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Oxyana, a look into the effects opiates have had on the small town of Oceania, West Virginia.

Happens to be one of the only movies I own through a DRM‐free digital download purchase, sold through Vimeo. I wish I could buy all my movies this way. Of course, it’s also available through the usual DRM‐encumbered sources too (Blu‐Ray, Amazon Prime).

Any American can visualize the size of a two‐liter bottle, thanks to our addiction to soda. Three‐liter is also a commonly available size. I’ve never in my life seen anything sold in quantity of one liter here, though.

Enough time has passed that Agatha Christie’s books have started falling into the public domain in the United States. She published a new book (sometimes more) every single year from 1921 until her death, so every January we can look forward to another expired copyright. I’ve read all of the Standard Ebooks editions (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie) and can recommend them.

She died in 1976, so in life+50 countries, all her works will become public domain in 2027 (84 will still be copyrighted in the US); in life+70 countries, the year will be 2047 (34 will still be copyrighted in the US). The copyrights will continue to expire in the US until 2072, when the the last book published in her lifetime falls into the public domain.

Well, the book was originally published in England under the name Ten Little N⸺s, and in that edition the location was named “N⸺ Island.”

For obvious reasons, that title was considered unsuitable for sale in America, so American editions were renamed to And Then There Were None, and the island and poem were changed to reference (depending on edition) Indians or soldiers instead. Most editions these days have settled upon soldiers.

Incidentally, Wikipedia mentions one use of the phrase “our black brothers” that only makes sense in the context of the original naming.

The US obesity rate is over 40%!

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

Is that the case, though? The US has problems of religious and political extremism, but is Muslim violence worse in magnitude than in France with its restrictions on religious expression, or anti‐semitism than in the European countries that ban Holocaust denial?

Obscenity is one of the (very few) exceptions to the First Amendment. What exactly makes something “obscene” is somewhat unclear (see the Miller test), but in practice explicit pornography, for example, is not legally considered obscene, in part because the definition is somewhat dependent on community standards and porn is very, very popular.

The FCC can and does regulate over‐the‐air broadcasts to a stricter standard, thanks to its exclusive authority over the inherently limited wireless spectrum. It restricts not just obscenity, but indecency (explicit sex) and profanity (bad language). However, this power does not extend to (e.g.) cable TV, which is not broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves.

The US really does generally have stronger free speech protection than the rest of the developed world. There is no equivalent in the US to a work being “refused classification” as seen in Commonwealth countries. The First Amendment would prohibit it. Some retailers won’t sell unrated or X‐rated films or AO‐rated games, but others can, because the ratings systems are formed by industry groups and are not compulsory.

When the Christchurch shooting happened, the New Zealand government banned both the shooter’s manifesto and the livestreamed video, making them illegal to possess or distribute. I doubt such a thing could happen in the US. (I remember my surprise that NZ actually has a government office named “Chief Censor.”)

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

—C.S. Lewis

It seemed obvious satire to me (not funny or sophisticated, but satire nonetheless).

Felt like my suspicion was confirmed after seeing that other “Men of the Year” articles in the Free Beacon include “The Brothers Cuomo” (https://freebeacon.com/men-of-the-year/2021-men-of-the-year-...) and “Dem Who Spent Campaign Cash at Strip Club” (https://freebeacon.com/men-of-the-year/2021-man-of-the-year-...).

In this case the cyclist is the primary butt of the joke, not the driver. But the grandparent’s description of the article as “pure incitement to violence” is ludicrous hysteria.

> All browsers implement XHTML.

Internet Explorer did not. It completely refused to render XHTML pages served with an XML MIME type (application/xhtml+xml). It would only display pages if they were served with the text/html MIME type, which meant that none of XML’s vaunted features (such as strict parsing) came into play, and such pages were effectively treated as “HTML with syntax errors.”

A big part of why WHATWG was able to dethrone W3C was W3C’s insistence on dropping HTML in favor of XHTML when the overwhelmingly dominant browser of the time had zero support for it.

> They came up with XML, the clean subset, and XHTML, the DTD. … Basically, XHTML was the first actual standardization of HTML.

No, the first formal HTML standard was 2.0 (RFC 1866), which was released in November 1995 and had a DTD that among other things disallowed overlapping hierarchies. XML’s first draft was released a full year later (November 1996), and the first W3C spec was XML 1.0 in 1998. Later that year came the initial drafts for XHTML 1.0, which was a straightforward translation of HTML 4.0 to XML.

> I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.

It’s important to save the offline installers too. I keep a rather large external for my GOG library.

Runtime DRM is sometimes optional with Steam, but install‐time DRM never is.

> GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes … You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now.

XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.

