Fun fact: The mass of all humans on Earth is about 10 times greater than the mass of all wild mammals.

Both the real President and the fake President have a long history of reneging on deals, and not paying up. DGE seized the Treasury’s payment system, so they could remove money from the people’s bank accounts. The tariffs have a good chance of plunging the U.S. into recession, and $1 million really isn’t that much compensation for taking on the risk, especially if inflation gets going in earnest. They’d be on the wrong side of trade barriers with the economic bloc that’s geographically easier to trade with. Would this regime bail them out?

In short, trustworthiness matters.

I’m not versed in modern military strategy, but I’ve heard others say that the U.S. carrier fleet has been a dominant force because the U.S. has only taken on adversaries that didn’t have submarines, and anti-torpedo systems aren’t foolproof. Also, it seems to me that they’re for force projection, and not so great for defensive action, to since there are only 11 of them. That is, the U.S. has a lot of assets that enemies could strike while the carrier groups are elsewhere.

I guess I’m not convinced that the carriers would be decisive in a conflict with a modern military, instead of the usual U.S. MO of picking on the weak.

Only one of the interviewees said location. That would be key for me. If the theater was close by and integrated integrated into daily life, I’d probably go a lot more often. Instead, all of the theaters are way out on the edge of town, often in some grotty commercial area where the land is cheap enough for the obligatory huge parking lot. It’s a commitment to get there, as in, you intend to go to a movie and only to a movie, because there’s nothing else to do nearby. No dinner and a movie, no random matinee as a break from the office grind, no movie followed by hanging out with friends at the bar across the street. I might as well watch at home.

As others have said, it’s important to distinguish different types of intellectual property laws. A patent is protection for a process or mechanism, which doesn’t apply to the shape of the bar. I doubt that there would have been a patent, because mold-making is an ancient art, and pretty straightforward. It wouldn’t be an innovation to make an oval mold.

A copyright is protection for a tangible recording of an expressive work; writing, music, film, et cetera. It doesn’t apply to goods. It would apply to a designer’s drawing of the shape of the bar, but not the shape, nor the bar itself.

What might apply is a trademark, which is protection for the use of some distinguishing feature to identify a product or brand in the marketplace. Trademarks are supposedly about preventing consumer confusion about whom they are buying from. They arise from customary use, meaning that a product or service has to be sold with that mark for them to exist. Courts have recognized all sorts of things as trademarks: in addition to logos and names, also color schemes, shapes, even scents.

Thing is, a trademark doesn’t have to be registered with the USPTO to offer protection. Registration just means that the Office has accepted it as a trademark, so that use of it by others is presumptively an infringement. Without registering it, an entity would have to sue to get a court to issue a finding of infringement.

So hypothetically, the shape of a Dove beauty bar could be a trademark, even if it’s not currently registered with the USPTO. However, the prospects aren’t that great, IMO, because oval is a pretty common shape, and Dove distinguishes itself with the prominent bird-shaped logo more than the shape of the bar.

One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

ZFS is more than just a filesystem, it’s a fully-integrated disk management system which replaces mdadm, LVM, LUKS, nfsd, rsync, as well as the filesystem. It’s great for NAS boxes and file servers, since you can give it a big pile o’ disks, and it slices and dices, and offers simple commands to create whatever volumes you need.

If I remember this site correctly from back then, it was one of those run by idiots that made you upload a PDF of your résumé, and then enter all of the same info in web forms. This tracks.

You have so thoroughly captured the Windows experience. Bravo!

As a long-time Linux user who had to dive into the Windows world after taking an admin job, this is such a bizarre thing to hear. So many how-to articles that I found to make a change to user-level Windows settings start with opening the Registry Editor. Technically, that’s a GUI program, but still a major challenge for the average user. On the admin side, the documentation and how-to articles are dominated by PowerShell scripts, because Microsoft has embraced the command line.

There is a word in philosophy of mind—the qualia of redness.

I love the critical mass metaphor for Lemmy. Posts and comments are the neutrons that knock free other posts and comments after reaching other people. If we spread out our fissile material into hundreds of tiny pails, then the neutrons just fly away into the air without having any effect.

Yesterday was the first day that Lemmy activity tipped over the threshold, and there were too many overnight posts for me to read all of them over breakfast.

In the same vein as A Short History of Wine, there’s also And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The last one goes way, way back, and focuses on scientific topics, but it’s an entertaining read, and helps provide context to the pre-modern era.

According to Wikipedia, the earliest property tax records are from 6,000 BCE.

Definitely illegal in the parts of Wisconsin I’m from. Zoning codes generally include a list of permitted uses for each zone, a list of conditional uses that need approval from the local zoning board or officer, and everything else is not allowed. If this structure were classified as a permanent structure, it would not meet building codes anywhere. If not a permanent structure, staying in it would be considered camping, which is not a permitted or conditional use in the zones of the county where I live. (Or maybe it is somehow; I just glanced over the ordinance.) I do have a bit of land in a county that does allow camping in certain zones, but for a maximum of 10 nights per year.

It seems to me that there’s this pervasive sense that the landscape and lifestyles (cars, single-family houses, lawns, etc.) in the United States are what they are because that’s what its citizens want for themselves. The reality is that just about anything else is illegal. Remember, the United States is the country that invented loitering (a.k.a. existing in public without a specific objective) as an offense in order to force (mostly Black) people into working degrading jobs. This is actually the kind of dwelling that Cornish miners built when they came to Wisconsin to mine galena. They got the nickname of “badgers” for it, and that’s why we’re the Badger State (and not due to the animal). So it’s not like this is a new idea that nobody has thought of before, we just can’t do it anymore.

If it’s me on the bike, know that I’m pitying you. -6°C is nothing. I drove a lot of miles as a delivery driver, and saw a lot of faces behind windshields in that time. Very few happy faces. Driving makes people miserable.

In my experience learning Windows 10 for my job, the results of searching for how to do something are: ‘click-this’ tutorials that don’t work because Microsoft changed something in the next edition, editing the registry, or PowerShell commands. The registry editing sometimes doesn’t work because Microsoft changed something. The PowerShell method is the way to go, because Microsoft has embraced the command line.

Enough farmland? I suggest reading up on the Ogallala Aquifer. Also, where the best climate zones for agriculture will be 50 years from now.

I felt the same way about the Hulu episodes until Quids Game, which I just straight-up hated, at first. No real connection to the larger premise, just torture porn in the form of weird aliens playing with/killing off the familiar characters.

Later, it hit me: The episode is a meta-commentary on the Hulu seasons. The “quids” are self-insert characters for the writers, poking fun at themselves. They aren’t doing a coherent storyline with this reboot, they’re just playing with familiar characters in different scenarios, and wringing out a few new jokes in a way that they couldn’t do with the established canon. In a way, it’s Futurama fanfic by Futurama writers.

From that perspective, I’ve found the reboot a lot more enjoyable. The good parts are a bonus, and the duds are forgettable.