> A stripped book is a mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price.[1] The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, sometimes by illegal means, and are resold.[2]
I grew up reading books with this ditty in them:
> If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Those books certainly weren't scanned before being pulped. Would've been illegal. Really, the big thing that destroys books is the copyright term being as long as it is.
AI companies weren't buying up tons of unsold mass-market materials, and I think it's disingenuous to even make the comparison.
What was going on recently was AI companies were specifically seeking out rare — or sometimes irreplaceable — books to supplement their data sets (and hopefully getting a leg up on their competitors). The destruction of the books wasn't the point, it was just a consequence of the business-oriented realization that they could scan the contents of more books faster if they just chopped off the bindings rather than investing the time to care for the books and keep them intact (plus supposedly playing along with copyright law by "only having one copy of the copyrighted material").
> There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn.
> In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.
Also, on the subject of insurance, know what special programs your insurance may have for things like transplants, including autologous transplants like stem cell therapy and CAR T-cell therapy. I got CAR T-cell therapy paid at 100% due to Cigna's Lifesource program, which also paid for transportation and an apartment stay.
Here's a big thing I learned from my cancer: Be very careful comparing the results of scans from different hospitals. I had one PET scan done at MD Anderson and one done at Providence St Patrick in Missoula and the later one seemed to show a substantial growth in my tumor, so I brought it up with my oncologist, who, to her credit, was very quick about scheduling both scans to be read by the same person... and the tumor had shrunk. I got concerned over nothing. You get all these nice reports and maybe even images on your MyChart page and you can do a lot of research yourself and you're still not an expert.
On the subject of research: The standard of care changes over time for a reason. Older studies, based on older treatment protocols, will have worse survival rates, and including them in an average will make things seem worse than they are. It's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison with chemotherapy protocols from before current biologics like monoclonal antibodies existed.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
I wonder if this is a deliberate prompting to counteract the old WebMD flaw of "Flulike symptoms? You have a week to live" because it takes actual context to understand that a lot of things have flulike symptoms, but for most people, most of the time, in the absence of other evidence, they're caused by the flu.
> You may need to push for comprehensive genetic testing. Some doctors were weird about this and didn’t order it promptly, even after telling me they would. My surgeon, who told me he’d get it done, eventually referred me out to an oncologist. This caused a multi-month delay to getting genetic results, since the first results were done on the surgery tumor, not the biopsy tumor. No one cares more about your case than you, so take control and send lots of follow-ups.
Also, genetic testing is not necessarily going to reveal anything. I had cancer, I got genetic testing, I explicitly opted for the "expanded" version which I was warned might give me results that sounded scary but were inconclusive based on current knowledge and... I got a Variant of Unknown Concern on one gene and that was it. Nobody knows what causes the kind of cancer I had (PMBCL) and the test left us none the wiser.
What's the licensing on Windows 11 these days? Can an individual still run an unregistered Windows 11 installation basically forever with only minor restrictions?
> on Solaris, unlike elsewhere, the packaging system is intended only for system components (and Solaris defines this narrowly), not additional software.
> The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980 — DEC, Intel, and Xerox defined the standard several years before the internet existed
The Internet existed before 1980. It dates to 1969, in that there's a continuous history from the ARPANET to the modern Internet, even though NCP wasn't replaced by TCP/IP until 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book
> A stripped book is a mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price.[1] The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, sometimes by illegal means, and are resold.[2]
I grew up reading books with this ditty in them:
> If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Those books certainly weren't scanned before being pulped. Would've been illegal. Really, the big thing that destroys books is the copyright term being as long as it is.
reply