Yep. This is why online recipe sites put a whole goddamn personal essay before the actual recipe: if someone scrapes the page and copies it, they’ll scrape the (copyrightable) essay as well as the (non-copyrightable) recipe.

As the article mentions, Red Hat is IBM.

For what it’s worth, getting in the habit of making excuses for one’s use is part of alcoholism.

SLS and Yggdrasil came out in '92; Slackware in '93; Red Hat in '95.

The Debian project started in '93, but the first stable release wasn’t until '96, along with Linux kernel version 2.0.

Ubuntu didn’t come along until 2004.

So you’re into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?

I dunno man, that’s still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won’t try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.

I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.

I’m just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.

(Also, I think you’ll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone’s reading matter.)

Just to be clear, are you saying that people should be investigated by the police for fictional stories that they read?

Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.

Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

Removed by mod

The first-past-the-post voting system sucks; the resulting two-party system sucks; but right now we have to operate within it. The mathematics of that system entail the simple fact that if you discourage people from keeping Trump out, you are helping get Trump in. That makes you a Trump supporter.

You’re currently a Trump supporter. If you don’t want to be one, you can stop.

In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.

If your kids’ school laptops are surveilled, they’re surveilled by someone. Let’s call that someone Joe. Joe is a person who took a low-paying job that lets him surveil your kids. Joe likes his job, because he gets to surveil your kids. He gets to turn on the camera and look in your kids’ room. He gets to read the chat messages your kids send to their classmates.

Your kids would be better off without Joe in their lives. Joe is not a source of security. Joe is not protecting your kids; Joe is a threat to them.

I’m gonna smoke me a Mary J. Wana
Y’all ain’t can stop me, I’m totally gonna
Bake me a stoned like a sunny iguana
I’m gonna smoke me a Mary J. Wana

I’m gonna hash pipe to high me my head
Mellow my jello from born until dead
Teq’ me no 'quila, no pills blue and red
I’m gonna hash pipe to high me my head

I’m gonna weed me some grassical pots
Look you my dime bag 'cause that’s what I gots
Ain’t gonna shoot me no heroin shots
Just gonna weed me some grassical pots

Pot, weed, grass, ganja, herb, trees, green, chronic, reefer, doobage, dagga, dank, tea, …

“A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.

Regulating a money scam that uses art as a token isn’t regulating art, it’s regulating money scams.