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(crossposted from TechDirt)

If laws can be copyrighted, then would obeying the law require a copyright license?

Would obeying the law without a license constitute copyright infringement?

With so many jurisdictions (city, county, state, federal) and so many laws, there are a lot of copyright licenses that each citizen would need to acquire.

To simplify things, collection societies could be created. These societies would obtain the rights to license and enforce the licenses on copyright 'bundles' of various laws.

When a new law is passed, one of the copyright societies would acquire the rights to it and add it to its bundle. Now you can get a proper copyright license -- necessary to obey the laws -- from one convenient place, and with one single copyright fee.

Oh, wait -- but with multiple copyright societies, each licensing different subsets of the laws, it seems you would still have to go to multiple parties in order to acquire all of the necessary licenses in order to obey the laws without infringing the copyrights of those laws.

So maybe congress could establish a new federal department of law licensing. Give it suitably large budget, offices, staff, etc. Every citizen could be required, annually, just like with taxes, to file forms declaring that they intend to obey the laws, and paying the copyright license fees for those copyrighted laws they intend to follow.

There. That should fix everything.

2020 Democratic Party presidential debates and forums

9 PM EDT on NBC.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio
Former Rep. John Delaney

---

Commentary:

An Interview with AMD’s Forrest Norrod: Naples, Rome, Milan, & Genoa

There's some clarifications and small tidbits in the article. Not sure why the Rome DRAM question was asked and barely answered; I thought it was known that it would support 4 TiB.

Milan will be Zen 3. Genoa is confirmed to be Zen 4. "Another Italian city" will come after that, likely Zen 5. The Frontier 1.5 exaflops supercomputer will not use Milan, but rather a "custom CPU". IIRC, AdoredTV speculated about a server CPU with 4 attached GPUs (Infinity Fabric) for this purpose.

But the best part is this shade thrown at the end about 3D XPoint/Optane:

IC: Intel has extended out to all the other aspects of the enterprise market in order addressing more TAM than ever before, because that is the goal for investors. One of those aspects is volatile memory and Optane. What can AMD do in this space, or is it worth it the customers that you're going for to do some sort of non-volatile memory?

Forrest Norrod: With all these forms of NVM I do think that there are two value propositions that people have been talking about.

One is the non-volatile aspect, to blur the lines between memory and storage, and customers will get much better large memory database machines etc. On the whole non-volatile aspect, I think people are doing the software work to enable that on a broader range of applications, but at the end of the day, the fact that you still have a failure domain at the node level means that the value is relatively smaller. Before you can commit, you're going to trust a commit to just one machine, to the SCM on one machine. However realistically you're not going to commit until you got a commit on multiple nodes. And so, that tends to somewhat degrade the value that people were thinking about.

So the other aspect of course is lower cost per bit. They’ll use it as DRAM replacement and the fact is that it has longer latency and non-uniform latency, and so there are a bunch of issues there. Now withstanding that it is close enough that we can use it as DRAM replacement, I'd say there was probably more interest in that 12 months ago when DRAM price were at a historically high level. Today there is less interest in that now as DRAM prices have come way down and I do think that DRAM/memory is a commodity market, and commodity markets have a very set of economic rules. The cure for high oil prices is high oil prices right? You know because that increases production and that brings the oil prices back down. The prospect of Optane being a replacement for DRAM in of itself would bring the cost of DRAM down, regardless of the current market factors in play today.

But there are a lot of other storage class memory (SCM) technologies which are in development. I think that you will see SCM settle into a niche of the memory hierarchy over 2-3 years and I think that there will be a lot of choices, not just Optane. But I don't think it's the be-all and end-all. I think that that Intel has made a horrific mistake hitching their system architecture to a propriety memory interface. I think that they've made a key strategic mistake.

I think that in general, Intel may be forgetting what got them here. Truly having an open ecosystem where others could add value to that ecosystem, and that the platform is a key part of the success of the x86 market. Intel still talks about it in that way, but that's not what they are doing, any pico-acre of silicon that doesn't belong to Intel is something that they covet. But I think acting that way is to the detriment of the health of their platform ecosystem long term.

Here's another garbage non-volatile part announcement.

New PlayStation Patent Could Provide PS5's Killer Feature

“A system and method are disclosed for dynamically loading game software for smooth game play," reads the patent "A load boundary associated with a game environment is identified. A position of a character in the game environment is then monitored. Instructions corresponding to a next game environment are loaded into a memory when the character crosses the load boundary, such that game play is not interrupted.”

Hasn't this already been implemented in open world games like GTA V and Skyrim?

[Update 24 June 2019 0855 US/Eastern]
The issue (at least for me and several other users) appears to have been resolved. There is a front page story addressing this. That would probably be a better place to post info and discuss.
===================================

I am currently (since ~0640 US/Eastern) unable to access https://soylentnews.org via Spectrum internet.

However, the site is *not* down (I am writing in my journal as this is happening).

This likely means some sort of outage on Spectrum's (formerly Time Warner Cable) network or some intermediate network between Spectrum and Linode.

I am able to access the site via Megapath/GTT without issue.

I'm guessing that I won't get an answer until the outage I've inferred is fixed, but is anyone else having similar issues?

So, someone who is moderately important to me is aging. As we age, we tend to fall apart. This person needed surgery on her knees. Nice, new knees, they say. I suppose that's all good and everything - but there is recovery to go through.

This woman spends much of her free time on Facebook, anyway, keeping up with kids, grandkids, etc - it's what women do since the advent of computers and Facebook.

