robonerd

You're asking me why I'm not kind to somebody who has fallen for / is shilling for an absurd scam? I slam the door on Jehovah Witnesses too.

It's as old as law itself, isn't it? From the Code of Hammurabi (translation from wikipedia):

If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.

Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.

Well if that was throwntoday's point, it's a distinction without a difference. The Korean War particularly, despite not being officially declared as a war, came disturbingly close to going nuclear.

Decriminalize piracy for natural persons (not corporations.)

How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.

Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?

I thought this "end of history" narrative would be dead by now. It's incredibly naive to think that major wars are a thing of the past. The trade/commerce argument against the political viability of war has been made and debunked in the past. WWI should have been the nail in that coffin but I guess the idea is too appealing to give up.

In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.

Published in 1909. Yeah..

GPS is probably the only useful satellite for the majority of the world,

Synthetic aperture radar is incredibly useful to the military [and generally.]

OP link is a video of a discussion panel about a report which you can download a PDF of here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/boost-phase-missile-defense

The TL;DW/TL;DR is that boost-phase missile defense, deemed infeasible years ago, may now be practical thanks to advances in technology (rockets, electronics and sensors, lasers, etc)

In the context of fighting a war, Kessler Syndrome is a meme. It reduces the expected lifespan of a satellite, but that only becomes strategically relevant if the new lifespan of your satellites is shorter than the war is expected to last and satellites are being destroyed faster than they can be replenished. America is rapidly developing the ability to launch a ton of new satellites very quickly.

Of course the post-war aftermath would be deeply regrettable. But it always is.

An attack 80+ years ago does not underscore the need for any reform today, nor for that matter does an attack 20+ years ago. Not unless you think nothing has changed between then and now, which would be silly. Introspection and reform after both those attacks happened years ago. It may be the case that we do need additional reform today, but that isn't evidenced by attacks which occurred generation[s] ago.

This site is excellent, worth a submission of its own.

Maybe Gopher or one of those similar inspired projects is the future after all. Too weird for mass appeal.

evil-mode

In other applications I mostly avoid the ctrl-v/ctrl-c and use X's highlighting and middleclicking system instead. When those aren't available, I actually prefer context menu copy/paste entries to the CUA shortcuts.

TikTok used to suggest all sorts of long-form articles. Tiktok is all short-form video; a bunch of vapid trash.

Local newspapers don't need cookies to sell ads.

a rule stating that all takeout food must be packaged or covered

On May 6, 1986 Carmel City Council passed a resolution to enable a rewrite of the ordinance related to eating places and takeout food and make said ordinance more friendly toward ice cream parlors. The new language made eating establishments that “primarily serve frozen desserts” their own category

So they solved this inane takeout ordinance by exempting frozen desserts. I guess takeout hotdogs, pretzels, etc are still required to be sold with excessive packaging. Or perhaps a little paper dish for a hotdog is sufficient packaging? Could they have sold icecream cones if they put the cone into a paper sleeve?

Some of the things small towns see fit to regulate give an undue bad name to all government regulation.

You have a soul. That's a handicap if you want to keep up with bureaucratic bullshitting.

Evil-mode is incredible, for me Emacs with evil is the best vi-derived editor in the world, beating neovim and vim by miles. But as an ex-Vim user and fairly recent Emacs convert I feel like a guest in a clubhouse full of old timers. It wouldn't be right for me to swagger around their domain, demanding they change things up to accommodate me. Evil mode is already a much warmer welcome than I'm entitled to, so what if it takes a line or two to configure? I'm very grateful to have what I have now, I don't need or want Emacs defaults changed.

But Emacs predates CUA by a couple of decades

Only a couple of years if you're taking GNU Emacs specifically. About one decade if you're talking about editor macros for TECO.

basic stuff like CUA

I don't care for the defaults either, but I also don't care for CUA, so if you had your way the defaults would be just as objectionable to me as they are now. Since you can't make everybody happy, I think the best way forward is to continue the status quo, so at least you won't be forcing configuration on users who were previously fine with the default.

Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive.

It's simple: Don't tell other people what they did or didn't experience. If you don't understand that, then you aren't worth talking to.

Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer.

I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.

"Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much"

Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.

PulseAudio doesn't code defensively against those kind of bugs.

That's a reoccurring pattern across Lennart software. He gets an idea of the way things should work, maybe from the spec or maybe just from his own subjective biases, and has his software expect things to work that way and fail when it doesn't. Every time, he'll say it's the other guys fault. Sometimes his software even fails unsafe and he still blames everybody else.

The '0day' username bug in systemd exemplifies this. Lennart decided that usernames beginning with numbers weren't valid, even though Linux permits it. Systemd was found to run service files with User=0day specified as root instead, not as the user 0day. To Lennart this was not a bug because in his subjective opinion the rest of the system was in error for permitting a username beginning with a number. Even if he were right that usernames beginning with numbers shouldn't be valid, the mere fact that they can occur is reason enough to code defensively around it. At the very least systemd could fail safe when it encounters such an 'invalid' username. But no, he thought there was nothing wrong with failing-to-root. It was everybody else's fault, of course.

https://lwn.net/Articles/727490/

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

the graying of gnome

They broke their own user -> developer pipeline through years of deliberately alienating power users.

Certain individuals took it up, but as a whole those other societies disregarded it.

Just like today? How many people today own a telescope? It's a niche tool useful to some but irrelevant to most.

Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.

Sickboy's Philosophy of Life. We all get old and cannae hack it anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g

Driver issues, right.. is that why my archived shell histories have hundreds if not thousands of entries for `pulseaudio --kill ; puslseaudio --start` ? Does restarting the userland sound daemon reset the drivers operating in kernel space? How would that work?

I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.