they're suing over copyright infringement, not trademark infringement. They're using only using the trademark infringement to prove that the copyrighted works were encoded/copied into the training data."

If your description is accurate then in fact they do need to show the trademark infringement because it is part of their argument.

"Why or why not?"

In your specific example here, what matters is first whether or not the result is sufficiently similar to infringe on Nike's trademark, and second whether there was intent.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

I support them whether I believe that's a fact or not.

I don't believe you're not a maggot, though.

Let's not forget Leon violating his student visa.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.

In and of itself, that's actually the worrying part.

In the 1930s, and even the first few years of the 1940s, a lot of normal (and relatively sane) people agreed completely with what the fascists were doing. In the Rhythm 0 "endurance art" by Marina Abramovi, normal (and relatively sane) people openly abused their right to do whatever they liked to her, at least up to the point where one tried to kill her with a gun that had been supplied as part of the installation, at which point the people realised they may have gone a little OTT.

Normal (and relatively sane) people will agree with, and support, all kinds of things most societies would regard as utterly evil, so long as (relative to some aspirational ideal) the evil is incremental, with each step in itself banal.

There are various (now-disputed) psychology experiments that attempted to study this phenomenon, but regardless of the credibility of those experiments, there's never really been much of an effort by any society to actually stop, think, and consider the possibility that maybe they're a little too willing to agree to stuff that maybe they shouldn't. People are very keen to assume that it's only other people who can fall into that trap.

Normal and sane is, sadly as Rhythm 0 showed extremely well, not as impressive as we'd all like to think it is. The veneer of civilisation is beautiful to behold, but runs awfully thin and chips easily. Normal and sane adults are not as distant from chimpanzees as our five million years of divergence would encourage us to think. Which is rather worrying, when you get right down to it.

Pretty much agree, I'd also add that we don't have a clear impression of who actually did the supposed rioting, the media were too busy being shot by the National Guard to get an overly-clear impression.

(We know during the BLM "riots" that a suspiciously large number of the "rioters" were later identified as white nationalists, and we know that in the British police spy scandal that the spies often advocated or led actions that were more violent than those the group they were in espoused, so I'd be wary of making any assumptions at the heat of the moment as to exactly who did what, until that is clearly and definitively known. If this had been a popular uprising, I would not have expected such small-scale disturbances - the race riots of the 60s, the Rodney King riots, the British riots in Brixton or Toxteth in the 80s, these weren't the minor events we're seeing in California, which are on a very very much smaller scale than the protest marches that have been taking place.)

This is different from the Jan 6th attempted coup, when those involved in the coup made it very clear they were indeed involved and where those involved were very clearly affiliated with domestic terrorist groups such as the Proud Boys. Let's get some clear answers as to exactly what scale was involved and who it involved, because, yes, this has a VERY Reichstag-fire vibe to it.

Thanks for getting what I said about paper, too. Some people will stop [thinking] at nothing to find something to which they might object.

I hear they have a treatment for your tyrant defense syndrome, it involves sticking a light bulb up your ass and injecting bleach.