There’s enough rabbits in my area that some more predatory pressure on them is probably a good thing. Let alone the rats and mice attracted by a nearby apartment building that really needs a proper dumpster but doesn’t have space to put it in, and so results in stray trash lying around every trash pickup day.
Cats are vicious little bastards, but nature is not a very nice place.
If you had a dog you’d probably be more certain it would only kill rats and rabbits, and not go after birds if it gets bored.
But I don’t have any strong preferences either way. Our neighbor has a free-range cat that probably wreaks havoc locally, but she’s a support for him as a widower.
I have a dog; it would love to kill rats and rabbits, but cats usually do a better job cleaning themselves up between “murdering something small and cute” and “licking your face”. …And are less likely to get in trouble by trying to join the kids doing football practice across the street.
Cats are also usually smart enough not to try messing with skunks. :-P
Honestly I think the best solution would be more hawks and owls; I used to see lots of birds of prey in my area 5+ years ago but haven’t seen as many recently. Not sure whether there’s fewer of them around for some reason, or I’ve just gotten used to them and stopped noticing.
If you’re reading someone’s (essentially) obit and don’t know who they are, you can safely just keep going without this kind of inquiry. Suffice to say those who posted and are discussing know, and the question is (intentionally or not) insensitive.
She mostly grew up in notoriety in the golang and k8s community. I will not do a full eulogy, this is not the place, nor am i well placed for that.
But despite all the disagreements we may have with her, Nòva was a genuinely nice person to have in our community, pushing forward in interesting front, saying things that needed to be said, and in general someone a lot of us appreciated having in our communities.
No, they are not. Now, Googling her just results in a lot of people expressing sadness over her passing. I do not want to intrude on anyone’s grief here, but I’d never heard of her before and I’ve not been able to find any solid info about her life or work, just as @4ad below says.
@colindean above said she did the best talk of FOSDEM 2023. I was at that event, but I’d never heard of her, nobody mentioned this talk, and Colin does not link it so I don’t know for sure what talk it was.
I’ve googled that too – this is way more work than I should have to do, frankly – and I think it might be this one, but the blurb is fairly content-free and tells me nothing useful.
But the talk is also mentioned here and that gives a little context.
Apparently she ran Hachyderm. I hadn’t heard of that, either. Apparently it is a Mastodon instance – I see little to distinguish these, TBH, and while I’m on Mastodon/Fediverse, I find it little to no use. But David Calvert said:
mostly known for hosting the tech industry at hachyderm.io since Musk bought the bird site.
That’s more info than anywhere else in this thread.
Hachyderm is apparently
a safe space, LGBTQIA+ and BLM, primarily comprised of tech industry professionals world wide powered by Mastodon and ActivityPub.
She mightn’t have been well-known amongst journos, but she was well known amongst developers and ops/infrastructure engineers.
Searching for her on Google and DDG, she’s famous enough to warrant a sidebar on Google, and her website is above the fold on both. DDG gives better results, and also includes a link to her ORA author’s profile above the fold. She’s definitely very Googlable.
Hachyderm was a side-gig. The blurb also wasn’t content-free: the talk was about how she managed to scale out Hachyderm, which started as a personal Mastodon instance, in the face of a massive influx of users.
The Hacyderm talk she gave at FOSDEM earlier this year was on the main track, which was wedged, which is unusual for a non-keynote talk in Jansen. She also gave a talk about the Aurae low-level container runtime on the Rust track.
We should all remember that our lack of awareness of somebody does not mean that they’re not well known.
I don’t really think most users value privacy as much as Apple likes to fear monger it. Lots of users (in my experience, anyways) will click through warnings, notices, permissions, etc. just to “get the thing” whether that is some app, a picture of a kitten in a giant sock or something else. Once in a while there is the fear of “omg, your privacy!” and users will have some knee-jerk reaction but from my pov users aren’t proactive in protecting their privacy.
We should place value on people privacy also as a society. Lack of privacy changes behavior, could lead to preference falsification, etc. An argument can be made that privacy is required for honest communication, and honest communication is necessary for functioning democracy.
Functions support Caddyshack call reference. For example:
Hey(llama)! // Void return
Hey(llama)! How ’bout something for the effort? // Something is a poorly written linked list modeled after first year computing science students work. The linked list contains the return values, along with Rodney Dangerfield quotes placed randomly.
Bonus ransomware compiler:
The compiler encrypts your output and you need to supply a cryptocurrency payment to decrypt it.
