NateNate60 @ NateNate60 @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I'm not a sovereign citizen. This is just a point where the law isn't fair/doesn't work in the way that you'd expect. See the updated parent comment for sources + legal reasoning.

The applicable Supreme Court precedent here is Allen v. Cooper. The State of North Carolina published all pictures of a shipwreck within its custody on its website as "public record" and the photography firm that owned the copyright sued. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot abrogate a state's sovereign immunity under its Article I legislative powers and thus ruled in favour of the state.

Yes, it is federal. Congress can't abrogate a state's sovereign immunity to make them liable under copyright law. In fact, they tried and it was deemed unconstitutional (Allen v. Cooper). States can't be sued in federal court without their permission (Amendment XI).

Hongkonger here: Although Cantonese is pretty alive and well in Hong Kong, it's pretty clear that the Government is being pressured by the mainland to promote Mandarin. It is commonly taught in schools and the Government promotes "trilingualism and biliteracy". Cantonese and Mandarin are both written in the same script (Hanzi), and the third language/second script is English. It's pretty clear that not all three languages get equal treatment though. English is not that heavily emphasized but most schoolchildren will learn it anyway because they want to watch American movies and enjoy American meme culture (this is not a joke). Parents also want their children to be trilingual and biliterate for economic reasons. Hong Kong is a city that revolves around money and it's very common for business to be conducted internationally in English.

That doesn't mean that Mandarin is doing well in HK though. Hongkongers have a very negative perception of mainlanders for being "uneducated" and Mandarin is associated with mainlanders. I can't describe it as "racism" since everyone involved is the same race, but Hongkongers think mainlanders spit in the street, smoke in lavatories and don't know how to sort recycling from rubbish. Doesn't help that most of these stereotypes are to some extent, true.

The difference in Cantonese usage couldn't be more stark. I'm currently in Hong Kong. Everyone speaks Cantonese, and if you speak Mandarin, that says to people "This person is a Mainland tourist, let's overcharge them.", and if you speak English, that says "This person is a rich foreigner/white person, let's overcharge them.". This is despite English and "Chinese" (both variants) being official language in Hong Kong. All Government services are provided in all three languages but if you use anything but Cantonese, you're going to see significantly more friction and encounter many more difficulties that Cantonese speakers don't.

In mainland China, even in the eponymous Guangdong province (AKA Canton province), only old people speak Cantonese. When you're at a restaurant or trying to buy something at a store, it's 50/50 whether the other person speaks Cantonese and even then it's likely they'll greet you in Mandarin

Two types of people in this post:

• Those answering "Why are you on Lemmy and not doing something productive", and
• those answering "Why are you on Lemmy and not Reddit"

Libraries can do that. Okay, technically, it's illegal, but under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, since US libraries are run by political subdivisions of US states, they can't be sued with the state's permission which means that a state government can literally not allow the library to be sued for copyright infringement and then they'd get away with it.

The trade-off is that this probably permanently burns all bridges between the library and publishers, who would likely not want to deal with the library any more.

Edit: The controlling US Supreme Court precedent is Allen v. Cooper. The State of North Carolina published a bunch of shipwreck photos. The copyright owner of those photos sued claiming copyright infringement. The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the state saying Congress can't abrogate a state's Amendment XI sovereign immunity using copyright law as a pretext, thus the photography firm needs the State's permission to sue it in federal court.

I remember my aunt (lawyer) coming up with some insane conspiracy-level solution to this problem:

The Supreme Court has ruled in Allen v. Cooper that Congressional attempts to make US state governments liable for copyright infringement are unconstitutional. In other words, US states can't be sued for copyright infringement under US federal law without their permission. Under standard federal jurisprudence, all subdivisions and departments of a state are considered to be the state they are a part of for the purposes of sovereign immunity. This also applies to organisations that receive most of their funding from and are wholly dependent on state government agencies as well.

The solution would be to have a friend state government either:

• donate a copious amount of money to the Internet Archive to make it "financially dependent" on that state government, or
• in cooperation with the Internet Archive, pass a law that makes the Internet Archive an independent state agency of that government (probably safer in terms of keeping the IA independent)

This would make the IA fully immune from copyright lawsuits because they would benefit from their patron state's sovereign immunity. But it comes at the cost that the patron state has a lot of power over the IA. A considerable trade-off.

I never understood the appeal of paid programs. 7-Zip works equally well and is free and open source software. It integrates much nicer into File Explorer as well.

A number in parentheses means it is negative.

Fake news–they would never give you a $10 discount for selling your personal information. That's like taking food right out of those poor shareholders' mouths!

What not knowing about limited liability companies does to a mf

As a Chinese person it's kind of annoying when people pronounce it "seshwan". "Sichuan" is pronounced "sih-chwan"

I looked it up and it turns out, he's the president! The organisation is the Parking Reform Network. It seems they're specifically against car parks but listening to him talk I though it was against all sorts of car infrastructure.

Then do them on paper?? Do people really like pretending that writing things on a piece of paper or editing & printing a PDF and then mailing it in is difficult?

Is it really that hard to do your own taxes? I was taught to do this in school and it's really not hard if all you have to do is write in how much money you made and then claim the standard deduction. If your taxes really are that messy then you can hire an accountant to do it, and they'll do it ten times better than any tax software could, because if the software could do it better then they'd bloody use the software.

Edit: was mostly referring to people who work a job and that's it, which is probably 80% of the population

Over the school year I live in Corvallis, OR (attending Oregon State Univ) where it's extremely walkable and likeable. Free public transit but only on weekdays, unfortunately. Regional buses connect with the train station in Albany.

Sadly, over the summer, I'm back at my parents' place and they live on a very steep hill 20 minutes by foot from the nearest bus stop, and the bus only comes every 45 minutes so there's really no option but to drive :(

In my city (Portland, Oregon, USA), consistent nagging finally got us improved bus service and frequency, road diets, and "express" buses that have signalling priority over cars. One of my friends' father works for a local organisation that advocates against car infrastructure in favour of better public transportation and biking infrastructure. In the past ten years, we have had:

• Entirely new light rail line extending south into the suburbs
• Scrapped motorway expansion in exchange for improvements to a commuter rail line that runs parallel to it
• "Frequent service" bus routes that run every 15 minutes or better during peak hours
• Free public transportation for students during the school year and over the summer
• Tolls on a major motorway to offset maintenance and improvement costs
• "FX" express bus routes with nice bus shelters, signalling priority, and those long accordion busses
• Big pay rise for bus drivers, up to $25/hr now I think
• Road diet on a large arterial street in the southeast, adding bike lanes and a median
• Lowered speed limits across the city
• Designated "neighbourhood greenway" bike routes
• Major downtown arterial shrank to 2 lanes, with a segregated bike path installed in the freed space
• Improvements to the Springwater Corridor bike trail (use for commuting also)

You're technically supposed to use a human cashier lane if you have a lot of groceries. At least in the USA, it's pretty common for self-checkout lanes to have "15 items or fewer" signs.

The 25/3 bar was specifically lowered to that so that 4G LTE would meet this bar and they could claim that 99% of Americans now have access to high-speed Internet for political points.

Realistically, if it were up to me, I'd say anything 25/3 and lower is "low-speed", between 25/3 and 100/10 is "standard speed", and set the bar for "high-speed" to mean 100/10 or better. Companies should not be allowed to advertise "blazing-fast high-speed Internet" and then it turns out to be 30/3 ADSL for $50 a month