Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.
Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.
Someone is doing that right now - there's a proposed class-action lawsuit [1] that reads in part "On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion".
And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.
They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.
A movie theatre is a bad comparison. Nowhere does it say “Buy the movie” and it’s clear to the purchaser that they’re purchasing a one time viewing. That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.
Not that I necessarily agree with the other comment either.
Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread.
I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of the argument.
> I wouldn’t be confident in court
Which was my argument. Everything else you added were tangential arguments no one was refuting in the first place.
> but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
You think most people who buy books for ereaders expect that when they buy a book for Kindle, they can just load it up on their Kobo? I wouldn’t be that confident without a survey, but I would welcome seeing one.
People don’t seem to have trouble understanding that when you buy an app on iOS, that doesn’t work on Android, and vice-versa. It is plausible they might have the same intuitive understanding regarding the Kindle and Kobo stores.
IIRC is means a pictorial definition of a value so the above is a float printable using 12 positions which for maximum value would be as 999999999.99
While a PIC X(10)
Means character string length 10.
It was defined in era of fixed width fonts and band printers so the max printing width was 132 and one had to know exactly where each character would print.
Report writing in COBOL is easy.
Almost correct. However, this is not a float but a fixed decimal value with two decimals. The V is not stored but just used to indicate where the decimal sign should be.
Source: I've written a lot of COBOL years ago.
First job out of school was manufacturing systems support in COBOL and finance systems support in Assembler. As someone who has dealt with 40cm deep line flow stacks of source code for both the COBOL is way easier to hold in my brain. YMMV.
Boring old me would be reaching for mojo in order to have types that actually are "real" rather than just an editing overlay of decorators/DSL/tooling.
Too bad Mojo gave up on Python compatibility on code level. Now it’s just one of a dozen “Python inspired” languages, with the only benefit that they aim for easily calling into other Python code.
Dragon used as part of a phrase to describe some demons. So a poor translation tool maybe would see daemon as misspelling of demon and render "dragon".
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