It’s a bit weird to think that, and I’ve absolutely no clue if I am accurate here, but wouldn’t the closest thing to a small powerful handheld that you can hack on be something like a Steam Deck or one of the raspi+keybaord+battery devices? Since these things seem to actually be done there’s definitely a market for them.
Depends on what you want and exactly how small. For me a small Chromebook fits the bill. They tend to be light and handy, though they won’t fit in my pockets. I need a keyboard that I can actually touch-type on though.
It is easy to install the Linux subsystem. The Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM tend to be more expensive though. I’m not sure if that is feasible for modern GUI development though. Allegedly you can enable Vulkan via Crosstini, so that may be suitable.
Alternatively, you can buy a used Chromebook that can be flashed with Mr Chromebox’s BIOS, and then you can install a standard Linux distribution. Be warned: you may or may not have good support for things like suspend-to-RAM. That’s definitely been a problem with my old Acer R11 Chromebook.
I have a Pinebook Pro and it’s like the anti-Chromebook; It’s good at everything except running a web browser. Sadly, much (most?) of my day-to-day requires a web browser so I don’t use it much.
Also, the device is pretty much abandoned and the firmware never solidified. It still can’t reboot or come back from sleep.
I can definitely relate to this, I use vi/vim for all my development (Security Ops / Engineer person here) but I am also bad at using multiple files so I usually just use tmux to open a few different panes with files. I think it’s time I revisited vimtutor again…
I work in a context that only exists because copyright laws protect creators and enable them to create on a professional and not hobby basis. So I’m in no way a believer that copyright is inherently evil.
But archive.org is my only way of accessing the vast amount of literature (fiction and non-fiction!) between the end of the public domain (1920s) and, say about 2010. It is really disingenuous for publishers to claim that they are losing money from these works being available, because they are not publishing them themselves.
I would like to share the books I read and loved as a child with my children. Often archive.org is the only way to do that.
I would have a lot more sympathy for the publishers if they provided a blessed legal version of archive.org with their entire back catalog (unedited!). I would in all seriousness pay for access to that.
I used to work professionally as a musician. In theory, copyright law protected my livelihood; in practice, copyright was how various thugs would shakedown music venues for royalties, and often I would be told by venue owners/managers that we needed preapproval on every song we played.
Copyright is inherently unfair; some artists will get lucky and their particular expression of a popular idea will be legally protected, while most artists will be ineligible for the same protection.
The law in this case only holds up if the person who owns the copyright has enough money and time to pursue enforcing it.
When we talk laws and rules, I think that point gets glossed over. Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior (online): Laws, norms, markets, and technology.
Code/architecture – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)
Market – economic forces
Law – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government
Norms – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow
In the case of copyright I feel like the market piece dominates the rest as the major players have so much money invested in the system.
I would love to see an update to copyright law that requires publication (ideally with no DRM that in any way impedes fair use) to protect works. It annoys me immensely that companies can simultaneously refuse to sell something to potential customers at any price and claim lost revenue when those same people acquire copies elsewhere.
It would be difficult to implement well. A publisher could easily withdraw something from publication long enough for copyright to lapse and then reintroduce it without having to pay the author, but I can imagine that, with sufficient safeguards, a rule that copyright lapsed three years after last in-copyright publication would be implementable.
The original Queen Anne statute had a term of 14 years. I proposed life of author + 15 years a few months back and was blasted by a copyright abolitionist for my pains 😉
Another, related issue is that once copyright is equated with property, it can be sold and signed away to entities with much wider powers than an author or a composer, and the work is no longer a cultural artifact but an investment item.
I don’t want to abolish copyright, but I wouldn’t even go as long as life+. Maybe the 28 years the US used for a long time. It seems to me that long copyrights lose their original purpose and just become a way to seek rents.
Just had an interesting idea for a novel. In a world where copyright is limited only by the lifetime of the author, building up a valuable enough body of work might put quite the price on one’s own head.
For books, at least, the vast majority of the revenue is made in the first 7 years (and more than half of that in the first two) typically. This changes a bit with things like TV or film adaptations, which take a long time to organise. I could imagine copyright permitting redistribution of an original work after 10 years and permitting derived works without a license after a bit longer.
I think one of the big problems with copyright at the moment is that it isn’t tailored for domains. Software, for example, is completely obsolete when it comes out of copyright (the first ever copyrighted program is still under copyright). I doubt anyone benefits from, for example, Windows NT 4 or MacOS 9 still being under copyright, but the fact that they are makes (legally) emulating environments to run old software difficult.
