CountVon

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.

That was actually the rest of the comic:

...is this loss?

I'm with Gabe Newell on this one. High piracy rates indicate a service problem.

I can't find very good data on this, but my suspicion is that PC piracy rates are lower than they were a decade ago. I'm betting piracy of movies and TV shows is far, far higher than it was a decade ago. It's pretty easy to see why. If you want a PC game, you can usually (EGS timed exclusives aside) buy it from your digital storefront of choice, or add it to your wishlist and wait for a sale. Once it's in your library it's effectively there to stay. Game doesn't work on your PC, or you don't enjoy it like you thought you would? No problem, you can refund it. Now compare that movies and TV shows. An ever-expanding range of streaming services that all want $15 a month from you, region locking, staggered release dates. Nothing new you want to watch this month? Too bad, your $15 is now our $15 dollars, and we'll take $15 from you next month too. Movie and TV show piracy provides a more valuable and convenient service, so it wins hands down.

When I took welding shop class in high school, our shop teacher literally called it "sand eye" when he explained why wearing a welding mask was not optional in his shop or in general while welding. Sure enough, there was that one kid who thought he could get by with his squints while teach wasn't looking... He was out for days with sand eye and had quite the cautionary tale to share when he returned. Everyone got downright religious about the welding masks after that.

I'm not exactly a fan of Biden, but he's on the ballot for two reasons:

• Incumbents historically have an advantage, and it would be crazy to throw that advantage away.
• Who else would run in his place? It's not like there's some other obvious candidate. I can think of lots of progressives that I'd personally love to see on the ballot, but the reality is that none of those candidates are seen as being electable in swing states. Be nice if it were otherwise, but it ain't.

You could install LineageOS on your existing phone instead of upgrading. The OnePlus 7 Pro is supported. The install process can be daunting depending on your technical skills, but it's a one-time process since the phone gets updates over-the-air after the OS is installed.

I did this with my OnePlus 6 a few months ago and the experience has been good. Switching to LineageOS bumped Android to version 13, whereas it was stuck on Android 11 on stock OnePlus firmware. I'm getting regular updates again, including open-source Android security patches. Not everything gets patched though, some of the core firmware is proprietary to OnePlus and that cannot be patched by anyone but them. It's letting me extend the life of a phone still works well and has a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before.

I think what you just described is actually a problem. Friends of my parents were visiting somewhere, bought tickets to a show from a reseller, met up with the seller (normal looking guy, no red flags, gave some plausible story why he was selling) and paid cash for printed out tickets with barcodes. Printouts looked legit, dates on the printouts were correct, etc. Went to the doors, tried to scan their tickets, got told that unfortunately they'd just been scammed. The impression they get from the box office worker is that this sort of bad news is something they've had to deliver frequently. Anecdotal, but I doubt those friends of my parents were the only ones to get scammed in this way. TicketMaster still sucks as an organization but the extra security of rotating barcodes does serve a legitimate security purpose, just like the rotating security codes generated by an authenticator app.

Airlines have recently been having problems with stowaways using screenshots of boarding pass barcodes or QR codes too. Such stowaways should get caught before departure by passenger headcounts or boarding ID checks, but clearly there are gaps or breakdowns in these procedures because some of these stowaways are getting caught at the destination. Others may have successfully flown for free. If it keeps happening I bet we'll see rotating barcodes come to mobile boarding passes too, if that hasn't already happened.

a journalist saying that a COP above 1 means the heat pump “creates energy”

But what’s great is that this COP of 2, while bad, is not catastrophic. That’s still in territory where gas boilers are more cost efficient that a heat pump, but unless you are living in a place that is consistently under -10C for several months, then a heat pump has overall lower running costs than a gas boiler. And you are starting to hit pretty northern territories with this.

I actually have a hybrid furnace/heat pump system, and I live in southern Ontario, Canada. The furnace is the auxiliary heat source and it only kicks in when the outdoor temp is below -6C. I've only had this system through one winter so far, but I think I could count the number of days the furnace ran without running out of fingers. My electricity bill went up some of course, but my winter gas bill went down a lot.

Edit to add: I wasn't shopping for a hybrid system in particular, but I got this upgrade through the Canada Greener Homes Grant and there were limitations on which units qualified for rebates. For my install (forced-air with existing duct-work), the hybrid systems were the ones that qualified.

Hard cheeses are dense enough that the mold can only grow on the surface. If you cut off the moldy parts and discard them, you're getting rid of the vast majority of the mold. There will likely be some spores on the rest of the cheese, but not enough to harm you.

Soft cheeses are much less dense, meaning that the mold can penetrate below the surface more easily. If you can see mold on top then it's likely throughout the cheese, and thus it's much less safe to eat.

I don't think dedicated antivirus software is really required anymore. I haven't run third-party AV software on any of my systems in the last decade.

