Eric J. Korpela @SETIEric@qoto.org

If you really cared about the state of the world, you’d take that stick out of your ass and use it to crack skulls instead of wasting both our time being a whiny reply guy.

This is #ClimateBreakdown

This heatwave also includes some very important growing regions in China. As the world warms, food production will decrease.

Is mass starvation a fair price for billionaire jets and super yachts?

Governments around the world need to ban them now.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/northern-china-braces-for-record-high-temperatures-in-major-heat-wave/1658614

It Appears Cowardly Trump Is Already Looking for a Way to Cancel the Debate With Biden at the End of the Month https://www.politicalflare.com/2024/06/it-appears-cowardly-trump-is-already-looking-for-a-way-to-cancel-the-debate-with-biden-at-the-end-of-the-month/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

White House for sale: Donald Trump is selling policies for a second term to the highest bidders

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-campaign-donors-corruption-tiktok-b2560838.html

"It Appears to be a Payoff": Expert Says Kushner's Saudi Cash an "Egregious" National Security Worry

https://www.salon.com/2024/06/12/it-appears-to-be-a-payoff-expert-says-kushners-saudi-cash-an-egregious-national-security-worry/

@GottaLaff
If the SCOTUS roles were reversed, republicans would have no problem in expanding the court no matter how much pushback there was by Democrats. I wish Democrats would lose their timidity in such matters.

Oklahoma Supreme Court sides with the white supremacists who mass murdered hundreds of Black people during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—and rules that the harm done to the survivors does not fall into a recognizable legal remedy.

The Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of the case altogether.

White supremacy thriving in 2024 America. Horrific.
https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/state-supreme-court-sides-with-tulsa-in-1921-race-massacre-lawsuit

Donald Trump admits he still has a gun, despite felony convictions - It is a violation of federal law for someone convicted of felonies to possess a firearm

https://www.salon.com/2024/06/12/donald-admits-he-still-has-a-gun-despite-felony-convictions/

Oklahoma Supreme Court says that the Black Tulsa Race Massacre survivors get $0 despite being victims of terrorism & mass violence.

Meanwhile, in 1996 the families of the Oklahoma City Bombing got $50M to assist them as victims of terrorism & mass violence.

This is America.

Was anyone else’s car broken into last night? Someone took my wallet that I left on the seat in my unlocked car parked under the broken street lamp…AGAIN!!!! I don’t know why this keeps happening to me, but this neighborhood is CLEARLY going down the drain with all the Radical Leftist Marxist Communist Socialist Elites moving in. Thanks for nothing, Biden!

(Inspired by actual posts in my neighborhood.)

#OddNextDoorPostingsAndComplaints
#HashTagGames @hashtaggames

Reading up on Lynn Conway, this woman is unbelievable.

Specifically, she (in order):

1. Worked at IBM and invented superscaler CPU architecture (ie, the thing that intel lives by for modern performance)
2. Transitioned and started over in 1968, when it was stealth or death
3. Joined Xerox PARC, where she invented VLSI and modern silicon design

Modern chips exist because of her.

The ultra wealthy do not see the preservation of democracy as significant a priority as eliminating taxes and regulations.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/10/billionaires-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-trump-00162219

People on social media saying Lauren Windsor shouldn’t have surreptitiously recorded US Supreme Court Justice Alito endorsing the idea of “godliness” and a Christian fascistic country. NO-maybe Sam Alito and his spouse shouldn’t be bigoted, fascistic, traitorous, misogynistic asshats.

MAGA Rep Worried About Great White Men Replacement Theory

https://crooksandliars.com/2024/06/grothman-worried-about-great-white-men?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=89568

There was Paul Manafort, and we'll come back to Paul Manafort, but the important thing about Paul Manafort is that he had been working for Russian-backed oligarchs for years in Ukraine and had gotten enormously wealthy off of it.

Because he is a convicted felon, Trump will most likely lose liquor license for Bedminster and his other properties in New Jersey. — Slowly but surely, the universe is going to connect fuck around with find out.

This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the controversy regarding Adobe's Terms of Service changes. As always, this script may have a few minor word variations from how I presented it live on air.

- - -

So I think it's probably true that most people who use modern computers these days are likely to interact sometimes with Adobe technologies one way or another. The PDF document format traces back to Adobe in the early 90s. Photoshop is from Adobe, which really has become something of a verb as in "photoshopping an image", and goes back to the late 80's. And there are lots of other graphics and video and more where Adobe dominates the creative pipelines.

And what's happened with Adobe like with so many other firms is that they've moved from a model where you buy the software and install it on your computer and that's all you usually pay, to these "running in the cloud" models where you have to pay ongoing subscription fees for access. From a corporate profit center standpoint the attraction of the subscription model is obvious, but this hasn't always gone over well with users.

Now of course these cloud and subscription models almost always have Terms of Service agreements that users have to accept before they can use the services. And it seems commonly *accepted* that most people don't really read these in depth and of those who do most don't have the background to completely understand them given the dense legalese they're usually written in.

So what's happened with Adobe is very recently they changed their terms of service and apparently asked users to accept the new terms. And even though the changes may be *relatively* minor, the fact that they made changes drew attention to the terms of service for many users for pretty much the first time, and they really didn't like the expansive nature of the rights Adobe gives itself to access and inspect users' content.

Now in most respects what Adobe is doing isn't all that much different from what various firms with cloud-based services are doing and have in their terms of service agreements, but as users have been increasingly pushed into these cloud-based systems rather than being able to keep these applications completely local on their own computers, and now as the complexities of AI systems and what data AI has access to has entered into the mix as well, we seem to be reaching a kind of inflection point where for many people this has just all gone too far and a "we're not going to take it" blowback is being triggered from many users.

So over the last few days the Web has been flooded with articles and YouTube videos condemning Adobe, indeed using terms like "Adobe Apocalypse", "Adobe went too far", "the end of Adobe", and so on. And while obviously there's considerable emotion in play with this, there's no denying that many people are genuinely very upset and many are saying they're ending their Adobe subscriptions and moving to competing products wherever they can, even though that can cause them considerable hassles given how widely used Adobe products are for creating and exchanging work products during the creation of so much content.

Adobe has attempted to reply to this controversy but as you might guess, this seems to have just made many users even angrier at Adobe.

So I don't know how this is going to turn out with Adobe but I think it's reasonable to view this as a pretty dramatic warning to many firms, that the kinds of subscription/cloud models and terms of service that they've been pushing users into won't necessarily be widely acceptable indefinitely, and that it only takes a single misstep and a few days for large firms like these to put at risk the good will of users that took years or even decades to accumulate.

Many of the users of these firms, especially firms that dominate in particular areas, are starting to say that they feel like they're being pushed around, and we're now seeing evidence that they're unlikely to put up with this indefinitely. It seems likely that these firms can ignore this changing landscape only at their own considerable risk in the long run, with all the complex ramifications that has going forward.

Stay tuned, this is going to be interesting!

- - -

L

New study: "Manuscripts released as #preprints before journal submission experience significantly shorter acceptance time compared to those without preprints."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-05056-6

PS: This should boost the incentives for authors to release preprints prior to journal submission. A win for both authors and readers.