That makes sense. To retain a trademark you have to use it and take efforts to defend it. It makes sense to me to have a “use it or lose it” to other intellectual properties.
I think the major problem would be encoding that into a law that’s enforceable and not easilly gamed. We don’t want publishers doing 10 book runs every 5 years and throwing them in the landfill to retain their rights.
Interesting enough one of the reason George Lucas got toy rights back for Star Wars was part of the license that was originally sold off said toy publishers had to make toys every year and they neglected to do that. (paraphrasing)
You could have full rights return to the author on the expiry of three years, who would then have three years to fulfill the publication requirement. And maybe a provision for an author to provide notice that they’re going to publish before the publisher’s three years are up.
I would like to share the books I read and loved as a child with my children. Often archive.org is the only way to do that.
Just to add to that, re-issuing books is not always the straightforward affair it’s sometimes made to be.
One of my favourite things in this world, which I’ve always carried with me when I moved, is an obscure children’s book I’ve had since I was a child. It has large, paged-sized illustrations scattered throughout it, like most children’s book have. Thing is, it was published at a time when things were… expensive where I’m from. So the illustrations aren’t coloured, they’re sort of in the style of 1940s Walt Disney newspaper comics. That was obviously not a problem for me, or most other children my age: we had crayons, so we all coloured our illustrations.
I can’t quite describe how popular this was. 30+ years later we still ask “what colour did you make the balloon?” and we all remember what colour we made it. The book was a hit among children our age, it was fun and easy to follow along. And, while not a colouring book, and very much a “serious” book otherwise – it’s literally a novel! – the fact that we could “contribute” to it to some degree was a huge part of the experience. For many people my age, this book was the gateway into reading, the first “long” book they’d ever finished, the first book they’d read cover to cover more than once and so on.
Anyway, this book was republished a few years ago, which I learned from a friend of mine who’d bought it for her child, along with a pack of crayons. However, in keeping with the times, the editor decided to republish the book with full-colour illustrations, which she only realized when they unwrapped the damn thing and her child flipped through it and asked what he was supposed to do with the crayons now. Presumably someone in marketing thought the children might get bored or whatever. The book is still fun but… it’s not quite the same book, you know?
Thing is, an uncoloured copy of it is not easy to get these days. One pops up in used bookstores every once in a while, but precisely because it was so popular, and especially after it was reissued in a slightly different format, it’s crazy expensive.
@nickspoon’s question sent me down the Internet rabbit hole last evening. I had no idea it had ever been published in English, I could’ve sworn it was mostly an Eastern European thing!
Given that’s the case, and based on how many people voted both your and nickspoon’s question, I think it’s worth sharing – the English translation was published as “The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends”. archive.org actually carries a 1980 English edition that’s very similar to mine, which is a local edition – it has a handful of full-colour illustrations but most of them is black and white. Some modern editions coloured some, or all of those black and white illustrations, too.
I think it was published pretty much all over Eastern Europe; I know people from Albania, Poland, and the Czech Republic who’ve read it. I’m not sure if it was equally popular all over Europe and across all generations. It was hugely popular in my generation. Basically everyone I know in my age group (35-40) has read it.
Two huge disclaimers: 1) this is a book from a very different era, and from a very foreign place. Some of it may have aged poorly, especially if read by someone who doesn’t know its original cultural context – not to the point where it’s offensive, I think, but nonetheless, 2) please don’t take this as my endorsing anything about it other than that it was fun for young kids to read back then.
I work in a context that only exists because copyright laws protect creators and enable them to create on a professional and not hobby basis.
While I don’t disagree with at statement, I don’t think the inverse is true, that having no copyright would prevent a professional basis. Another facet to this is that copyright can certainly also prevent creators from the same thing in many different ways.
I also think large parts of culture that creators rely on only even exist because copyright for some reason (time, waiving, etc.) didn’t exist or was broken.
Overall I think it is better than brute force since you have access to the preimage, including the emails and password vault, making hashcat possible in the first place.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that definition of cracking before. John the Ripper’s webpage refers to itself as a “password cracker”, so it seems like “cracking” has multiple accepted definitions. Do you have a source for your definition (just wondering because it’s in quotes)?
