ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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14hr ago
Your "verdict" link is broken because you forgot to include the "https://" part at the beginning.
ToaKraka
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19hr ago
Note that this sentence is far below the guidelines recommendation of 15–21 months in prison. The judge's "statement of reasons" is not available, but Reuters has a quote:
US District Judge Lynn Adelman noted Dugan's long history of public service in deciding to spare Dugan from prison. "The punishment should fit the offender, and not merely the crime," Adelman said during a hearing in Milwaukee federal court, adding that Dugan "made a bad decision in the moment".
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Warning: The "?si=", "?pp=", and similar portions that YouTube has started adding to any URL created with the "share" button allegedly can be used to reveal the YouTube username of the user who created that URL. For that reason, those portions of the URL should be deleted before copying and pasting.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
If purchasing an expansion pack actually removed hours of gameplay from the base game, I would concede the point that this can no longer be called an expansion pack, but to the best of my knowledge this has never happened.
Lots of games have DLCs explicitly meant to make the game easier and therefore faster to complete.
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Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne HD Remaster: Merciful Difficulty (free)
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Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance: Mitama Dance of Wealth/EXP/Miracles (3 dollars each)
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Gundam Breaker 4: Powerup Booster Bundle (6 dollars)
ToaKraka
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2d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
I keep my controller balanced on top of my uninterruptible power supply (under my desk) rather than on my desk.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
The statement mostly cites court decisions in support.
In the Office's view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author”, which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office's registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue.
In its leading case on authorship, the Supreme Court used language excluding non-humans in interpreting Congress's constitutional power to provide “authors” the exclusive right to their “writings”. In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author”. The Court defined an “author” as “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature”. It repeatedly referred to such “authors” as human, describing authors as a class of “persons” and a copyright as “the exclusive right of a man to the production of his own genius or intellect”.
Federal appellate courts have reached a similar conclusion when interpreting the text of the Copyright Act, which provides copyright protection only for “works of authorship”. The Ninth Circuit has held that a book containing words “authored by non-human spiritual beings” can only qualify for copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations”. In another case, it held that a monkey cannot register a copyright in photos it captures with a camera because the Copyright Act refers to an author's “children”, “widow”, “grandchildren”, and “widower”—terms that “all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals”.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
AI-generated works are public domain in most countries
This sounds suspicious to me. I have no idea about Indonesia, but the usual criterion for copyright is creativity, not the tool.
In its complaint, Spyder Games quotes a 2023 statement of policy from the US Copyright Office.
If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.… When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright.
This statement remains in force, though the Copyright Office is continuing to investigate the topic.
You didn't specify why any of these actors are claiming they own this character.
Spyder Games alleges in its complaint that the characters are AI-generated, but Mementum Lab actually denies this allegation in its amended counterclaim.
[1] Defendant Mementum Lab describes itself as “the (Brainrot) Memes Agency”. [2] Even though the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright, defendant claims that it owns or controls the copyrights to over a dozen brainrots in the Game that were generated by artificial intelligence tools (and more than 50% of the entire “brainrot universe”). [3] For example, defendant contends that it owns or controls the copyrights to the brainrots known as “Tung Tung Sahor” and “U Din Din Din Din Dun Ma Din Din Din Dun”.
Answering Paragraph 7: [1] Defendant admits the allegation in the first sentence of this paragraph. [2] While the allegation in the second sentence of this paragraph that the law provides that AI-generated content isn’t protectible by copyright calls for a legal conclusion, to the extent a response is required, Defendant denies this allegation on information and belief, admits the allegation in this sentence that it claims it holds copyrights relating to over a dozen brainrot characters in the Game, and otherwise denies the allegations in this sentence. [3] Defendant admits the allegation in the third sentence of this paragraph that it contends it holds the copyrights relating to the referenced brainrot characters.
On page 9 of the amended counterclaim begins a five-paragraph section with the title "Defendant’s Creators Use an Involved, Artistic Process to Create Some of the Most Iconic Brainrot Characters, including Tung Tung Sahur", in which AI is not mentioned at all.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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3d ago
Assuming that people are engaging in targeted stalking just because they respond to comments that are buried deep inside threads is unreasonable. Lots of users use the "firehose" page to scroll through all comments as soon as they are made, with no regard for how deep into a thread they are.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
You can't just assume that your interlocutor is the downvoter in such cases. Lots of users use the "firehose" page to scroll through all comments as soon as they are made, with no regard for how deep into a thread they are, and one of them just as easily could be the downvoter.
"DLC" and "expansion pack" are not synonyms. Rather, "DLC" encompasses all optional add-ons, while "expansion pack" is reserved specifically for major optional add-ons.
Victoria 2 and Victoria 3 are good examples.