On Windows, the built-in Windows Defender is good enough for most use cases. When it first launched Defender had a pretty bad track record at stopping viruses, but now it routinely ranks at the top.

On Linux, antivirus software has never really been required. One major exception I can think of would be if you're running a file server or mail server that talks to OSX or Windows systems. Even then the AV software isn't really there to protect the server, it's there to make sure you don't pass malware or viruses to those non-Linux clients.

Serious answer, the question might be one that broke one of the community rules like Rule 5 ("No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda") or Rule 6 (No meme or troll questions, except on Fridays) and voters are expressing their displeasure.

Silly answer, the question wasn't stupid. The name of the community is actually "No, Stupid Questions." The missing comma is a typo.

There is a Unicode Technical Standard for this, called the Unicode Collation Algorithm. Whether everyone uses it, I can't say. As it says on the linked page:

Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.

So in other words it's possible to conform to the Unicode Standard without adhering to the Unicode Collation Algorithm.

whatever this is: ¦

That is the pipe symbol, or vertical bar. When it has a gap in the middle it may be known as the broken pipe symbol or broken bar. It's considered the same symbol with or without the gap. Early terminals displayed it with a gap to make it distinguishable from lower-case L characters.

Summing a balance column is never correct. Take any example that doesn't end in a zero balance and it's easy to see that the balance column's sum is meaningless:

Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve's assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.

They aren't, they're launching satellites for the Galileo satnav system.

Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it's to their benefit, but I believe corporations are inherently amoral. They might make decisions that are moral, but that's just a happy coincidence that occurs when the decision that's in their interest also happens to be the moral choice. Corporations are equally happy to make choices that most would consider immoral, if it meets their goals.

I have no source for this, but my theory is that when the workforce of a corporation grow past Dunbar's number it will inherently bend toward amorality. Making moral choices requires knowing the people affected by your choices, and having empathy for them. Once it becomes impossible for one worker at a company to have a personal relationship with every other member of the staff, it's all too easy for groups to form within the company that will make choices that drive the company's goals (growth, revenue, profit) at the expense of anything and everything else (the environment, the community, their customers, even their own workers).

Yeah, the writing was on the wall as soon as IBM acquired Red Hat. IBM is going to end up hollowing out Red Hat in their drive for more revenue. They started by destroying CentOS, which used to be a community-supported binary-compatible RHEL analog but is now effectively RHEL Beta and thus useless for enterprise work. Now they're closing the source so they can kill the other RHEL analogs, like Rocky Linux.

It's such a short-sighted move though, so many things got built on RHEL and compatible because those FOSS options existed. IBM seems to think that some significant percentage of those free installs can be converted to a paid install, and they might be right in the short term but I think the long-term impact is gonna be dire. Over time RHEL could became a closed-source ghetto in the FOSS world because fewer developers will be able to test their open source projects on RHEL without paying the IBM tax. Once RHEL starts to fall behind it could cause enough friction that enterprises will start looking to other distros, and then Red Hat's primary revenue stream starts to dry up.

This shit has been going on since the 80s. It's mostly bullshit instigated by US lumber companies. Available softwood lumber in the US is mainly on privately owned land, and the owners of that land want the price of lumber to be as high as possible so they can make more money. The softwood lumber companies in the US are effectively acting as an oligopoly, and they lobby US politicians for legislation in their interests.

Softwood lumber in Canada is mainly on public land, called "crown land" here in Canada. A lumber oligopoly isn't possible in Canada because the government would never sell all of that land to a handful of lumber companies. Instead lumber producers in Canada are charged a fee for the logs they cut, that fee is set by the Canadian government, and it is less per log than what US lumber producers want to charge.

Instead of competing on price, US lumber companies lobby congress to impose softwood lumber tariffs for the umpteenth time. When the US lumber companies don't need to compete with Canadian lumber, they can jack up their prices. When they do that the only people who benefit are the US lumber companies and the politicians they've lobbied. Americans pay more for lumber, Canadian lumber companies and their workers suffer.

Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.

Don't give him too much credit, it's hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.

That's a badger.

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can't take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

Every time there's a bad-news dip in Boeing's stock price, traders are treating that as a discount to buy the stock because they don't think the US government would ever allow Boeing to fail. Sadly, they're probably not wrong. If Boeing's financials get into deep trouble the US government would likely bail them out because they're a large employer and a strategic component of US economic hegemony.

I'm not convinced that Valve will go down the tubes when Gabe shuffles off this moral coil (praise gaben may he live a thousand years). It would require a strong company culture that believes as he does that piracy is a service issue and is thus willing to adhere to his vision in his absence, but that can happen in a privately held company if there's a strong succession plan in place.

Now, if Gabe dies and Valve goes public, then it's pretty much over. Platform monetization, proft-taking and short-term thinking would enshittify Steam in short order.

Containourboros!

C U Next Tuesday.

He was calling her a cunt without using the word.