I don’t know about india, but 4G and 5G are ridiculously cheap in south east asia. Service providers were competing to put out unlimited data packages for as low as 5USD per month. Some even offer unlimited data for some certain app: youtube, tiktok, facebook.
That enables remote work a lot more vs the price I have seen in both NA and EU. It seems like the infrastructure growth required for these in western countries are a lot slower than asian countries? 🤔
I would imagine, due to population density it’s much more cost effective to upgrade services in Asian countries than North America. In Canada people often complain about the high price of wireless, and while there is lots of factors, the huge areas to cover and smaller population do drive the price to some degree.
The EU is pretty hetrogenerous, most countries are very
different from the others. I live in a remote, artic region and I
can see my nearest 5G tower, and even the most remote parts of
this muncipality (and country!) are getting fiber (FTTH)
connections soon. And just across the border to our neighbouring
countries, this region isn’t remote and rural, it’s populated with
great infrastructure et c.
Great review, I’d be curious to see some very lightweight but still usable (practical?) wms in there too. My favorite being i3 but seeing some of the *wm (twm, cwm, etc.) as well
I write about desktops quite a lot and someone always seems to comment about comparing them with window managers.
WMs are not the same thing at all. A WM is part of a desktop, along with an app launcher, and an app switcher, and maybe a desktop manager, and a file manager, and a bunch of accessory apps that should look and work in the same, harmonious way, and some kind of global settings tool, and a lot of fit and finish and integration.
TBH I’d expect any plain WM to use a fraction of the memory of any desktop, and the differences between WMs should be rounding errors.
IMHO it’s like comparing a bicycle to a Humvee. If it’s not using 1% of the resources then something is badly wrong with it.
Whoah, unfollowing now… I really thought this was an interesting look but I had no idea the dude was convicted of travelling across state lines with the intent of having sex with someone under the age of consent.
Everyone is safe, but the situation is very uneasy. Many of the occupiers have brought their kids, so I’m not surprised they’re playing soccer, but I wouldn’t want any of my family in the middle like that.
Aw geez. And just a couple of months ago I was thinking of Canada as being a potential refuge place if things go even more crazy in Europe. Best of luck and endurance to you all.
My sympathies; I’m flying into rat-licker central (Alberta :/ ) for my weekend; I expect I’ll see some of the dumbasses myself along the way, although not as bad as your part of the country. Good luck!
This takes me back to messing around with nasm and qemu instead of studying for finals. I’m sure it could be done with qemu but I was hoping for a nice x86 emulator where you could type in ASM and it would execute and show you the registers and memory. We used SPIM for MIPS assembly in University and I quite liked it for learning.
It’s totally a toy and only supports a few instructions but yeah I too wish there were more accessible UIs that require zero external tools to be installed to just start messing around.
There is some good points here but I think they’re overlooking security. Admittedly I am an OpenBSD fan boy but FreeBSD, at least the last time I looked at it, lacked a lot of security features that are available in Linux (and of course, OpenBSD).
Would you like to elaborate what security features you were missing from FreeBSD? Perhaps they could be added to the project ideas list on the FreeBSD wiki.
Please don’t let your cats roam free :(
Can I ask why ? No malice or intent to start a flame war, just curious
Cats are very effective predators of other animals, specifically birds.
There’s enough rabbits in my area that some more predatory pressure on them is probably a good thing. Let alone the rats and mice attracted by a nearby apartment building that really needs a proper dumpster but doesn’t have space to put it in, and so results in stray trash lying around every trash pickup day.
Cats are vicious little bastards, but nature is not a very nice place.
If you had a dog you’d probably be more certain it would only kill rats and rabbits, and not go after birds if it gets bored.
But I don’t have any strong preferences either way. Our neighbor has a free-range cat that probably wreaks havoc locally, but she’s a support for him as a widower.
I have a dog; it would love to kill rats and rabbits, but cats usually do a better job cleaning themselves up between “murdering something small and cute” and “licking your face”. …And are less likely to get in trouble by trying to join the kids doing football practice across the street.
Cats are also usually smart enough not to try messing with skunks. :-P
Honestly I think the best solution would be more hawks and owls; I used to see lots of birds of prey in my area 5+ years ago but haven’t seen as many recently. Not sure whether there’s fewer of them around for some reason, or I’ve just gotten used to them and stopped noticing.
To be honest, I worry about they getting hurt, hit by cars, etc. (I’m a bit cat obsessed). They will also prey on birds as mentioned below.