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Victoria 2's DLCs are easily divided into two categories. The two expansions, A House Divided and Heart of Darkness, were major, linear upgrades to the game—you can play V2, V2 + AHD, or V2 + AHD + HoD. Additionally, there were several cosmetic, non-expansion-pack DLCs, mostly "sprite packs"—e. g., American Civil War Sprite Pack—plus a music pack.
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Victoria 3 currently has a smorgasbord of DLCs. They are marketed with several different names, from "music packs" and "art packs" at the minor, purely cosmetic end to "immersion packs", "mechanics packs", and "expansions" at the high end.
Likewise, for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, the infamous Horse Armor Pack was merely a minor DLC, while Shivering Isles was an actual expansion.
Also, you didn't ask a question.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
it's not "aristocracy" in any established meaning of the word
Polybius's "anacyclosis" idea (Wikipedia article short on citations, original text)
Monarchy (good) → tyranny (bad) → aristocracy (good) → oligarchy (bad) → democracy (good) → ochlocracy (bad) → monarchy
ToaKraka
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4d ago
670,500 Haitians expelled from the Dominican Republic in 20 months
For non-paywalled information, see also the UN Secretary-General's most recent report, which quotes numbers from the International Organization on Migration.
Internal displacement continued to rise. IOM reported that, as of February 2026, more than 1.45 million people, over half of them children, had been internally displaced, with the Artibonite Department recording the highest increase (23 percent). Over 741,000 children faced barriers to education due to disruptions caused by displacement, and many schools were being used as shelters.
In parallel, forced migration dynamics intensified, with 270,214 Haitian migrants forcibly returned in 2025 (of whom approximately 25 percent were women and 10 percent were children, many in highly vulnerable situations), a 36-percent increase compared with 2024. The vast majority of returnees originated from the Dominican Republic, and IOM data indicate that economic factors were the primary driver of migration for approximately 85 per cent of returnees. From January to mid-March 2026, 52,000 people had already been deported, placing additional pressure on already vulnerable border communities.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
I feel obligated to point out that this is the second finance thread in a row incorrectly labeled 2027 rather than 2026.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
that person should try meetup
Are you referring to Meetup.com in specific, or to the concept of "meetups" in general?
ToaKraka
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4d ago
California-based Castelion, which makes solid rocket motors and hypersonic weapons, turned to the auto industry for sophisticated electronic components used in advanced driver-assistance systems and electric vehicles to help steer its missiles to targets. These auto-industry processors, known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, can be bought at a tenth of the cost and obtained six times faster than comparable versions used in the aerospace industry, Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said.
The oil and gas industry has been another important supply-chain resource for Castelion. Rather than sourcing high-pressure metal tubes from aerospace vendors with long lead times, the company is using high-temperature, stress-rated precision machined tubes used to help crack open rocks in the fracking process.
These tubes are built to handle heat and pressure levels comparable to what is required for a rocket motor, but are sold by far more vendors, at lower prices, than the aerospace-industry equivalent, Pitt said. Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has won big Pentagon contracts to make over 500 hypersonic weapons.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
I will post a full summary of this case in the next Friday Fun Thread.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Vinoverski v. Sullivan, in which the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could regulate short-term rentals under the zoning code (I made that case up so don't go looking for it)
Link to a non-made-up Pennsylvania decision on the topic for people who want it
That's another thing I liked about the movie. There are parts where she's, like, creeping in the shadows and her face looks fucked up, but if you look at behind-the-scenes photos it's just, like, super simple makeup on her. It's just the way they've lit it, keeping her in shadow.
They play the footage backwards to give her a very unnatural movement at several points in the film.
There's one shot where she was clearly walking forwards and they played it backwards, but her voice was speaking forward—they didn't, like, reverse her voice or anything.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
The Motte automatically changes the link to Old Reddit
It does that only if you've enabled that setting in your personal account options (under the "Content" tab).
Item 1 of 6
Steve Jackson, leader of Steve Jackson Games and the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (which just celebrated its 40th anniversary):
Item 2 of 6
In a residential zone, a municipal ordinance permits only single-family detached dwellings, where a “dwelling” is used by one or more families and does not include “hotels, motels, rooming houses, or other tourist homes”, and a “family” is “one or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit”.
A real-estate investor buys a six-bedroom house capable of holding 17 people, and uses it as a short-term rental. The municipal govt. issues a violation to him, on the basis that the house counts as “hotel or other type of transient lodging” rather than “single-family dwelling”. The municipal zoning board and the trial judge agree with the municipal govt.
The appeals panel reverses (two to one). Since the ordinance fails to define “transient lodging”, it is ambiguous, and ambiguities are to be interpreted in favor of the owner. “Enterprises such as AirBnB have expanded the possible uses of single-family dwellings, and a township can address such uses in the zoning ordinance. However, amendments ‘cannot be effected by shoe-horning a use that involves renting an entire single-family home to vacationers into the definition of a “tourist home”’.”
