Look, mate, Intellectual Property Laws are literally the government creating and giving somebody an artificial monopoly on something which would not naturally exist if it wasn’t for artificial limitations on “doing the same thing” being forced on everybody thanks to legislation and the coercive powers of the Legal system, and this was purposefully written in Law to do exactly that, so it’s not an unexpected legislative side effect.

So anywhere were Intellectual Property legislation can apply the market is not free, on purpose and by policy.

Now, a good argument can be done about how IP law incentivises the creation of things with a high utility value which would otherwise not be created, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the whole thing is a giant legislative sledgehammer with massive destructive capability for both the Economy and people’s lives, which needs to be handled very carefully in order not to do more harm than good.

As it so happens IP has gone completelly out of control in the US because Corruption there is incredibly high, more some when it comes to the property of ideas since holding a piece of such property can yield billions of dollars in profits - the profits from owning ideas can be far vaster than of merelly owning land - and this shit has been copied around the world by almost as corrupt politicians (for example, the thoroughly corrupt crooks in the EU commission pretty much copy every single “this will make me personally lots of money from thankful corporations” pieces of legislation from the US).

So Copyrights now last an insanelly long period - about 1.5 times the average human lifetime - before things covered by it go into the Public Domain, whilst lots of Patent Offices (most notably the ones in the US and Japan) will just accept patents on everything no matter how obvious without even a proper search for prior art, hence things like the “round corner button” patent that Apple has as well as countless business patents for “solutions” which are obvious to any domain specialist (many such patents literaly the product of paying a domain expert for an hour of their time by a patent troll to just “think up a solution for this” as no actual implementation is needed to get a patent, just the idea of how it could be done).

All this to say that this fucked up situation of insane government-given monopolies all over the place for shit that’s obvious to domain experts or derivative (a common trick in patents for medicine is to just do a small tweak in the formulation to get another 25 years of patent protection on pretty much the same thing) was created ON PURPOSE by the very politicians who claim to want a Free Market.

The entire thing should be reviewed and ajusted in exactly the opposite direction it is going (so we should have shorter protection periods, no “ideas only” patents, proper prior art searches rather than relying on expensive court cases to nullify patents on things somebody else already did or which are common practice in that industry, no business patents, properly funded Patent Offices, no transnational recognition of patents - so that countries *cough* Japan *cough* can’t just use their Patent Office as some sort of commercial weapon to benefit their local companies in other markets - and so on) but given that Intellectual Property is an area worth trillions (and, remember, it’s entirelly artificial, so without that legislation such property would be worth nothing at all) and politicians are incredibly corrupt nowadays, this shit is getting worse rather than better (and, IMHO, severely slowing down the speed of progress in the current Era versus a Free Ideas system)

It’s yet another thing to force the riff-raff to work any job for any pay.

Can’t have people refusing to do disgusting or even life-long disabling jobs for peanuts.

See also “housing costs”.

Were I am, you just get Insulin for free with a prescription from you Family Doctor, because we have a National Health Service.

Even without said prescription, it’s only €70.

Americans are being thoroughly screwed, and it’s very much on purpose thanks to the way laws and regulations around Healthcare were designed in the US (and, at the risk attractint the crowd throwing “bothsideism” slogans around to defend “their” “tribe”, this is due to the actions of both US major parties) since in a real Free Market, Insuline over there should cost around the same as it costs over here without a prescription, not 10x more - without artificial market barriers there would be investors literally flying planeloads of the thing from Europe to US to make a killing out of buying it cheaply over here and selling it for “merelly” twice as much over there.

And you are totally right!

Let me be more precise: the Defrauding Of Investors for which she was convicted in Court was that her company was getting people’s blood samples and claiming to be analyzing them on their own special machines, whilst in reality they were sending those samples to labs to be analyzed in the traditional way and their machines never worked.

Maybe amongst her various claims she made one as you said (frankly, I don’t remember anymore), but that was not what landed her in jail, hence I only mentioned the machines as being the scam.

I supposed one could say both things were elements of her con, even if only one of those amounted to Fraud.

The poster before you was explicitly talking of Iraq,

Her con was that her company had machines that could do all the analyzing automatically in seconds, it wasn’t than blood analysis had predictive value for at least some diseases.