Not to be insensitive to anyone, but who is this?
Thank you for saying this, because I had the same question.
If I had to post just one thing, I think this essay explains it best :
https://hackingcapitalism.io/why/
If you’re reading someone’s (essentially) obit and don’t know who they are, you can safely just keep going without this kind of inquiry. Suffice to say those who posted and are discussing know, and the question is (intentionally or not) insensitive.
I’d ask you to look at it differently: if asked politely, a genuine inquiry is a good way to honor somebody.
We all die two deaths: when we cease living, and when we are no longer remembered.
If a stranger asks in passing about the subject of a public mourning, I believe it is a chance to postpone that second death just a little bit longer.
Well said. The two deaths gives me something macabre to think about today 😳
Here are some of the various projects/repos she had. There are some useful projects, some whimsical projects, and other neat stuff in there.
Someone in the tech community. Super easy to Google.
I googled and I still don’t understand the notoriety.
She mostly grew up in notoriety in the golang and k8s community. I will not do a full eulogy, this is not the place, nor am i well placed for that.
But despite all the disagreements we may have with her, Nòva was a genuinely nice person to have in our community, pushing forward in interesting front, saying things that needed to be said, and in general someone a lot of us appreciated having in our communities.
Thanks for the note!
No, they are not. Now, Googling her just results in a lot of people expressing sadness over her passing. I do not want to intrude on anyone’s grief here, but I’d never heard of her before and I’ve not been able to find any solid info about her life or work, just as @4ad below says.
@colindean above said she did the best talk of FOSDEM 2023. I was at that event, but I’d never heard of her, nobody mentioned this talk, and Colin does not link it so I don’t know for sure what talk it was.
I’ve googled that too – this is way more work than I should have to do, frankly – and I think it might be this one, but the blurb is fairly content-free and tells me nothing useful.
But the talk is also mentioned here and that gives a little context.
Apparently she ran Hachyderm. I hadn’t heard of that, either. Apparently it is a Mastodon instance – I see little to distinguish these, TBH, and while I’m on Mastodon/Fediverse, I find it little to no use. But David Calvert said:
That’s more info than anywhere else in this thread.
Hachyderm is apparently
She mightn’t have been well-known amongst journos, but she was well known amongst developers and ops/infrastructure engineers.
Searching for her on Google and DDG, she’s famous enough to warrant a sidebar on Google, and her website is above the fold on both. DDG gives better results, and also includes a link to her ORA author’s profile above the fold. She’s definitely very Googlable.
Hachyderm was a side-gig. The blurb also wasn’t content-free: the talk was about how she managed to scale out Hachyderm, which started as a personal Mastodon instance, in the face of a massive influx of users.
The Hacyderm talk she gave at FOSDEM earlier this year was on the main track, which was wedged, which is unusual for a non-keynote talk in Jansen. She also gave a talk about the Aurae low-level container runtime on the Rust track.
We should all remember that our lack of awareness of somebody does not mean that they’re not well known.
I guess Cunningham’s Law was right after all.
It look me a minute to grok the C++ doing C stuff but it’s a neat project.
I don’t really think most users value privacy as much as Apple likes to fear monger it. Lots of users (in my experience, anyways) will click through warnings, notices, permissions, etc. just to “get the thing” whether that is some app, a picture of a kitten in a giant sock or something else. Once in a while there is the fear of “omg, your privacy!” and users will have some knee-jerk reaction but from my pov users aren’t proactive in protecting their privacy.
We should place value on people privacy also as a society. Lack of privacy changes behavior, could lead to preference falsification, etc. An argument can be made that privacy is required for honest communication, and honest communication is necessary for functioning democracy.
Functions support Caddyshack call reference. For example:
Hey(llama)! // Void return
Hey(llama)! How ’bout something for the effort? // Something is a poorly written linked list modeled after first year computing science students work. The linked list contains the return values, along with Rodney Dangerfield quotes placed randomly.
Bonus ransomware compiler:
The compiler encrypts your output and you need to supply a cryptocurrency payment to decrypt it.
Giant sky lobster: plz no smite
I hope he’s finally free
If you’re a Linux user, I cannot recommend flameshot enough https://flameshot.org/
Daaaamn, that looks nice. Thanks for the rec. I have been very unhappy with Gnome’s screenshot tool for years
It looks like there is support for Windows and macOS too!
