BillyClark

Someone out there has been confused because they thought they parked on the 25th level.

I mean, you are describing modern copyright.

But copyright is an example of something where the US Constitution, at least, explicitly says its purpose is to “promote” something:

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I like how straightforward the Copyright Clause is. It even gives a testable standard. The length of “exclusive Right” for IP should be the “limited” length of time that “promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

So, the plain reading here is that IP laws need to give exclusivity long enough to encourage creation, by making authors and inventors think it is worth the time and money investment, but not so long that they discourage creation, for example, where a person doesn’t create something because they are afraid of violating IP laws.

Originally, in the US, copyright lasted 14 years, with an option for renewing for 14 more years, and this is one example where I think they got it about right.

Mark Hammil does an excellent Harrison Ford impression, so there’s a possibility that the “kid” is part of the impression, rather than a direct quote. Also, I was doing the quote from memory, so I might have remembered it wrong.

But I also like the thought that Harrison Ford calls everyone kid.

There’s this story that Mark Hammil tells about being on the set of Star Wars and he mentions to Harrison Ford that their hair should be wet, since it was just wet in the previous scene.

And Ford says something like, “This ain’t that kind of movie, kid. If the audience is talking about our hair, something has already gone wrong.”

Wonderful, thanks for looking that up.

I remember learning about that bug years after the OS came out, and not being too surprised that it was never fixed.

Windows 95 crashed so often that you’d basically have to specifically do nothing with the machine to ever get that crash. And even then, you’d just assume that it was crashing like Windows 95 always did anyway.

So you’d be unlikely to see or recognize that bug unless you were specifically testing for uptime issues.

Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.

I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.

Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.

Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with their software and services. This approach is all about digital sovereignty.

I never understood why any country would allow their government computers to run proprietary software from a foreign (to them) company.

I’m sure that China had access to a lot of Windows source code as part of their previous agreement, but it’s far too big a risk, really, for any country, even the United States, to run Windows.

As far as I’m concerned, China is decades late in making this decision, and it’s still ahead of a lot of (most?) governments.

Boneitis.

The people who thought data centers bad sides weren’t that bad for the environment are the same people who thought Epstein Island was just a nice place for boats to stop for lunch.

They probably will replace the management with AI pretty soon.

I would call a working brake pedal the single most critical safety feature in cars today.

I think it’s a question of comparing how common a name is to how iconic its new use is. Sesame street didn’t stop people from naming their kids Oscar. (or The Count /s)

After using Bazzite, I’m convinced that image based distros are the future for end users. Need to install an app? Flatpak. Need to install command line? Homebrew.

It all installs in user space. And Flatpak at least uses an effective sandbox system.

Distros that maintain their own package spaces are duplicating a. lot. of work.

The downside of Flatpak is the disk space usage. But that doesn’t matter as much to me as it used to.

Reddit’s basic business model was “We provide the platform, so you do all the hard work for free.”

The fediverse would be the same if it were a business.

From what I can see watching British television and influencers, it seems like the entire British public, outside of elderly or rich people, are opposed to fox hunting.

I think this is more of a political meme than mildly interesting, but I will point out that virtually every politician who can become the leader of a developed country has pictures similar to this.

Pictures like this are always used as gotchas by their opponents. Oh look, they shook hands with a really bad person! Oh look, they are standing next to a silly looking person! Yes, part of their job is to shake hands with people, even bad people. And part of their job is to take pictures with people, even if they look silly.

All of those cars and probably planes causing god knows how much pollution, just to get one of the world’s most despised men to a meeting where he’ll be too incompetent to have any effect.

Seriously, why do we even have ambassadors anymore?

If this were a movie, some clueless garbage truck would have pulled out and blocked the road.

After returning from a vacation to America, an English Youtuber was talking about the cultural differences, and said that what they call “going to a pub in the evening,” Americans would call “a serious drinking problem.”

Again, my suggestion was that we rethink the system, not that we keep the current system exactly as it is except that everybody locks down their cell phones. If we rethink the system, then those examples you thought of would be use cases for contacting people under the new system.