Not exactly the 19th century, but in 1980 Softsoap bought up a year's worth of manufacturing capacity of hand pump mechanisms in order to block competitors from entering the consumer market for liquid hand soap.
647 karma · joined December 5, 2024
Trees are really only a lot of work if you insist on keeping a grotesquely unnatural manicured garden; the only tree I've got that's any significant amount work is an apple tree that would turn half the yard to a rotten apple tripping hazard if you didn't pick them up. A couple more need trimming every few years to keep a path clear, but I would chalk that up to user error in choosing to plant them slightly too close to the path.
Contrary to what the "just tough it out" types would have you believe, noise pollution does cause appreciable harm to public health. Making lots of noise in a dense neighborhood where thousands of people live is just not worth the marginal efficiency improvement of blowing vs raking leaves. Tangentially, this is also one of several reasons why speed limits should be 30km/h in cities to limit rolling noise.
[0] https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p... [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-take-only-throw
More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.
If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.
Most distros have a fantastic track record of defending the interests of their users. Meanwhile, individual app developers in aggregate have a pretty bad one; frequently screwing over their users for marginal gain/convenience. I don't want to spend a bunch of time and energy investigating the moral character of every developer of every piece of software I want to run, but I trust that my distro will have done an OK job of patching out blatantly user-hostile anti-features.
There is widespread browser support for linking directly to text fragments[1] which makes it possible to link to arbitrary parts of documents even when the author hasn't marked up some nearby element with an id to target, like so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45047572#:~:text=You%20...
Unfortunately, Firefox provides no convenient way of creating such links, but Chromium has a "Copy link to highlight" context menu entry when you have text highlighted. Neither Firefox nor Chromium provide a convenient way to create a bookmark to a text fragment.
> As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services.
Both Firefox and Chromium support importing/exporting bookmarks from/to "HTML" (really, Netscape bookmark file format[2]).
Both browsers also provide the means to organize bookmarks into folders, and Firefox lets you add arbitrary tags to them as well. Alas as you say, the only way is to spend time manually organizing them. Automatically suggesting folders/tags (preferring ones you already have created) seems like an ideal use case for LLMs or other NLP tools. Ideally browsers would offer an option to save a snapshot of the page together with the bookmark, that would guard against link rot and enable full text search. We have the technology, it's really only a matter of improving the UI and linking the two features together. Too bad hamstringing adblockers, gimping sites that rely on XSLT, and implementing WebBluetooth or whatever has higher priority.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F... [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
Tell this to Julian Assange, or to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström. Though these are examples of government pressure in the opposite direction, they are still examples of how despite having no legal powers to intervene there is plenty of de-facto power being wielded by the U.S. over the Swedish justice system.
Fortunately, Thunderbird still has support for feeds and doesn't seem to have been afflicted by the same malaise as the rest of the org chart. Who knows how long that will last.
Essentially: If you wish to process personal data on the basis of consent, then the consent must be freely given, and consent is not freely given if you engage in coercive or deceptive practices, which includes providing a consent form that has an "accept all" option but no "reject all" option.
Here's the relevant text of the regulation:
> 1. Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal data.
> 2. If the data subject's consent is given in the context of a written declaration which also concerns other matters, the request for consent shall be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable from the other matters, in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. Any part of such a declaration which constitutes an infringement of this Regulation shall not be binding.
> 3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.
> 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
> Not having an option to reject that is as convenient as the one to accept is not compliant with GDPR.
The law, guidance provided by regulators, and court rulings are all quite clear on this: Consent must be freely given, the consent form must not be coercive in any way.
This includes (but is not limited to) making rejecting more difficult than accepting, degrading the quality of service for those who reject, gating the service behind accepting, or requiring payment from those who reject. Collecting personal information without prior consent would obviously also be a (worse) violation of the law.
I, for one, think it's time to start busting some proverbial kneecaps if we ever want publishers to take the matter seriously. The other alternative is to outlaw the collection of personal information without a legitimate purpose (consent or no) _and then_ come down hard on violators. The industry has had ample time to regulate itself and has chosen profit over ethics at every opportunity.
Not having an option to reject that is as convenient as the one to accept is not compliant with GDPR.
Lots of transactions actually destroy value, they just do so in a way that externalizes this cost.
A good example is advertising: companies are incentivized to dump all available resources into marketing, because those who don't get out-competed by those who do. It is a winner-takes-all game where the strategy that maximizes global value is nowhere close to being a Nash equilibrium.
A more extreme example would be hiring someone to go rob a bank. No value is created (lots is destroyed) but both parties to the transaction come out ahead.
You just need to ask a couple of open-ended questions about the candidate's preferred programming language and/or some technical details of a past project they've worked on to get an idea of whether they are reasonably competent or not. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to go through. The majority of rest of the meeting can consist of the candidate asking you questions and/or chit-chatting to make sure the vibes aren't off.
What you are trying to judge is whether or not they can do the job, which you can really only tell once they are actually doing the job anyways. So you pay extra attention to what they do for the first couple of days/weeks after you've hired them and if it's obvious things are not going to work out you let them go. Most places have laws that are amenable to hiring someone on an initial trial period before stronger employee protections kick in.
In general, most of the pathologies of the hiring process can be solved by treating it as a satisfier problem instead of an optimizer problem.
Indeed, even for those who require a round of mental gymnastics before they concede that monopolies are, like, "bad" or whatever, GP points out precisely how this would constitute "consumer harm".
Yes, by setting the repeatCount or repeatDur attribute of the <animate> tag to "indefinite". Notably, since <animation> tags effect individual attributes and not the image as a whole, different parts of the image can be on different animation cycles and don't have to add up to some small common multiple.