It’s a bit weird to think that, and I’ve absolutely no clue if I am accurate here, but wouldn’t the closest thing to a small powerful handheld that you can hack on be something like a Steam Deck or one of the raspi+keybaord+battery devices? Since these things seem to actually be done there’s definitely a market for them.
Depends on what you want and exactly how small. For me a small Chromebook fits the bill. They tend to be light and handy, though they won’t fit in my pockets. I need a keyboard that I can actually touch-type on though.
It is easy to install the Linux subsystem. The Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM tend to be more expensive though. I’m not sure if that is feasible for modern GUI development though. Allegedly you can enable Vulkan via Crosstini, so that may be suitable.
Alternatively, you can buy a used Chromebook that can be flashed with Mr Chromebox’s BIOS, and then you can install a standard Linux distribution. Be warned: you may or may not have good support for things like suspend-to-RAM. That’s definitely been a problem with my old Acer R11 Chromebook.
I’d say the PineBook Pro might be a good choice too if you’re looking at Chromebooks.
I have a Pinebook Pro and it’s like the anti-Chromebook; It’s good at everything except running a web browser. Sadly, much (most?) of my day-to-day requires a web browser so I don’t use it much.
Also, the device is pretty much abandoned and the firmware never solidified. It still can’t reboot or come back from sleep.
I can definitely relate to this, I use vi/vim for all my development (Security Ops / Engineer person here) but I am also bad at using multiple files so I usually just use tmux to open a few different panes with files. I think it’s time I revisited vimtutor again…
I work in a context that only exists because copyright laws protect creators and enable them to create on a professional and not hobby basis. So I’m in no way a believer that copyright is inherently evil.
But archive.org is my only way of accessing the vast amount of literature (fiction and non-fiction!) between the end of the public domain (1920s) and, say about 2010. It is really disingenuous for publishers to claim that they are losing money from these works being available, because they are not publishing them themselves.
I would like to share the books I read and loved as a child with my children. Often archive.org is the only way to do that.
I would have a lot more sympathy for the publishers if they provided a blessed legal version of archive.org with their entire back catalog (unedited!). I would in all seriousness pay for access to that.
I used to work professionally as a musician. In theory, copyright law protected my livelihood; in practice, copyright was how various thugs would shakedown music venues for royalties, and often I would be told by venue owners/managers that we needed preapproval on every song we played.
Copyright is inherently unfair; some artists will get lucky and their particular expression of a popular idea will be legally protected, while most artists will be ineligible for the same protection.
The law in this case only holds up if the person who owns the copyright has enough money and time to pursue enforcing it.
When we talk laws and rules, I think that point gets glossed over. Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior (online): Laws, norms, markets, and technology.
In the case of copyright I feel like the market piece dominates the rest as the major players have so much money invested in the system.
You probably want to preface that with IANAL.
Pretty sure that’s self evident from the post.
I would love to see an update to copyright law that requires publication (ideally with no DRM that in any way impedes fair use) to protect works. It annoys me immensely that companies can simultaneously refuse to sell something to potential customers at any price and claim lost revenue when those same people acquire copies elsewhere.
It would be difficult to implement well. A publisher could easily withdraw something from publication long enough for copyright to lapse and then reintroduce it without having to pay the author, but I can imagine that, with sufficient safeguards, a rule that copyright lapsed three years after last in-copyright publication would be implementable.
I would rather see a reduction back to a more reasonable term for copyright length. 120 years is way too long in my opinion.
The original Queen Anne statute had a term of 14 years. I proposed life of author + 15 years a few months back and was blasted by a copyright abolitionist for my pains 😉
Another, related issue is that once copyright is equated with property, it can be sold and signed away to entities with much wider powers than an author or a composer, and the work is no longer a cultural artifact but an investment item.
I don’t want to abolish copyright, but I wouldn’t even go as long as life+. Maybe the 28 years the US used for a long time. It seems to me that long copyrights lose their original purpose and just become a way to seek rents.
Just had an interesting idea for a novel. In a world where copyright is limited only by the lifetime of the author, building up a valuable enough body of work might put quite the price on one’s own head.
For books, at least, the vast majority of the revenue is made in the first 7 years (and more than half of that in the first two) typically. This changes a bit with things like TV or film adaptations, which take a long time to organise. I could imagine copyright permitting redistribution of an original work after 10 years and permitting derived works without a license after a bit longer.
