nybble41

> you're looking at 75% of the country voting for Democrats

A constitutional amendment ought to have support from more than one party, not just Democrats. You might be able to get that if you took a more oblique approach, for example with an amendment explicitly upholding the natural right to control over one's own body, as opposed to one narrowly focused on allowing abortion.

It has automatic reconnect: "-o reconnect". You'll need to use key-based authentication with an SSH agent, since it won't be able to prompt you for the password while running in the background.

> Employees can get another job, investors can diversify and manage their portfolio better...

Employees can get another job after the fact. Their skills and experience are mostly transferable. I'm not saying it isn't disruptive, but they haven't lost any principal or equity, just the opportunity to sell more labor to that particular employer in the future.

For the shareholders at the time to business goes bankrupt it's too late to try to diversify. Their shares are worthless and they are out whatever they paid for them. (BTW, telling them to diversify ahead of time is equivalent to telling them not to invest as much into this company... which isn't great for the company or its employees.)

> ... no portion on the profits are shared with employees.

The employees' fair share of the profits is their salary or wages (plus performance bonuses where applicable). If they want equity they can buy it with their earnings, but in general it's a bad idea to hold too much equity in your employer. The trade-off for sharing in "record profits" is sharing in the losses when the company doesn't do as well.

Don't forget how much higher screen resolutions are these days. Color depth also. Those 8 MiB systems were driving single-buffered displays with perhaps 800x600 resolution at eight bits per pixel, with a color palette and dithering, which requires about 480 KB to hold the framebuffer image. Most applications would render directly into the framebuffer. A full HD (1080p) screen at 32 bits per pixel requires 8 MiB just to store the framebuffer (16 MiB with double-buffering), and that's not counting any of the input data or code needed for rendering. Figure on two or three times that to hold separate textures for each window (depending on the window sizes and how much they overlap) so that they can be composited live with desktop effects.

> Investors who do not get more returns in the companies compared to a debt instrument will take their investments to companies which can offer better returns….

Of course, but to do that you first have to find another investor willing to take your place by buying your shares. An individual shareholder might leave but the shareholders, as a group, are just as invested in the fate of the company as before.

> Imprisoning people should be expensive so that it is used judiciously as a punishment.

It shouldn't be used as a punishment at all. It makes sense only in cases where a convicted criminal represents a serious threat to other members of society which can only be mitigated through isolation—in which case the isolation should continue until there is no longer a threat. In all other situations we should be able to come up with more immediate and effective forms of punishment; ideally ones with an element of restitution for the victims.

(Also: If there are no victims seeking restitution then there shouldn't be a conviction in the first place, much less punishment.)

> Note that the dot-com bubble lost about $1.7T …

… in 2000. That would be $2.85T today, going by the official CPI inflation calculator.[0]

[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.7&year1=2000...

When the final record should have either Yes or No, but the there is an intermediate state where the answer could be missing, you want something like a Maybe<Bool> which you can map to a simple Bool as part of validation. Ideally you'd use a functor-style parameter for this, for example in Haskell:

  data Record f = Record { …, someField ∷ f Bool, … }
  type PartialRecord = Record Maybe
  type CompleteRecord = Record Identity

  getCompletedRecord ∷ PartialRecord → Maybe CompleteRecord
  getCompletedRecord (Record { …, someField, … }) =
    Record <$> … <*> (Identity <$> someField) <*> …

This way you can define your record type once and handle all the missing fields in a uniform way, and functions can easily indicate whether they expect a partial record full of Maybes or a complete record with no potentially missing fields. You can use the same type definition for other things, too, by substituting different functors in place of Maybe or Identity. For example, `Record ToString` where `ToString a` is a newtype over `(a → String)` could be a record of functions describing how to render each field as a string.

In the DB you would need to store incomplete records in a separate table, since they have different validation rules. Queries against the main table should be able to assume that all the records are complete.

> Wayland uses the MacOS approach. It allows the program to provide increased resolution buffers at integral scales. This forces fractional scales into framebuffer scaling.

There is work underway[0] to implement a protocol (wp-fractional-scale-v1) to support fractional scaling as well, which in combination with wp-viewport will allow fractional scaling without framebuffer scaling. Experimental support exists in wlroots, sway, kwin (KDE), and Mutter (GNOME).

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

Those so-called "representatives" created the problem in the first place by restricting the supply with drug patents, FDA regulations, import restrictions, and limitations on the number of new doctors and medical facilities, and now you want to "demand action" from them on behalf of patients? Good luck. They're representing someone all right, but it's their donors, not their official constituency.

That, BTW, is a consequence of the system responsible for selecting and influencing those in power and not any particular individual, so voting in someone new won't change anything. And that goes for much more than just health care.

