It depends on the type of work. The proper length of copyright for books or films should long, about 20 to 25 years, because they remain relevant for longer. But software should be shorter, about 7 years.

The purpose of copyright is to enhance the public domain, not to create a business model. How well is 75 year old software enhancing the public domain? If any software has even entered the public domain through copyright expiration, what use is that software today? At best it’s an archeological curiosity, but more likely it’s no use at all.

Nobody’s at zero. It’s been said that the average American commits 3 felonies per day. The law is so long that you couldn’t read it in a lifetime. There are more criminalized actions than you can imagine.

The OS itself, Debian. If I have to pick a component, Mate Panel. Compared to the Windows 11 start menu, it’s useful, customizableand has no ads. My IT department at work can’t even figure out how to remove the Windows 11 start menu ads from my computer.

Benjamein has my sympathy. No person should have to watch a commercial.

chmod can do 95% of everything I’ve ever needed, just with the “user” and “other” category. Private files, public-readable files, public read-write files, programs I compile but anyone can run… all that is just in the “user” and “other” category of chmod.

It gets 99% if you add the sticky bit (used on /tmp) and the “group” category. Serial ports are owned by root:dialout, and mode 660. To get serial port access, just add the user to the dialout group. For group assignments in college, each partner pairing had their own group they could use. Group work files were mode 660 so groups could edit each others’ work, but other groups couldn’t peek.

For the last 1%, use setfacl. It does everything that explorer.exe’s security tab can do.

Images spoilered due to uncanny horror:

This is negative productivity. It worked before, and now it doesn’t.

Maybe… but they wrote “X” (latin “Ex”), not “χ” (Greek “Chi”). I’m still thinking “Twitter users” is the most plausible meaning of “Xians” here.

Flatpak doesn’t have digital signatures anyway, so effectively nothing is verified on Flathub

A car warranty lasts like 2 years. I can’t afford a car less than 2 years old.

It sucks that you can’t browse anywhere without javascript anymore. It used to be that all the open source sites, most news sites, forums running phpbb, even YouTube aside from the actual <video> element all worked without javascript, and as a bonus there would be no ads.

Now, you can’t browse anywhere without these challenges. At least this one is noninvasive, but the Cloudflare one and the Google Recaptcha do a ton of fingerprinting to choose whether to let you in.

USPS has a home-rolled one that requires web assembly enabled, or it silently fails with a blank page. There’s no non-malicious excuse for that.

If this is the future of web browsing, hopefully more sites use systems like Anubis. But I also hope at least static pages can be viewable as plain html.