Sadly, now that she's sitting around in pain, and suffering through the start of rehab, all she has to do is to post about recovery.

I'm starting to think there ought to be a law, or something. Me? When I was recovering, I resorted to the computer as well. I registered with an online game, and killed aliens and such. Hell, I didn't WANT people to know how much misery I was in. Can't dope yourself up, and stay unconscious for a couple months, right? So, I killed stuff.

I almost want to make a post to her Facebook page, tell her to STFU, and let us know how great she feels AFTER recovery. But, even an asocial asshole doesn't want to be THAT frigging rude. *sigh*

Let's just have Facebook make a new rule (they love making rules) that you can't post anything until you're off the painkillers. New national law says "You must notify all social media prior to undergoing surgery." Then, each of the platforms put your posts on hold, until you demonstrate that you've recovered. Six months after your surgery, you can sort through all the posts you made, and decide if you really, and truly, want to post ANY of that shit you wrote while you were in pain.

We've come to expect the youth to post every irrelevant detail of their lives to Facebook. I would expect more mature people to have more dignity.

Senators receive classified briefing on UFO sightings

A group of US senators, including the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, received a classified briefing Wednesday about a series of reported encounters by the US Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to a congressional aide.

"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," Rachel Cohen, the spokeswoman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, told CNN.

The briefing was first reported by Politico.

President Donald Trump recently confirmed that he was also briefed on reports of Navy pilots spotting unidentified flying objects. "I did have one very brief meeting on it," Trump told ABC News in an interview that aired Sunday. "But people are saying they're seeing UFO's, do I believe it? Not particularly."

‘We’re watching’: Trump stokes UFO rumors during ABC News interview

Asked if he would be told if extraterrestrial life was found, Trump said: “We’re watching, and you’ll be the first to know.”

[...] On Thursday, UFO speculation hit Kansas City after several people said two mysterious, white, hazy and elongated “orbs” had appeared above the city’s airport. A local TV station tweeted a series of photographs of the purported mysterious objects. “We’ve taken several calls in our newsroom about these two orbs spotted in the Kansas City sky tonight,” KMBC said. “This picture was taken near KCI Airport.”

The National Weather Service declared itself flummoxed. “We honestly have no explanation for the floating objects over Kansas City,” it wrote.

Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home, sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullabye
Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles await you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullabye
Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home, sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullabye

============
Bonus Track: Her Majesty
Her majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she doesn't have a lot to say
Her majesty's a pretty nice girl
But she changes from day to day
I wanna tell her that I love her a lot but I gotta get a belly full of wine
Her majesty's a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm gonna make her mine
Oh yeah
Someday I'm gonna make her mine

It's raining today. The sky is a featureless grey. The greenery that was so vivid yesterday in the sun is now muted. And I feel lonely. Again. I don't know why. I don't really have any reason to be. Maybe it's just the rain.

I woke up this morning to the sound of rain hitting the window, which I love. I put on Paw Patrol for my daughter and gave her a few dates to munch on. I sat with her for a while cuddling and asking her about the characters. After I got ready for work, my daughter and wife both give me a hug and a kiss to send me on my way.

The coffee shop I normally stop at to get my daily cappuccino -- a normally bustling place -- was much quieter than normal. Normally I enjoy the time it takes for them to make my coffee. I'll take a seat on one of the long benches and watch the other people getting their coffee. I go enough that most of the employees know me by name and will frequently chat me up. They always make me feel welcome. Today the place was nearly empty. I quickly got my coffee and left.

A new project manager started just over a month ago. She's beautiful. Totally my type, with short dyed red hair. Her short hair shows off her neck which drives me crazy. I have a major crush on her. Even though she has only been here for a month or so, we have had a lot of time to chat together. Maybe 1/2 the time we have lunch together. Just the two of us in the lunchroom. I want to touch her; to be touched by her. I keep debating about asking her out for a beer after work one day. I think she likes me too, but mixing dating and work can be risky.

Earlier this week (Tuesday maybe?), I had such a great day. It was hot and sunny. I felt important because I was fixing some important problem. There was some new girl that worked on the business side of things that I had never seen before that was acting super awkward when I was helping her with a problem. I think she liked me and it felt good. One of the other ladies kept flirting with me and touching my arm. On my drive home, I was merging and there was a cutie in the back seat of the car beside me and we locked eyes. She kept looking over at me with a knowing smile. I felt like a million bucks that day.

But today I feel like I'm missing something. I feel like a drug addict that needs a hit, but my drug is validation.

Maybe it's just the rain.

Navy SEAL War Crimes Witness Says He Was the Killer

In stunning testimony that may upend the war crimes trial of Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, a SEAL medic told the court on Thursday that he — not the chief — had killed a wounded captive in Iraq.

The medic, Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, testified that he watched Chief Gallagher stab the prisoner, a teenage ISIS fighter, in the neck, but that the stab wound did not appear to be life-threatening. After the chief walked away, Special Operator Scott told the court, he pressed his thumb over the captive’s breathing tube until he died.

“I knew he was going to die anyway, and wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would have happened to him,” Special Operator Scott said, adding that he had seen other captives tortured and killed by Iraqi forces.

He testified after being granted immunity from criminal prosecution for the events and actions that he would discuss on the stand. A Navy official said that he could still face nonjudicial punishment, including being dropped from the SEALs or discharged from the Navy entirely.

Did he do it, or is he just exploiting immunity to try to be a lightly punished fall guy?