I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but there were black people in ancient Greece IRL. It’s not even “woke,” just historically accurate!

I don’t remember having the choice of 15-bit. I only remember having the choice of “256” (8-bit indexed palette), “thousands” (16-bit “high color,” with 5:6:5 bits per channel for RGB respectively), or “millions” (24-bit, 8 bits per channel).

I actually remember the Solitaire card back images being dithered because I had the resolution turned up (and thus the color depth turned down).

This is “you are an absolute fool for planting that second cucumber plant” month.

They’ll get there. They hate the idea of individual people being able to make things for themselves or having any other escape from consumer serfdom.

It’s not even just surveillance! It is destruction of property rights generally, including the right to repair and the ability for individuals to own their means of production.

The law. It would become a criminal offense to use open source firmware.

And that’s exactly what the tech oligarchs’ true goal is.

This goes way, way beyond ‘guns.’ It is an assault on property rights and freedom of expression as concepts generally. It would fully outlaw Free Software firmware (which is what the entire 3D printer hobby, having started with the RepRap project, is based on!). It would cut the Maker movement as a whole off at the knees.

It’s absolute tyranny in ways entirely unrelated to guns themselves.

Are we going to start fitting [CNC lathes and mills] with “you might be making a gun” detectors, too? Of course not.

I’ve got some bad news for you about just how fucked-up these proposed laws actually are.

You forgot the leading @ and your username mention turned into a mailto link.

I’m not convinced it wasn’t mostly dead before Steam, TBH. I mean I guess there was “lending” (read: copying), but there was never a “GameStop for PC games” the way there was for console games. And even the “lending” was somewhat curtailed by CD-keys and account registration before Steam existed.

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The hard part is that turning the raw data into actual forecasts requires a lot of processing power.

Hmm, I hadn’t really thought about that; I was just thinking about stations reporting current conditions. But yeah, you’re right that that’s the important part. Is weather modeling software another one of those areas like CAD where the state-of-the-art is locked up in proprietary shit, or is it government/scientific enough that the software is public? If one were to start building a distributed weather prediction system, are we talking about refactoring existing software to be distributed or reading research papers and implementing algorithms from scratch?

The fucked-up part is that there are various networks of croudsourced weather data, but I think most or all of them are proprietary, or at least centralized (which means enshittification could put consumer API access at risk).

We need a service that’s peer-to-peer (or at least federated) and open-data-licensed. And also not affiliated with the National Weather Service because Trumpism puts even that one at risk.

• https://www.weather.gov/cle/CWOP (US government (i.e. Public Domain), centralized)
• https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview (proprietary, centralized)
• https://weathercloud.net/en (proprietary, centralized)

Dumb terminals don’t need much RAM. Unfortunately, the minimal RAM would come with maximum rentiership and exploitation.

You mean those workflows that could’ve been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?

Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.

Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.

Luckily, that would never happen…

Even not underestimating the scale, I’m not sure it would work because all the debris would need to be ejected from the thousands-of-kilometers-deep hole. And then you’d also have to have a solution to stop the walls from caving in before the next bomb had a chance to arrive. It’s almost as if you not only need thousands of extremely powerful (even for nukes) bombs, but also need to deliver them in a continuous stream to keep the blast pressure up and the hole open.

I feel like, at that point, the easier strategy to accomplish your goal would be redirecting a large asteroid to impact the planet, or something like that.

I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.

Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.

Contracts require four elements in order to be valid: offer, acceptance, consideration, and intention to create legal relations. EULAs fail at multiple of these:

1. As I already said, they offer no “consideration” because you already have the right to do the thing they purport to give you permission to do (i.e., make the incidental copy necessary to run the game).
2. They lack “acceptance” and “intent” because they are contracts of adhesion (sprung on you after the sale transaction is complete and you already own the copy of the software), and clicking through them is nothing but a mechanical act necessary to use your property (which, again, you already have the right to do, by definition of “property!”) with no legal intent behind it. And if you have no intent, how the fuck can merely doing a thing you’re being forced to do constitute “acceptance?” It is, simply, complete bullshit.

If it were presented at the time of sale and you had to agree before the money was exchanged maybe it’d be different, but that’s not how they do things. And even then, it would still fail at “consideration” unless they offer you something above and beyond the right to use your property, which I cannot emphasize enough, you already have.

(By the way, since it sometimes comes up as a “gotcha” rebuttal attempt: no, Free Software licenses are not EULAs, and that’s why they are valid while EULAs are not. You are not required to “agree” to the GPL etc. merely to use the software; it only kicks in when you want to do something, like modification or redistribution, that would otherwise be copyright infringement. It grants you those new privileges in exchange for accepting its terms, and that consideration is what makes it valid.)