The Death of the Mind

The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, including commercial ones. That’s the bargain, but it seems that the copyright maximalists in the French Parliament want to renege on it. Here’s an amendment to a finance bill that was proposed by 75 politicians in the National Assembly a few days ago (translation by DeepL):

The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/12/french-parliament-wants-to-make-people-pay-a-license-fee-to-use-public-domain-works/

The end is nigh! PostgreSQL has
substantially tightened
restrictions on the use of the “public” schema.
Here, a standard login user (not superuser) tries to make a table, as one does:
user=> CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer); ERROR: permission denied for schema public
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer);

NoooO! Why can I not write a table into public?
For developers and experimenters, one of the long-time joys of PostgreSQL has
been the free-and-easy security policy that PostgreSQL has shipped with for the “public” schema.

“public” is in the default search_path, so you can always find things in it;
and,
any user can create new objects in “public”; so,
“just throw it in public!” has been an easy collaboration trick.

However, for anyone using a database for more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5qV

Mesa’s Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Async-Pipeline-Pre

On Friday, October 7, the Internet Archive filed a reply brief against the four publishers that sued Internet Archive in June 2020: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. This is the final brief in support of our motion for summary judgment (our previous motions can be found here and here) where we have asked the Court to dismiss the lawsuit because our lending program is a fair use. The lawsuit was filed against Internet Archive in 2020 because of “anger among publishers” about digital lending by libraries. The publishers are urging the court to declare that “controlled digital lending is not a defense to copyright infringement” and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/08/internet-archive-files-final-reply-brief-in-lawsuit-defending-controlled-digital-lending/

The global traffic violence pandemic that claims over a million lives every year is also spawning a devastating global mental health crisis that could itself be making traffic violence trends worse — and researchers say policymakers must do more to prevent car crashes and the psychological impacts that often follow them.
As part of a comprehensive literature review of 20 years’ worth of peer-reviewed studies from around the world, a team of Brazilian researchers found that road users are at significantly increased risk of post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety after surviving motor vehicle collisions — and those who experience more serious crashes experience more serious psychological impacts as well.
That might not seem surprising, given that researchers have…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/06/how-the-traffic-violence-pandemic-is-creating-a-silent-mental-health-crisis/

The embrace of neo-Nazi’s by both big business parties obliterates any notions that the US government is fighting for “democracy” or “human rights” in Ukraine, or anywhere else.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/07/pndc-o07.html

The clever folks at Adafruit tested their Cheekmate chess-cheating prototype by embedding it in a slab of pork butt.
The Internet has been abuzz for weeks about a particularly juicy chess cheating controversy that erupted last month. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost in the third round to a 19-year-old upstart, Hans Niemann, in what was widely considered to be a shocking upset. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament the next day, and his cryptic comments on Twitter fueled rampant speculation that Niemann had cheated. The fact that Niemann admitted to cheating in online chess matches didn’t help his case, but he steadfastly insisted he never cheated in over-the-board games.
The fierce debate eventually produced…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1887540

Can it be that the Times report indicates US concern over the political fallout from a more recent operation that is of far greater international consequence than the Moscow assassination? The unexplained bombing of the Nordstream pipeline comes to mind.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/dugi-o06.html