I think one of the big problems with copyright at the moment is that it isn’t tailored for domains. Software, for example, is completely obsolete when it comes out of copyright (the first ever copyrighted program is still under copyright). I doubt anyone benefits from, for example, Windows NT 4 or MacOS 9 still being under copyright, but the fact that they are makes (legally) emulating environments to run old software difficult.
That makes sense. To retain a trademark you have to use it and take efforts to defend it. It makes sense to me to have a “use it or lose it” to other intellectual properties.
I think the major problem would be encoding that into a law that’s enforceable and not easilly gamed. We don’t want publishers doing 10 book runs every 5 years and throwing them in the landfill to retain their rights.
Interesting enough one of the reason George Lucas got toy rights back for Star Wars was part of the license that was originally sold off said toy publishers had to make toys every year and they neglected to do that. (paraphrasing)
You could have full rights return to the author on the expiry of three years, who would then have three years to fulfill the publication requirement. And maybe a provision for an author to provide notice that they’re going to publish before the publisher’s three years are up.
Just to add to that, re-issuing books is not always the straightforward affair it’s sometimes made to be.
One of my favourite things in this world, which I’ve always carried with me when I moved, is an obscure children’s book I’ve had since I was a child. It has large, paged-sized illustrations scattered throughout it, like most children’s book have. Thing is, it was published at a time when things were… expensive where I’m from. So the illustrations aren’t coloured, they’re sort of in the style of 1940s Walt Disney newspaper comics. That was obviously not a problem for me, or most other children my age: we had crayons, so we all coloured our illustrations.
I can’t quite describe how popular this was. 30+ years later we still ask “what colour did you make the balloon?” and we all remember what colour we made it. The book was a hit among children our age, it was fun and easy to follow along. And, while not a colouring book, and very much a “serious” book otherwise – it’s literally a novel! – the fact that we could “contribute” to it to some degree was a huge part of the experience. For many people my age, this book was the gateway into reading, the first “long” book they’d ever finished, the first book they’d read cover to cover more than once and so on.
Anyway, this book was republished a few years ago, which I learned from a friend of mine who’d bought it for her child, along with a pack of crayons. However, in keeping with the times, the editor decided to republish the book with full-colour illustrations, which she only realized when they unwrapped the damn thing and her child flipped through it and asked what he was supposed to do with the crayons now. Presumably someone in marketing thought the children might get bored or whatever. The book is still fun but… it’s not quite the same book, you know?
Thing is, an uncoloured copy of it is not easy to get these days. One pops up in used bookstores every once in a while, but precisely because it was so popular, and especially after it was reissued in a slightly different format, it’s crazy expensive.
But what is the book??
Can you share the title of this wonderful book?
@nickspoon’s question sent me down the Internet rabbit hole last evening. I had no idea it had ever been published in English, I could’ve sworn it was mostly an Eastern European thing!
Given that’s the case, and based on how many people voted both your and nickspoon’s question, I think it’s worth sharing – the English translation was published as “The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends”. archive.org actually carries a 1980 English edition that’s very similar to mine, which is a local edition – it has a handful of full-colour illustrations but most of them is black and white. Some modern editions coloured some, or all of those black and white illustrations, too.
I think it was published pretty much all over Eastern Europe; I know people from Albania, Poland, and the Czech Republic who’ve read it. I’m not sure if it was equally popular all over Europe and across all generations. It was hugely popular in my generation. Basically everyone I know in my age group (35-40) has read it.
Two huge disclaimers: 1) this is a book from a very different era, and from a very foreign place. Some of it may have aged poorly, especially if read by someone who doesn’t know its original cultural context – not to the point where it’s offensive, I think, but nonetheless, 2) please don’t take this as my endorsing anything about it other than that it was fun for young kids to read back then.
While I don’t disagree with at statement, I don’t think the inverse is true, that having no copyright would prevent a professional basis. Another facet to this is that copyright can certainly also prevent creators from the same thing in many different ways.
I also think large parts of culture that creators rely on only even exist because copyright for some reason (time, waiving, etc.) didn’t exist or was broken.
Overall I think it is better than brute force since you have access to the preimage, including the emails and password vault, making hashcat possible in the first place.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that definition of cracking before. John the Ripper’s webpage refers to itself as a “password cracker”, so it seems like “cracking” has multiple accepted definitions. Do you have a source for your definition (just wondering because it’s in quotes)?
I don’t know if there’s a syncthing client for iOS but I’ve had good luck with using it to sync files between devices.
