> The difference is that a human artist can't then turn around and take commissions to sell paintings of other people's IP, right? You can't just learn to draw Moana and then sell Moana TShits online - that's infringement. But Midjourney will take your money for access to their models and serve you up infringing images.

There's a disconnect between those two periods. Yes, an art student can't just start selling Moana merch. However, I don't see where Midjourney is doing that. In fact, their ToC states that you own all rights to the images you create. You are paying for the hardware resources to make freaky fingered people, not for the actual image.

They made over $48 billion dollars of profit *last quarter*. I think they can afford to pay as many people as they'd like.

> quasi monopoly

Is this like "Jumbo Shrimp"? They're certainly a big player, but not the only one. I don't really see how being successful means we have to dislike a company. Now, if they engage in practices that make things worse for consumers, we can deride that. And I'm sure they do, but I'd honestly be surprised if its anything nonstandard. That is- anything that Epic, GOG, Amazon, Google, etc also do.

> really aren't very good with returns

Can you please explain this? I have never had a problem with getting a return, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Epic's return policy is almost word for word the same. GOG's supposedly has a month-long return window, but they're also the only ones I've ever had an issue returning a game to. That's purely anecdotal though. I'm old enough that being able to return any PC software (especially games) is huge, and to my knowledge, you still can't returned an open game to a brick and mortar store.

I think it has more to do with the fact there's little point in spamming what most people use as their spam email account.

I only check mine when some forum or whatever refuses to allow me to login until I confirm an email address.

Oh? So threats of violence no longer work on the weak? I'm sure many people will be thrilled by that news.

You may think it a joke, but it wasn't to me at the time.

Haha, I threatened to call the cops / child protection services on my Dad once. He simply said "Go ahead. I'll beat the shit out of you until they get here."

Guess who won that standoff.

11:32AM: +5 Funny
11:33AM: -1 Something

Same comment. What a difference a minute can make.

What about looking at it from another direction?

Say the FBI suddenly raided you, and brought you up on say, pedophilia charges. They confiscate your computer hardware, as is standard procedure.

Now, I'm going to take a leap of faith here and presume you have no child porn on your PC. And for the sake of my point, no encryption. But they are sure you have it somewhere, so they naturally assume that you must have encrypted ghost partitions or whatever on your hard drive(s). Maybe they even have a log provided by your ISP that says at one point, you navigated to a website that provided such encryption software in the last decade. They demand that you hand over your passwords for your encrypted drives.

Or, to use your example with the safe, say that safe was in the house that you bought, and didn't get the combination for it from the previous owners. Maybe it was hidden, and you didn't even know of its existence before the feds demanded you hand over the combination.

Being brought up on charges for forgetting or even "forgetting" your password to incriminating evidence is already bad enough. But the scenario above is what I'm truly afraid of. The problem is, in some cases they could be treated the exact same if the judge sides with the authorities after hearing your "excuses".

It seems you don't live in the USA. A place where, by modifying the source in your browser, you can be brought up on hacking charges, wire fraud, violating the DMCA, etc.

You ever actually read any of those TOS that you supposedly agree to the moment you navigate to a webpage?

Welcome to Slashdot Summaries, where the grammar is bad and the content mostly random.

And then they all hoped into their Mini Coopers and drove off into the sunset, leaving a stream of bills fluttering in the wind.

Sadly, self-disqualification is exercising rational thought; something I think you'd want lots of in a mission like this.

Oh wait, this is a reality show now? Carry on....

Maybe I'll start a pool on how long until the first murder occurs.

I wasn't aware the Earth had a Constitution.

I call BS. A quick google search says Hollywood blueray is usually encoded around 25-35 Mb/s. So even an uncompressed video would stream just fine with an old 10/100 router and cat 5 cabling. And that's with no/minimal compression.

Big files, sure, I'll give you that. But I'd also argue the average person isn't moving files that large to and fro on their network too often.