This is how people lose credibility.

The articles wants to make you think the box is a 3d confinement reminiscent of the drawing.

From the description it sounds like it is a 4 square foot cage that the person stands in while cuffed.

Yes it’s bad.

No, it’s not like the box mentioned at the CIA Black site.

Just because they are not literally identical does mean they are unrelated. The author points this out and it sounds horrific.

> The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

> A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty

You get in the box and tell me it’s not torture. I’ll wait.

Draw 2x2ft square on the ground and see how could you stand there, sit down, sleep, stretch your legs/arms. Imagine doing that for 24h.

I haven’t drawn this, but I think taller adult would always be touching at least two walls unless standing diagonally.

I think if you ever get to the point where you're argument hinges on 'well actually it's torture but it's not THAT BAD of torture' you should really step back and analyze if your post is really worth making or not.

Here is the fundamental issue:

People for the most part value security and community far more than privacy.

Even in old days - most people lived in a village with zero privacy than lived out in the wilderness all alone.

People passed the income tax which gave far more information to the government than other ways of taxation.

What is the downside to limiting all movie and software copyrights to 10 years?

Source code and materials etc can remain trade secrets if desired?

And all IP with a movie as well - including characters. This would stop a studio from forever milking the same piece of IP forever.

No, the opposite. To be protected by copyright, sources must be uploaded to a Library of Software.

Downside: Movies will be made to not last; Software will be made to be incompatible with everything on a 10-year timeframe; and the country who enabled this open mindset will displease its copyright owners who will move to the other countries.

One downside is it would motivate companies to get intellectual property registered under a trademark with indefinite protection rather than copyright. Even with our current lifetime + 70 year protection we have companies like Disney getting characters registered as a trademark.

That is called being on the other side of an airtight hatch (h/t Raymond Chen)

The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German.

Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.

I think we can go further.

Human attention is the determinant of monetary value.

Gold is expensive because it takes a lot of human attention to find and refine it.

Food became cheaper when it required less human attention to make it.

There aren’t that many places out of America’s orbit where you would want to live.

If by failure you mean fascist and authoritarian, America could still reach you.

Agreed, the problem is that in many scenarios where the US becomes a failed state.. you probably want to be IN the US rather than living under our security umbrella (Canada/Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Australia). Or worse, in a nation we might end up in a shooting war with (Russia/China).

Either enemies are going to make moves in our absence, or we are going to pray upon former allies (next orange man takes his trade wars kinetic).

So I'd rather still be in the exponentially larger (population & land) isolated continental power surrounded mostly by water and smaller states.

> still reach you

Yeah but the effort just went up 10x

Besides I don’t think they are moving to resist the fascism. It’s to seek an alternative and carry on living.

To me VB 6 was the height of RAD IDEs

You could throw together a CRUD app in under an hour interactively.

VB was the GUI equivalent of Dataflex - you could design the screen and it would automagically create the data structures under it. I also remember, from the same period, Mantis (from Cincom Systems) that did the same for 3270 terminals and IBM mainframes.

I often say Deteflex is Ruby on Rails for the VT100.

I would agree the anti-monopoly action had far more to do with that.

Basically, if you you think you can leverage your R&D into maintaining your monopoly and extending it to other areas it makes sense if for nothing else to keep the smart people who might otherwise disrupt your monopoly connected to you.

But if you are going to get broken up, just take as much short term profits as soon as you can

Anybody remember the heartbeat scanner in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six?

Yep. But my first thought on usage was "man this will make detecting home occupancy simpler" (till it turns out you can't distinguish from pets I suppose).

Pet heart-rates probably fairly different and “quieter”.

Only if they are small pets. A Mastiff for example is going to have a heart rate extremely similar to a human.

After reading this, I don’t feel bad about using AI to generate art anymore.