merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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merc,

Of all the new uses of Mickey we’re now seeing, one thing I really hope is to see Mickey showing up on murals in kindergartens and daycares. This is really what it means for the character to be entering the public domain. He’s has been a part of American, if not world culture for decades, but that part of the culture has been illegal for people to use.

Finally, after nearly a century of Disney getting absolute control, that cultural element finally belongs to everyone. Now parents and caregivers can paint images of Mickey and make kids happy without having to get permission from Disney.

merc,

I just like how he used “% 2” in the Python code he used to generate the C++ code.

merc,

I think just reading his Wikipedia entry, I caught someone at CNN being kind:

O’Brien left CNN in December 2008. He was rehired by CNN as an aviation analyst in March, 2014.

2008–present: owner Miles O’Brien Productions, LLC in Washington, DC

In February, 2014, O’Brien was injured when a Pelican case filled with television equipment fell on his left forearm, causing acute compartment syndrome and resulting in the amputation of his left arm above the elbow.

So, the month after a gruesome injury he was re-hired by CNN, who probably have a pretty good medical plan, better than what he probably would have had when he was self-employed. Maybe not, maybe it’s just coincidence. But, it’s nicer to believe that someone at CNN thought they should look out for a former colleague / friend who needed some help.

merc,

Sure… and you could pass around porn on thumb drives. But, having a central website where you can browse public repos and clone the interesting ones is a pretty key part of Open Source / Free Software development.

merc,

The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.

merc,

Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.

You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.

Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.

merc,

decide to limit the definition of the word.

To what it actually means? Sure.

merc,

Who cares? The point is, it’s not theft. The person who had the art still has the art, so it’s not theft.

merc,

Yeah, apparently you need to know the origin of the word to know how to pluralize it.

One octopus, two octopuses. But you can also say “octopodes” because the elements used to create the word are originally Greek (okto for 8, pous for foot), and that’s how Greek words get pluralized. But, although it was based on Greek elements it was never used in Ancient Greek. It was a modern Latin word, created in the 1700s as a scientific term using those Greek elements. As a Latin word, the “us” ending should be pluralized with “i”, so “octopi” (which is one of the oldest known pluralizations of the word). But, it’s an English word, and the proper way to pluralize an English word ending in “us” is to tack on “es”.

So, you can go with “octopodes”, “octopi” or “octopuses” and have an argument why any of them is correct.

For Unix, since it’s a word created in English, it’s probably “unixes”. To claim it’s “unices” you’d have to pretend that “unix” is a Latin word, which it isn’t, and never was, but “ix” is a common declension pattern in Latin, and an uncommon ending in English, so it’s fun to pretend it’s a Latin word and doesn’t get pluralized normally.

merc,

Yeah, but at least they’re unixes (unices?).

merc,

Yeah, I don’t get that. Bicycling requires strength and endurance. It exposes you to the elements. Why is sitting in a cushy car something some people think as being more macho? Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?

merc,

The smell of the magic smoke that gets released from the electronics, preventing them from working.

merc,

And if you’re only slightly rich (as in, daddy’s a lawyer) you can afford to gamble, lose, and then try again.

merc,

The newer pronunciation has become popular based on

The newer pronunciation has become popular based on their internalization of the obscure patterns of English pronunciation, informed by the most similar word: “gift” which uses a hard g. Everyone I know of started saying it with a hard g because that’s what made sense based on the spelling, long before hearing the weird thing about constituent words.

Nobody pronounced LASER as Lah-seer, which you’d have to do if you used “A as in Amplification” an “E as in Emission”.

merc,

Nah, Starbucks is MacOS.

It’s more expensive than it needs to be, but it looks really pretty, and fundamentally it’s still coffee, just like MacOS is Unix-based under the hood.

A chromebook is more like a can of coke. It’s caffeinated, has mass-market appeal, but nobody’s going to be spending hours talking about just how great their can of coke is vs. someone else’s can of coke. A high-end chromebook is maybe a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.

merc,

Modern dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive. They don’t tell you how things should be spelled, or what meaning they should have. Instead, they report how things are spelled and what people think they mean in the real world.

merc,

But, good enough for just about anything most people need to do on a daily basis. For anything else there’s specialized tools.

merc,

And it’s popular, and it’s something non-Linux users might recognize.

merc, (edited )

It’s inside a ventilation shaft in Cloud City. Maybe people have houses that look out into the ventilation shaft, because it’s at least better than no windows at all?

To me, it looks like panel lights on a computer / machine. But, why have those indicator lights in a ventilation shaft where you only rarely have people?

merc,

As disturbing as these mass shootings are, they’re still very rare. The vast majority of Americans will never be in a mass shooting, let alone tourists who only visit occasionally.

It’s telling that most American police officers go their entire career without shooting their guns except at the firing range.

But, it is a sign of US dysfunction that the problem is so obvious but there’s zero chance of the problem being solved any time soon.

merc,

Aside from all that, it’s just sane to lock down weapons.

The military knows how dangerous they are, so they don’t let people on military bases just wander around with them. They’re carefully controlled. It’s just insanity that outside the walls the rules are less strict.

merc,

Games is one of the blockers for me. I’m really hoping the Steam Deck changes things so that Windows is no longer needed at all.

Right now we’re just on stage 1, where almost everything that runs on the Steam Deck needs a compatibility layer. I’m hoping that the next step is developers building for Linux as well as Windows to run better on the Steam Deck, which would mean zero performance loss playing on a Linux desktop.

merc,

*worse

merc,

I bet typing that makes you feel like your you’re own worse enemy.

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