I don’t think that even back then anybody disputed that at the very least doing DNA sequencing of the cells found in blood could predict the likelihood of certain diseases for a person, as the concept of some people having a genetic predisposition for certain diseases was already accepted at the time.

The scam was the “magic” machine that could do it fast and cheaply, not the concept that it can be done.

As the Official British Report On The Iraq War showed, both the Brits and the Americans (more the latter than the former) committed the War Crime of Pillaging by forcing the Iraqi Administration they themselves put in place after conquering the place to give Oil Exploration contracts to British and American companies.

Saddam (for decades supported by America) was shit and the self proclaimed “Liberators of the Iraqi People” were almost as bad, so that “infinite” money hasn’t been for Iraqis in a long time.

My own experience of being, within a large transnational company, technical lead of a small team based in India for a cross-border software development project, is that their own management structures over there were spectacularly incompetent (and I come from a country - Portugal - were management practices are, IMHO, shit compared to the rest of Europe).

Amongst other things, they still had ancient management practices such as “managers must always earn more than technical personnel” which meant that even a junior manager earned more than a senior developer, in turn directly leading to bright young developers moving to management (were they were invariably shit) within maybe 5 years purelly because it was the only way to earn more money, so as a result the broader team (so, not just my project) there had no good senior developers - it was either “senior” in the sense of lots of years working there rather than senior-level expertise or a handful of junior and mid-level devs who were good at that level and could turn into competente senior techies, but were bound to transition to management as even a junior manager earned more than a senior techie.

Other “funny” things were how nobody there would never, ever, ever admit not to have fully understood something or needing more clarification during an open call about the project next-steps with the rest of the team, so I had to do “special handling” for my remote team of talking to each one individually and carefully tease away their questions with some kind of “it’s on me” excuse, for example, saying that “I want to make sure I explained things correctly and didn’t miss anything important”. Notice that my Indian colleagues who were not based in India but rather sat with the rest in London, did not have that peculiar behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, that outsourced team which existed as part of an outsourcing division the senior management of the company had decided to set up in India to cut development costs, didn’t actually add significant value because of the overhead of dealing with them and the need to check and correct their work, mean that the vastly more senior - and costly, as half of us were contractors - team in London (of which I was part) ended up losing almost as much time dealing with them and the side-effects of the low quality of their work as was gained from having that India-based team doing part of the development work.

Well, the Mini-PC actually looks like it belongs in my living room TV table.

But, yeah, functionally it would work just as well on a spare laptop as long as the microprocessor in it has the video decoders in hardware (something which is only a concern for really old laptops).

Beyond that, I wouldn’t recommend an old desktop because of its higher power consumption and noise, but a laptop should be fine on both regards.

Don’t really know about the HDMI cec, but I use one of these remotes which works perfectly with Kodi (it seems to just work like a wireless keyboard that just sends keypresses for shortcut characters corresponding to the function of each button, and those shortcuts are some kind of standard that Kodi supports, so this kind of remote - that also works for Android stuff - works fine with Kodi).

The only quirk it has versus the remotes that come in commercial solutions is that whilst the Power button in the remote will switch the Mini-PC OFF, it won’t switch it back ON (for the obvious reason that it uses a USB dongle and the PC when switched OFF won’t recognize input from the dongle).

I first got one which had even more buttons (also working fine with Kodi), but the remote’s build quality was shit and it didn’t took long for some of the button on that one to stop working reliably.

This one has been working fine for about a year now.

I do have a keyboard and mouse attached to that Mini-PC because it doubles up as home server and once in a while I have to do something on it which is more easilly done directly there with a UI rather than remotelly on the command line via SSH (or I simply don’t want to boot my main PC to access the Mini-PC remotelly), but to just consume media via Kodi nothing else beyond that remote is needed.

Get a Mini-PC and put some Linux distro and Kodi on it.

Or even better, get one of the many LibreELEC supported devices (including, as somebody mentioned, a Raspberry Pi 5) and put LibreELEC on it (which is a pared-down Linux with Kodi).

