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?

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”.

To be clear — what McKenzie is saying here is that Substack will continue to pay Nazis to write Nazi essays. Not just that they will host Nazi essays (at Substack’s cost), but they will pay for them.

They are, in effect, hiring Nazis to compose Nazi essays.

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement at the time of the unionization that it had “no objection to these Cognizant workers electing to form a union,” but that it would not bargain with them. “We are not a joint employer as we simply do not control their employment terms or working conditions—this matter is between the workers and their employer, Cognizant,” the spokesperson said.

NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect …

It’s not only what you can do, but what it won’t do to you.

Using your computer is not wrong. You shouldn’t be punished for it.

Using your computer is not an imposition on someone else. You don’t owe anyone for the privilege of using it. You have already paid for it. The OS vendor doesn’t have a lien on it; they aren’t paying you to rent ad space on your desktop.

You bought it, you own it, you can break it if you like but it’s not anyone else’s place to tell you what you’re allowed to do with it.

Your computer is yours – just yours – and it shouldn’t be spamming you with ads, filling itself up with junk, or telling you “you’re not allowed to do that because of the OS vendor’s deals with Hollywood”.

I’m not anti-commerce or anti-corporate. My preferred browser is plain old Google Chrome (with uBlock Origin). I buy games on Steam. The game I spend the most hours playing on my Linux system is Magic Arena, hardly an anti-commercial choice. But that’s my choice. I buy computers from Linux-focused vendors (currently System76) and I expect my computer to be mine, not the vendor’s to do with what they like.

Did cars peak around 2016? That’s when you could get a plug in hybrid, with Bluetooth audio, a rear view camera, but no spyware or mandatory subscriptions. Sure they’d pester you to get SiriusXM but you could just say no.

Google for most things.

Bing in an incognito window for weird porn.

Here’s what this sounds like to me:

george@aol.com and george@hotmail.com do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.

It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn’t work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That’s okay! It’s okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!

There’s no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.

Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it’s really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user’s first guess must be right.