The state supreme court reverses (unanimously). “While ‘single housekeeping unit’ is undefined in the ordinance, it is a term of art that is widely used in zoning ordinances. This court has adopted the common definition, used by courts throughout the country, as requiring the person or persons residing in the home to function as a family and to be ‘sufficiently stable and permanent’ and not ‘purely transient’. Thus, by defining ‘family’ by requiring ‘a single housekeeping unit’, the ordinance clearly and unambiguously excluded purely transient uses of property.” “The [appeals court]'s decisions have slowly eroded our decision in Albert [where we adopted this interpretation], from Marchenko (allowing some transient use) to Shvekh (allowing mostly transient use) and now in the case at bar (allowing purely transient use), differentiating Albert on less and less convincing grounds.”
Item 3 of 6
Excerpt from Wikipedia's Manual of Style:
But practices vary. Some publishers (such as the aforementioned Steve Jackson Games) use italics for shorter works and bold+italics for longer works.
Reminder: In any of these situations, it technically is bad practice to just hit Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B on your keyboard. Rather, you are supposed to use semantic markup (such as the cite element in HTML⁎ or a custom style in Word) and apply styling based on the semantics. (Using CSS to generate quotation marks that do not exist in the original HTML is possible. However, I personally dislike that practice, since characters that do not exist in the HTML are invisible to copying-and-pasting. So just type those quotation marks manually.)
⁎Historically, the cite element has been badly misused by some software.
Item 4 of 6
A food manufacturer experiences salmonella contamination at a peanut-butter factory. It is targeted by thousands of lawsuits, and calls on its insurer for coverage, since it expects to incur total damages in excess of its policy's deductible of 250 k$ per “occurrence”, defined as “an accident, including continuous or repeated exposure to substantially the same general harmful conditions”. However, the insurer points out that a later section of the same policy redefines “occurrence” as “any ‘bodily injury’ or ‘property damage’ that arises out of any one ‘lot’ of ‘your product’ that is prepared or acquired by you”—i. e., each 24-hour lot of peanut-butter production counts as a separate occurrence. The contaminated peanut butter was distributed over 225 lots, so the 250-k$ deductible must be reached on the basis of a single lot—not all the contaminated lots combined—before the insurer will provide coverage on that single lot. The manufacturer sues the insurer in order to get a clarification of which definition of “occurrence” controls.
The trial judge rejects the insurer's interpretation and adopts the manufacturer's, and the appeals panel affirms. The later section of the policy is ambiguous as to whether it is intended to redefine “occurrence”, especially when compared with other sections that do explicitly specify that they are redefining previously-defined terms. Even when considered in a vacuum, the second definition is ambiguous in itself: it is not clear whether, under the second definition, multiple injuries caused by a single lot are one occurrence or multiple occurrences. And it is circuit precedent that any ambiguity in an insurance policy is to be construed against the insurer that wrote that policy.
Item 5 of 6
Found via the YouTube algorithm: Mildly interesting video using popular Japanese Twitter posts to illustrate LLM stereotypes in that language (akin to em dashes in English)
Item 6 of 6
As part of a road widening, the state DOT (department of transportation) condemns a 13-foot-wide strip of land at the front of a person's residential property. The person's house would overlap this strip, but the DOT has modified the strip with a rectangular cutout in order to eliminate the overlap. Years later (presumably while the construction is ongoing), the person hires a surveyor to double-check the DOT's plan. Whoops! The DOT's survey fails to show a large concrete porch at the side of the house⁎, so the cutout failed to exclude that area from the DOT's taking.⁎⁎ (Disclaimer: Past this point I am far from certain that I understand what's going on in this lawsuit. But, IMO, this one paragraph is quite interesting on its own.)
The person sues for compensation—not just for the de jure taking of the land under the porch as shown in the DOT's plans, but also for the de facto taking of the porch itself as not shown in the DOT's plans. The trial judge allows the de jure claim to proceed, but rejects the de facto claim, reasoning that the de jure claim already includes any economic damages incurred by the DOT's misstatement.
The appeals panel reverses and remands for further proceedings. The economic damages have nothing to do with this question. This lawsuit may seem like double-dipping, but it is perfectly reasonable for the taking of the land+porch to be composed of de jure and de facto portions that must be considered separately.
⁎Google Street View indicates that this “porch” is large enough that “patio” may be a more appropriate word.
⁎⁎Can we pour out a drink for the hapless low-level civil engineer who was tasked with drawing the “survey” from old as-built plans and/or Google Earth screenshots, and now doubtless is being excoriated for this mistake?
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