Personally after maybe a decade running successive generations of TV Media Players to play my growing video file collection on my TV, on my latest upgrade I ended up going down the Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi on autostart route (as I used it also as a home server) and am very satisfied with it, though if I wanted to just use it as a Media Player I would’ve gone with LibreELEC and on of the various ARM SBCs they support (maybe the Pi, maybe something cheaper).

There really is no reason to use closed commercial solutions for this.

Edit: If all you do is consume media on it via Kodi, you can use a remote like this one so it’s the same usage experience as with a commercial device, just without the enshittification.

Hence why I formated my comment as a question ;)

Wouldn’t that just be a single vertical line?

Isn’t that the red one? At least there’s no excuse for not being able to find it.

Naturally being an “article” carries some implied authoritativeness compared to “random social media post”.

However my point is about the believability of the content itself on two “random social media posts” (the tweet and the one I replied to), which carry the same level of authoritativeness (“random person on the internet says”)

As I wrote somewhere else, statements about things always or never happening, unless backed by evidence are generally false, if only because statistically there are very few things which are absolutelly so all the time and everywhere and this one is about a kind of human interaction, which is far from the kind of thing likely to be absolute.

So based on the content and assuming nothing about truthfulness of falsehood of the sources, I personally find a story about a working dog handler rewarding a dog for doing something silly but endearing is more likely to be true than a statement from somebody saying that they never do such a thing, if only because it’s unlikely that it never ever happens and if it does happen somebody might spot in and because it makes for a nice store, share the story.

Mind you, by the same rule I also think that the statement from the poster before the one I replied to about “them training the dogs to bark on command to get probable cause” is not believable on itself and without further evidence and does not logically follow from somebody noticing once a dog handler rewarding a working dog for doing somebody which is a work mistake but also is silly and enderaring

(Had I been in the same position as that handler, even knowing I would be reinforcing a mistake, I would be sorely tempted to reward the dog for the silly “detect pizza” behaviour if only because it’s funny and lovable).

I just think the poster I was replying to criticized the previous post in just as much an “opinion about everything everywhere unbacked by evident and stated as fact” way as the post they were criticizing.

Fair enough.

Is the post of that other person I commented on any more supported by evidence than the tweet?

If not, wouldn’t the analysis I wrote in response to your post (mistakenly thinking it was the original post) not work as an evaluation of which one is more likely to be true?

Does me using the wrong word (“article” instead of “tweet”) alter the point that the previous poster’s absolute statement “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes” is just an opionated statement with no backing meant only to contradict the event related in that tweet?

In the face of two statements unsupported by evidence (the tweet and that post I replied to), what’s more believable:

• That somebody saw a working dog handler rewarding a dog for doing something funny even though that’s not really what the dog was supposed to do?
• That working dog handlers absolutely don’t (i.e. none, ever) reward dogs for mistakes?

In my experience descriptions of events (like the one in the article) are less likely to be false than absolute certainty general statements about things always/never happening (such as “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes”).

This is mainly because the absolute certainty general statements are pure opinion worded as fact (i.e. with no actual study or similar to back that assertion that something always or never happens) hence usually bollocks, whilst somebody describing an event would have to willingly, explicitly and activelly be lying for it to be false.

So purelly from the way you worded things, that random tweet is already way more believable than your post.

Then beyond that, what’s described in that post is the handler being nice to the dog for their quirky behaviour, which doesn’t at sound far fetched - I’ve often seen people unthinkingly reinforcing a dog’s negative behaviour because “it’s cute” - people like dogs and often end up doing dumb things with them because they like them, which is how you end up with dogs which are too fat (which is bad for the dog) because that dog is smart and good at begging for food.

I’m not even saying that the poster you replied to claiming that handlers were purposefully mistraning the dogs was right (frankly I have no idea as, like you, they just voice opinion as fact), I’m saying that the way you tried to counter argument that post is even more bullshit than that post and now you just doubled down of scoring own goals by claiming the tweet itself is possibly a lie.

You

they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes

The post

the handler just patted his head and goes “it’s okay buddy i know pizza always confuses you” and gave him his treat anyways.”

It’s there literally in the article that the handler rewarded the dog for a mistake. Whilst I doubt that it was the handler’s intention to incentivise the dog to make that mistake more, in practice by giving the dog a treat for making that mistake they were doing positive reinforcement of that behaviour.