That's assuming that the issuer, mediator, and destination are all distinct entities who don't communicate with each other except as described in the protocol. If they are the same entity, or they collaborate, all those nice privacy guarantees disappear. And the destination—not the user—decides which issuers & mediators they accept.

> I doubt anyone is saying that this is bad if you're using a web app for financial transactions like buying tickets.

I for one am certainly saying that this is bad if it means that you need approval from one of Apple, Google, or Microsoft to participate in financial transactions. That would be a giant step backward compared to the status quo.

> Prefix translation has the potential to be stateless which is nice for resource management on the translation element, though.

It really messes with protocols where you need to tell another host how to contact you, though, since you don't know your "real" IP address without asking some other server. This gets worse if there is more than one level of translation involved. You also need hacks like "hairpin NAT" (wastefully passing local traffic through the router) since local hosts trying to connect to the public IP of a local server don't realize that they can reach it directly via the ULA.

> … you might set up ULAs for local traffic, and use whatever prefixes are advertised for non-local traffic.

This is the way.

Where do you think it's gone? Complain about the wealthy all you want–their personal consumption of goods and services isn't that much higher than the average.

> In the real world a company making losses cuts down on employees, wages, increases working hours for same pay…

All of that only affects future earnings. The employees' wealth (savings) is not tied up in the success of the company—they can quit at any time and go work somewhere else. Everything they've earned up to that point is theirs to keep, along with intangibles like training and job experience they've received along the way. This is their share for "putting in their sweat and brains".

For the shareholders, on the other hand, a company taking losses doesn't just impact future income. Their entire investment is at stake.

If an employee prefers equity rather than income they are free to purchase shares in the company with their earnings; as a rule, though, employees just want to put in their hours and get a steady paycheck which they can spend or invest as they please. They don't want to be forced to invest in their employer such that the prospect of their employer going bankrupt threatens both their paycheck and their savings.

> There's a definable "margin" there, too, but I wouldn't know where to look to find out what.

Not enough of one to make becoming a landlord a guaranteed way to earn an easy profit, or everyone would do it. Lack of startup capital wouldn't be an issue either—banks would be happy to front the cost if you can prove the venture will succeed well enough to pay them back with interest.

> … just because something is open source does not necessarily mean that it will stay alive in the way you describe it - especially redesign or new features.

True, being open source doesn't guarantee that the app will be maintained. It does, however, provide the legal framework to make it possible. If the app has an active user base then it's likely that someone would step up to take over the development, and the open source nature of the project means that the new maintainers are not starting at a significant disadvantage.

> My point was mainly in the context of Electron desktop apps, an abandoned, proprietary Electron app would probably run for at least 5 years * without touching it after it's abandoned. Further from that point patching it so it works would not be that hard.

Okay, so you're assuming an app distributed mostly in source form to begin with. That's fair, but an Electron app can be minified or obfuscated (and in the case of a proprietary app, probably would be) so it wouldn't necessarily be easier to work with than a compiled binary. You also still have the copyright issues which would make it difficult to collaborate on any patches.

> In quite a lot of cultural traditions, the point of marriage is supposed to be that it is significantly different and you won't break up due to poor fit.

Which is not to say that you can't end up with a poor fit anyway. You're just compelled by social expectations (if not legal requirements) to stay together despite the poor fit, often to the detriment of everyone involved.

Sometimes people do give up too easily, and could make the marriage work if they just had a bit more incentive to try. That's where systems which grant marriage more permanence shine. But on other occasions the problems run deeper, and separation may well be the correct answer.

In any case, since people have learned that they can get most of what they want out of a relationship without actually getting married, stronger / less reversible marriages just tend to discourage people from getting married in the first place.

I'm not sure incompetence on the part of the ISP really translates into a need for NAT. It's a useful workaround, to be sure, but what you need here is an ISP that handles IPv6 prefixes properly. There is no reason for the prefix delegated to a customer to change, ever. They should just assign it statically when they create the account.

Elsewhere they mentioned that there are exceptions for "popular" SSO systems, but I have a hard time imagining any exception that would allow a shared login for Facebook comments while blocking Facebook tracking across sites. These are essentially the same mechanism.

> Total Cookie Protection is going to put cookies that only Facebook can see in a different jar for each separate site you visit, making it so that Facebook can’t read it’s own cookies across different sites.

Won't this break some basic features like being logged in to Facebook (or similar services, e.g. Disqus) for the purpose of embedded comment sections on other sites? They don't use cookies only for tracking buttons after all. It would be… annoying… for every site to require a separate login.

It makes a difference who is doing the coercing, though. Is it the person offering a solution (employment), or the universe in general for imposing scarcity?