Reminds me of this classic.

First off, good job on quitting! Keep up the good work.

Alcohol withdrawal can apparently cause high blood pressure. Withdrawal typically peaks in the first 1-3 days, which would match up with your observation that your BP was even higher at the 72-hour mark:

In the most severe cases, alcohol withdrawal should be supervised by a medical professional because it's actually possible to die from it. If you'd gone through full-blown worst-case alcohol withdrawal, you'd probably know it (and high BP would probably not be your most pressing concern). Maybe it's possible to get a milder case of alcohol withdrawal from a lesser level of alcohol use? That's pure speculation on my part, I can't find any source one way or the other as most are devoted to withdrawal from heavy alcohol abuse. If I were in your shoes I'd monitor my BP for the next couple weeks and talk to a doctor if BP measurements aren't trending downward over that time.

No, because your furnace should be venting its exhaust outside. There's a heat exchanger that draws interior air through the furnace, taking heat from the combustion but the exhaust and your home's interior air do not mix!

Edit: I should qualify the above. A gas furnace is less bad for your health than a gas stove, because a gas stove is leaving a lot of combustion byproducts in the home's air while a gas furnace shouldn't. There's still a case to be made that anything burning fossils fuels is probably not healthy and isn't good for the environment to boot.

You've failed the test.

You can do this with custom formats. You'd want to create a custom format that gives a score if the file is below a certain size threshold (say 1.5GB per hour), then add minimum custom scores to the release profiles you use (e.g. Bluray 1080p). You can also add custom filters for release groups that prioritise file size. YTS for example keeps their releases as small as possible.

Atlassian doesn't even have consistency within single products! I'm using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira's own notation (e.g. {code} to start a code block). It's always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn't support it for some inexplicable reason.

MEC used to be the Canadian equivalent to REI. The "C" in MEC stood for "cooperative," as in cooperative corporation. Members are supposed to be part-owners and have a say in how the business is run. Despite that, in 2020 the MEC board sold the company to a US firm without consulting the member-owners.

Apparently the technical term is protein poisoning. Digesting protein creates urea, and the body needs at least some fat in order to convert to ammonia that can be excreted. It's also called "mal be caribou" in French (caribou sickness, I think), which I find fascinating.

In case anyone reading is unfamiliar with the reference / one of today's lucky 10000:

If anything, I’d like to see them put their money where their mouth is and hire Linux devs to continue Oracle Linux in an open manner.

Oracle Linux is already open: https://yum.oracle.com/. ISOs and full sources are freely downloadable, you don't even need to create an account, and the Oracle Linux license explicitly states that you retain all your open source rights to any open source software distributed as part of Oracle Linux. I suppose it would be possible for Oracle to change their license to make it more akin to Red Hat's and thus make Oracle Linux less free, but there's been no sign of Oracle looking to do that.

Oracle also definitely has lots of Linux devs. They even throw some shade at IBM in the post:

By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.

They need those Linux devs because all of Oracle Cloud and Oracle Exadata are built on Oracle Linux, and Oracle tests their main cash cow Oracle Database exclusively on Oracle Linux. I think that last point is actually the reason that Oracle Linux even exists. I don't think Oracle cares too much about owning the OS layer, they want to be able to support their Database product on an OS that the majority of their customers are using without having to pay a tax to the OS vendor.

I also work on a product that has to interoperate with RHEL, and I also want my company to be able to test our product without having to pay a tax to Red Hat. I'm quite happy to see this blog post from Oracle because it shows that our aims are aligned and it means we've got an 800 lb. gorilla on our side of the line. Entirely possible Oracle could turn around and do the same things, but I've got no compunctions about cheering them on while our aims coincide.

It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.

Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we'd likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it's not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It'd be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain't.

The GPL essentially states that you must give copies of source code to the same people you give copies of binaries. Red Hat is not under any strict requirement to give copies of source code to everyone. What this means in practice is that Red Hat is essentially forcing everyone to agree to their license terms, in addition to the GPL, in order to access the RHEL source code.

What Red Hat appears to be doing is very much in a gray area, and at the very least it violates the spirit of the GPL if not the actual agreement as written. In fact what they're trying to do may very well end up contravening the GPL. This is one of the clauses in the GPL:

If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

In other words, if Red Hat tries to wrap the GPL in some bullshit extra license that says e.g. "you are not allowed to give copies of this source code to a third party" (such as, say, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux or some other downstream distro), then I think their customers can simply remove that term from their license as it's a "further restriction" as defined by the GPL. However, Red Hat also has in their license some restrictions that allow them to terminate their agreements with a customer at any time and for any reason whatsoever. Red Hat wields that like a cudgel, threatening their customers with Red Hat license termination if those customers choose to exercise their full rights under the GPL in ways that Red Hat doesn't like. This article has a much more in-depth analysis if you want to know more.