Either Thomas Jefferson had two first names, or Jefferson Davis had two last names.

Blahblahrians!

Anyone with even one level in monk automatically counters this with an Ānāpānasati save.

Trade is ancient. Consider: People have been ordering products from abroad, relying on promises and reputations, since the days of Ea-nāṣir. It’s always depended on trust, which is why we still know the name Ea-nāṣir.

Try text.

As the article mentions, Red Hat is IBM.

And yet a dump rump is still worse.

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.

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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.

New York is all the Asgardians’ fault. If Thor hadn’t gotten himself exiled, Loki wouldn’t have come to Earth and found the Tesseract, so no invasion.

Sokovia, though, is all Tony’s fault. He built and released an unaligned superhuman AI agent. (Don’t do that, folks; it predictably breaks the planet.)

Previously, it was a shithole.
Now, it’s a Nazi shithole.

The 1984 Gibson novel Neuromancer begins with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”

At the time, this unambiguously meant the speckled gray of analog TV static: radio noise amplified and played out through a CRT’s scanning electron gun. However, before too many years had passed, new TVs started displaying a solid blue screen when tuned to a dead channel.

And in 1996, Neil Gaiman riffed on Gibson’s line, in Neverwhere: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”

Elphaba

Huh?