There is (Mobius Sync) but AFAIK it doesn’t run continuously in the background like you’d expect.
This really looks like elaborate joke without a clear punchline
There once was a library from Venus, it’s functions were all shaped like… I forget the rest
I don’t know about india, but 4G and 5G are ridiculously cheap in south east asia. Service providers were competing to put out unlimited data packages for as low as 5USD per month. Some even offer unlimited data for some certain app: youtube, tiktok, facebook.
That enables remote work a lot more vs the price I have seen in both NA and EU. It seems like the infrastructure growth required for these in western countries are a lot slower than asian countries? 🤔
I would imagine, due to population density it’s much more cost effective to upgrade services in Asian countries than North America. In Canada people often complain about the high price of wireless, and while there is lots of factors, the huge areas to cover and smaller population do drive the price to some degree.
The EU is pretty hetrogenerous, most countries are very different from the others. I live in a remote, artic region and I can see my nearest 5G tower, and even the most remote parts of this muncipality (and country!) are getting fiber (FTTH) connections soon. And just across the border to our neighbouring countries, this region isn’t remote and rural, it’s populated with great infrastructure et c.
Great review, I’d be curious to see some very lightweight but still usable (practical?) wms in there too. My favorite being i3 but seeing some of the *wm (twm, cwm, etc.) as well
I write about desktops quite a lot and someone always seems to comment about comparing them with window managers.
WMs are not the same thing at all. A WM is part of a desktop, along with an app launcher, and an app switcher, and maybe a desktop manager, and a file manager, and a bunch of accessory apps that should look and work in the same, harmonious way, and some kind of global settings tool, and a lot of fit and finish and integration.
TBH I’d expect any plain WM to use a fraction of the memory of any desktop, and the differences between WMs should be rounding errors.
IMHO it’s like comparing a bicycle to a Humvee. If it’s not using 1% of the resources then something is badly wrong with it.
Interesting story but his pedophilia kinda taints the thing.
Whoah, unfollowing now… I really thought this was an interesting look but I had no idea the dude was convicted of travelling across state lines with the intent of having sex with someone under the age of consent.
trying to keep myself and my family safe In the middle of an occupation of the capital of a G7 country. They protested at my son’s school yesterday.
Maybe trying to set up the gaming laptop into a full-fledged setup with dual monitors and an actual keyboard and mouse when I’m not doing that.
How is the situation down there conflict wise? The article shows kids playing soccer on the streets. I hope it’s safe!
Everyone is safe, but the situation is very uneasy. Many of the occupiers have brought their kids, so I’m not surprised they’re playing soccer, but I wouldn’t want any of my family in the middle like that.
Yikes, try and stay safe. I’m over in Orleans myself but this stuff is frankly terrifying.
Aw geez. And just a couple of months ago I was thinking of Canada as being a potential refuge place if things go even more crazy in Europe. Best of luck and endurance to you all.
Mars it is then, I guess.
If it makes you feel better, there’s likely nowhere on the planet that is truly a refuge if things go super sour.
I’d be fine with a small unknown island. But then somebody asks me where my low-latency internet and power come from.
I’m really sorry to hear. This is a super scary time and having the threat of violence looming so close has got to be nervous making.
Hey, me too! I’m over in Gatineau in the ’burbs but I generally spend a lot of time in Ottawa proper.
My sympathies; I’m flying into rat-licker central (Alberta :/ ) for my weekend; I expect I’ll see some of the dumbasses myself along the way, although not as bad as your part of the country. Good luck!
Hey now, we are rat free!
This takes me back to messing around with nasm and qemu instead of studying for finals. I’m sure it could be done with qemu but I was hoping for a nice x86 emulator where you could type in ASM and it would execute and show you the registers and memory. We used SPIM for MIPS assembly in University and I quite liked it for learning.
I built something like that! https://github.com/eatonphil/x86e
It’s totally a toy and only supports a few instructions but yeah I too wish there were more accessible UIs that require zero external tools to be installed to just start messing around.
There is some good points here but I think they’re overlooking security. Admittedly I am an OpenBSD fan boy but FreeBSD, at least the last time I looked at it, lacked a lot of security features that are available in Linux (and of course, OpenBSD).
Would you like to elaborate what security features you were missing from FreeBSD? Perhaps they could be added to the project ideas list on the FreeBSD wiki.
I agree. Every non-FreeBSD platform where I try to write compartmentalised software causes me to struggle due to the lack of Capsicum.