The Democrats could have been smarter tactically. Trump’s first SC nominee was Gorsuch, certainly conservative but a stellar jurist, and an uncharacteristically good pick from Trump (compare to the other names on his 2016 shortlist). The Democrats had no cards besides obstruction, which would certainly lead McConnell to kill the filibuster. If they had made the reasonable guess that Trump’s next pick would be easier to beat, saved their powder, and reluctantly let Gorsuch through, McConnell would have had to kill the filibuster for Kavanaugh. For Kavanaugh, a far more controversial pick than Gorsuch, he wouldn’t have had the votes.

It’s strange that’s how it came across to you.

The difference compared to your analogy is that Telegram’s self‐rolled crypto is a problem many messengers don’t have, and it can’t be mitigated by the client.

Whereas the possibility of malicious things being done on Signal’s server end is a problem shared by every messenger, and Signal works hard to mitigate this by pushing smarts like contact handling entirely to the client side.

I also don’t see why you brought up “owning your own data.” I already discussed that the same “don’t trust external servers” axiom applies to self‐hosted federated systems as well.

I was a PGP enthusiast for some time, and advocated it to technical friends.

In the end, though, I only ever received a single PGP‐encrypted mail from a single person.

These days, I have over a dozen reliable Signal contacts, nearly all with safety numbers verified in person, and have sent to or received from them hundreds (perhaps thousands) of encrypted texts and voice messages, and dozens of encrypted audio calls. The majority of my immediate social circle doesn’t use Signal (and some have tried and rejected it), but a sizeable chunk does use it, including non‐family.

When it comes to volume and quality of E2EE communication in my daily life, I cannot call PGP anything but a failure, and I cannot call Signal anything but a success.

I have a modicum of trust that the sensible reader understands that given the phrase “federated or not,” the subsequent phrase “a server you talk to” refers to external servers in the federation that your self‐hosted server talks to.

Not your contacts, but everyone [already using Signal] who has you as a contact.

To remove that functionality would be equivalent to removing the ability to look up if a Signal message can be sent to a particular number. At least as long as phone numbers are used as the sole identifier for Signal accounts—another decision that has been debated into the ground, of course, but was done for understandable reasons.

Don’t trust the server side of any service. Open source or not, federated or not, it’s impossible to verify that a server you talk to runs the code it says it does.

Which leads to one of the selling points of Signal: that the client is designed to expose as little metadata as possible to the server. Sure, the Signal servers could be slurping up IP addresses and timings despite advertising that they don’t. But I can’t think of a single alternative service that can guarantee otherwise, and that problem is compounded by clients that leak much more metadata than Signal.

It’s certainly not “serious math,” but I’m rather proud of this revision I made to the MathML used for a throwaway equation in an obscure short story: https://github.com/standardebooks/fritz-leiber_short-fiction...

I’ll second Alex’s recommendations of P. G. Wodehouse (especially Jeeves Stories) and Agatha Christie.

A personal favorite of mine is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/around-the-wor...

Another fun example is Super Mario Land 2, where going out of bounds can lead to a “level” where blocks on screen directly correspond to general work RAM values, and breaking the block corresponding to the “game end” flag rolls the credits. Feels very Tron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24XHkmOJebA

> "Very seldom" including every single Republican Presidential term for the past 30 years save one.

So, twice?

There was an interesting discussion in 2019 after a group of people started cracking the passwords of the original Unix developers that had been obtained from an old /etc/passwd file in this repo (https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-S...).

Rob Pike spoke out against the effort, calling it “distasteful.” https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgw0Vz8UFbK7c_Jr+RHGMssSxN=...

Nonetheless, in the end every password was cracked. Some highlights:

Steve Bourne: “bourne”

Dennis Ritchie: “dmac”

Kirk McKusick: “foobar”

Brian Kernighan: “/.,/.,”

Ken Thompson: “p/q2-q4!” (a chess move)

Bill Joy: cracked but not posted due to Rob Pike’s comments, but it contained a control character

I suppose that would be the same question as whether GitHub Copilot violates copyright in its code suggestions.

Fun fact: in the United Kingdom, the King James Version is still copyrighted—perpetually copyrighted, in fact—by (who else?) the British monarchy.

Since the author of this app is based in the United States, he should be safe… we have a bit of precedent for ignoring royal prerogatives here :)

Implicit end tags as described in the article have been allowed by every HTML DTD not named XHTML.

In this context (although I would dispute calling it “saner,” as someone who was fully on board the XHTML train a decade ago), an XML parser, which among other things enforces that the markup is “well‐formed” by the XML definition, thus prohibiting implicit closing tags and unquoted attributes.

You misunderstand the spec. Exactly what confuses you is hard to discern, but perhaps you misread “the p element” as referring to the <p> start tag, when in fact the element includes the start tag, text contents, and (if present) the end tag.