pwnicholson

Go MTSU Blue Raiders!

I think the more direct inspiration was Gus March-Phillips. The recent movie “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a fictionalized telling of the work that the team Ian Fleming was on, based of some of the recently declassified missions.

Either way, if you’re interested in the topic it’s a really fun movie.

Eh, you’re probably right, but I also know a lot of people from various Houston burbs and they all lean right/MAGA, so I’ve got some observational bias going on too

Houston is as well considering it’s massive but full of mostly sprawled suburbs and tons of oil people or friends/relatives of oil people.

It is in the context of a guy singing. The next line is something like “if it was a dog that had howled thus, he’d have shot him”

“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hail souls from mens’ bodies?” – Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

(Guitar/lute strings used to be made from sheep gut, for anyone confused)

I am one of the bosses. I’ve been around lots of businesses that do this kind of thing, including tiny startups.

I’m telling you for most businesses, if they’ve bothered to send someone on a business trip that costs $2500+ per person for an important reason, they aren’t going to cancel it over $250. That’s foolish.

The percentage doesn’t change for a team vs individual. 3 people also need 3 plane tickets, 3 hotel rooms, etc.

$250 is a rounding error for most international business travelers. That’s the cost of one moderately nice business dinner for 3 people. Between airfare, hotels, and meals, that’s less than 10% of the cost of almost all international business trips, with the possible exception of some quick jump from Toronto to Detroit for a lunch meeting.

Same for a lot of international leisure travelers.

This is a filter to keep ‘the poors’ away

Ha. Funny

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That’s also just what I could find in 30 seconds on Zillow. Pretty sure you could get stuff even cheaper (no structures in property, for insurance) with a little effort

I didn’t say Canadian tundra, I say Canadian North.

Hers a listing in northern SK for $129k CAD that’s nearly 12k acres. That’s $10.75 CAD per acre. That’s pretty cheap in my book.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1412-2nd-Ave-Edam-SK-S0M-0V0/453901932_zpid/

Outside of the awesome ‘national parks’ answer from someone else, I would have to assume the best cost-to-surface-area purchase in the world would be really cheap land in the American West, Australian outback, Russian tundra, Canadian North, etc. Assuming it doesn’t have oil on it, some of those areas, land practically given away. Sometimes you can get governments to pay you to take it on and try to do something useful with it.

If you consider that ownership usually includes mineral rights for miles under the ground, this really starts to look like the obvious choice of your looking for volume, not just area.

I mean, The Mandalorian started by cutting someone in half with a door 60 seconds into the first episode. It’s not exactly “little kid stuff.”

Half-life.

As a photographer and the spouse of a writer, they are making massive profits off of a product that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t train it. By the very way the technology works, there’s a little bit of our work scattered in everything they do. If I included a sample of a piece of music in a song I recorded, or included a copyrighted painting in the background if a movie I was making, is would have to get a license. Why is this any different?

They should have done something more like a commodity license as it exists in music:

The composer of a song cannot prevent a new artist from recording a cover of their music if it has been previously released. The original composer is legally forced to grant them a license (hence “compulsory license”). But that license is at a pre-negotiated minimal rate. The new artist is free to try to negotiate a lower rate if the composer agrees. But the original composer can’t stop the new artist from recording a cover. And the new artist has to pay them for it.

Unfettered access is granted and the composer gets their share. Win-win.

That’s disappointing to say the least. I’m sure there will be a few more lawsuits as big publishers like Disney try to get their share of the pie.

The ‘pirating’ news from a couple of months ago was Meta, specifically. But I’m sure Anthropic did some too.

The issue I’ve always had wasn’t that they didn’t own a copy to read/reference. It’s that they’re effectively creating derivative works from that content, which they haven’t licensed for that use.

According to my understanding of copyright law (IANAL but I took a few IP law classes on in college) every author whose work was fed into that beast could have an argument that they share copyright in the derivative work that comes out of it.