You may be "coerced" into working by the general human condition of needing to earn money somehow to survive, but that doesn't mean your employer is coercing you. That relationship is still voluntary. You can choose to work for them on mutually-agreeable terms, or not—and they can choose to hire you, or not. Neither party is forcing the other to do anything.

> That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.

On that point we agree.

> That said, open source have this edge that if it's just too obsolete for the dependencies, you can hope someone would patch it if it's popular enough. It would be harder to patch a proprietary app.

IMHO this understates the difference, severely. The open source app can be maintained by the community for as long as it has a community. That includes not just dealing with dependency obsolescence but also new features, redesign, porting to new platforms… anything that would have been handled by the original team.

The proprietary app, on the other hand, will be near-impossible to patch for even the most trivial of changes without the original source code or build environment—and let's not forget that distributing the modified version would be illegal; at best you might get instructions for patching your own copy. And of course there won't be any growth in the user community since there is no (legal) source for new copies. Existing users may be able to struggle along on their own for a while but this is ultimately a dead end without support from the copyright holder.

The "clickbait" headline is merely stating the law. Article R4228-19: "Il est interdit de laisser les travailleurs prendre leur repas dans les locaux affectés au travail."[0] Google translates this as "It is forbidden to allow workers to take their meals in the premises assigned to the work."

Enforcement may be lax but the headline is perfectly accurate.

[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...

It's not clickbait. You may be able to skip lunch altogether but you can't eat it at your desk:

> Until now, any company allowing employees to eat lunch at their desks was subject to a fine if discovered by the inspectors who enforce the labor code. The employee in question faced unspecified disciplinary action.[0]

The "until now" refers to the suspension of the law in 2021 to promote social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That suspension has since expired, so eating at one's desk is once again prohibited.

The actual law is Article R4228-19: "Il est interdit de laisser les travailleurs prendre leur repas dans les locaux affectés au travail."[1] Google translates this as "It is forbidden to allow workers to take their meals in the premises assigned to the work."

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/world/europe/france-desk-...

[1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...

Unfortunately apps can refuse to run if you don't grant them the permissions they requested. A better system than simply allowing or denying the request would be to sandbox the app so that it appears to receive the permission but doesn't get access to any useful capabilities. Empty or synthetic calendar / contact list data, Internet access which is somehow never available, camera and microphone which only report darkness & silence, etc. Ideally the app would have no way to tell that it's been sandboxed.

That sort of thing should be called out in (1-star) reviews.

The Samsung Gear app is like that, for example. You need it if you want to tweak the settings for their Galaxy Buds headset (the ambient sound level, for example), but on first startup it prompts for what appear to be all the permissions needed for every kind of Samsung device, including things like smartwatches—calendar, contacts, notifications, the works. If you deny any permission the app refuses to start, even though none of that is necessary for the task at hand.

My workaround was to install it and then immediately disable all Internet access (airplane mode), adjust the settings, and then purge the app from the phone before turning the network back on. Fortunately the settings are persistent even without a constant connection to the app. I think that should be sufficient to avoid any unwanted data leakage, but it's a lot of work for relatively minor benefit, and the process must be repeated any time the settings need to be adjusted.

Fully agreed. What's worse, even if you painstakingly go through all your apps and disable this anti-feature—since there no global setting—it just gets turned back on the next time the app is updated. Putting aside the abysmal UX, automated systems should respect clearly-expressed user preferences.

> The app needs the geolocation permission to access the bluetooth radio and scan for devices.

Sure, but why does the app need to be able to scan for any and all Bluetooth devices? There should be an entry in the manifest describing the kind(s) of devices the app wants to interact with, and only those devices should appear in the scan. Naturally the list would need to be reviewed to verify that the selected devices are related to the app, and presented to the user in the app store along with all other requested permissions.

In this particular case the same company designed both the app and the device it's connecting to, so for all we know the device could have an embedded GPS receiver to provide the app with much more detailed location information than it could get from Bluetooth alone. It could also just relay its own Bluetooth scan results. However, the app at least couldn't easily get location data from Bluetooth scans when the device isn't in range.

The US Constitution gave Congress the power—but not the obligation–to enact copyright laws in pursuit of certain social goals. A mistake, IMHO, but it was certainly mentioned as something Congress could do at its discretion.

And then the First Amendment promptly nullified that power by categorically stating that the freedom of speech shall not be infringed. Distribution of content is speech, and copyright enforcement penalizes it, which infringes the freedom of speech. This is how the exceptions for Fair Use came about, by attempting to reconcile the Copyright Clause with the First Amendment, but Fair Use is only a half-measure which does not fully avoid the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have Rule A saying that you may do something and Rule B saying that you must not do that thing, they don't combine to create a compromise rule which says that you can do that thing most of the time with a few narrow exceptions.