This is dumb on so many levels. It'd be trivial for people to obtain a web browser that ignores this. The biggest browsers in the world all have open-source code bases, so anybody could build something with near feature parity but none of the restrictions, and then distribute it wherever. Enforcing this would be just create another game of wack-a-mole, with no advantages for the copyright holders, and potential abuse against even non-pirate users. Very slippery slope.

^^so ^^hard ^^picking ^^which ^^meme ^^to ^^use

I'm wondering the same thing for Valve and Gabe Newell.

My personal favorite is Ctrl+Shift+C which brings up Dev tools in selection mode, so you can click on the picture or whatever and be taken straight to its HTML code.

You can copyright software code, just like any other written work, to protect you from people literally copy and pasting your work, but the idea that you could patent things like "slide left to unlock" is just stupid, as it's a fundamental concept and software is full of fundamental concepts.

Compression algorithms being patentable is even more stupid, as it would be like somebody claiming they own Pi, just because they figured it out first. Imagine not being able to compute the circumference of a circle without paying somebody for the privilege.

I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.

Yeah, 600/800 sounds like a lot until you realize that includes all the stuff you're just scrolling past in your feed or comments, not even clicking on. I wouldn't be surprised if they even overlooked the fact that ads might count against that cap too. I'm no heavy user but hit that cap in less than 20 minutes of reading people reacting to the news.

Ad blockers don't even modify websites usually. Many just block web requests to certain domains and addresses. You can't force people to load stuff, that sets a dangerous precedent for protecting against malware. Glad this German court saw reason.

This is a strange move from a country that is usually the most overprotective when it comes to copyright. Though I guess if you view it from a "pro-business" view then it might make sense. Sucks a ton for artists though.

There needs to be a ban on any judge presiding over something within at least one or two degrees of separation of relationships with said judge. Any direct relationships, either direct relatives or friends or direct investment, and possibly second degree relationships like a relative or friend being invested, or a relative/friend of a relative/friend.

Because it's great at killing things, including human skin. Seriously, my local gym has people practically sign their life away before letting them into a UV-A/B tanning booth. No way are you putting the even worse UV-C bulbs out in public. That's how people got their retinas fried at a crypto conference in Hong Kong last year.

Firefox opening the gates for addons on mobile is some really good timing.

I mean, if this is basically Twitter's Community Notes feature, but for YouTube, I'm all for it. Bit of a balancing act, but it's the last thing that hasn't been completely wrecked now that Twitter became Xitter.

If the TV is VESA compatible, there are tons of third-party stand options.

It's kinda amazing how Unity shot themselves in the chest with this one. No, I don't mean foot, they are now actively bleeding from the torso.

No Dev or Publisher is going to be okay with this, none. This basically leaves Devs on the hook for unlimited liability. Even with their walk back of "only initial installs" doesn't help. I myself have both a Desktop and a SteamDeck. That's possibly two installs out of the gate from one customer. Then any time I make an upgrade in the future, or heck maybe even switch Proton versions on my Deck, the Dev could be on the hook for more cash. There's zero transparency with how these "installs" are detected or counted, so there is no way to budget or plan for the expenses.

Businesses hate unpredictable fees.

They'll deal with utilities upping rates, because who are you gonna switch to in a monopoly? But if you're just a tool for them, they'll ditch you as soon as they're able and never use you again.

And again, publishers will care about this too, since their whole job is distribution. Any Dev looking to sign with a publisher, even a subscription service like GamePass, will now be asked which engine they're using, and I bet you 9/10 times the Dev will get rejected if they're using Unity now. That puts even more pressure on Devs not to use Unity.

Unity will price gouge their existing customers(Devs), but will ensure that nobody ever buys their product ever again. At this point I doubt their reputation will ever recover even if they can walk this back. The fact that they believe they can unilaterally add enormous fees at the drop of a hat means they've ruined any trust their customers had in them.

Unity: I can charge you any fees I want, any time I want.

Turns out making a low-pressure vacuum tube that spans 100+ miles, but lets small pods full of people be inserted on demand, was way harder and more expensive than predicted, making it poorly price competitive with existing technology like high-speed rail. For some reason.

Roblox is a sandbox game sort of like Minecraft, but with way more power given to third-party developers and users to develop and distribute content in it. What you'd consider mods for other games are the whole point of Roblox, and MTX can be implemented by those third-party developers using "Robux" as a currency. The MTX can be your usual MTX fare of skins and power-ups, but also often abused for less ethical purposes, like gambling mechanics. The fact that Robux can be cashed out for real money via official and unofficial methods mean that's it's ripe for abuse.

Update: Also, I wasn't aware of this before the article, but apparently gambling sites have figured out a method to link a Roblox account to their external sites, and then use the user's Robux wallet as currency in their illegal online casinos.

They really want us to cancel? My family only barely decided to keep Netflix after they last raised prices, and now they're doing it again.

The overhead isn't the storage but the request. Processing a request takes CPU time, which can get expensive when people setup a media server and request subtitles for dozens of movies and shows. Every episode of a TV show is a separate request and that can add up fast when you scale it to thousands of users.

As I said, wack-a-mole. You ban a site, different one pops up, people share links in DMs and other platforms. Sharing that stuff isn't banned in other countries, so they can't actually take down anything. Good luck stopping that when you can't even properly get sites blocked at the DNS/ISP level.

And this doesn't even get into VPNs and proxies.

Recently at work they replaced the AEDs with new models that support Children, and have a Spanish guide mode, super nice. But they also are now connected to the Internet so that they report any usage and order a new set of pads automatically, plus it has a bright screen constantly cycling through advertisement of what the device is. Also for some reason the power button isn't actually a power button, and just triggers the start-up process while calling back to base, just like touching the on-screen buttons or pulling out the pads will do.

What could go wrong?

Seriously. This year for a similar amount per night, while I didn't get a whole house to myself,

Just a two bed room, bathroom, desk, mini fridge, microwave, and coffee maker to myself.

I got an actually good free breakfast every day, a pool, a gym, free room cleaning, free Internet, and there was like a mini food store next to the front-desk if I needed food in the middle of the night.

Sure there are crap hotels, but if you read reviews it's not too hard to find decent ones. And there's usually no surprise extra fees.

Pretty much the only issue I ran into was at one hotel, the claimed free breakfast was watered down coffee, a waffle maker, cereal, and frozen solid orange juice. Had to go out for breakfast every morning which was annoying.

####For an in the wild example, Steam Deck.

Steam Deck runs Steam OS, which is a heavily customized version of Arch Linux by Valve. But unlike normal Arch installs, Valve has locked the System partition(/) to read-only.

The reasons they've done this is two fold. First, there's actually two copies of the system partition. The reason for this is that when an update is downloaded it's actually written to the other partition, not the one you're currently using. This way the update happens in the background, and then you just need to reboot for it to switch partitions and do some house cleaning. What this means though, is that any changes you might've normally made to the system partition, disappear, as they are now on the other partition you aren't using. So if any changes you make won't matter, not much point in letting people make them in the first place. Using Flatpaks, any applications users install would instead be stored in the user partition, and never touch the OS itself.

The second major reason for doing this, is consistency. If people are discouraged or blocked from modifying the system partition, then any bugs or issues that crop up are, 99% of the time, Valve's fault. And because of that, Valve can more easily diagnose and try to reproduce any reported issues, because theoretically, the user's Steam Deck should be configured exactly the same as one at Valve HQ. All that's needed is for a user to report what they were doing when they encountered the issue, and Valve can follow those same steps and hopefully encounter the same issue, get detailed logs, and hopefully quickly push out a patch as needed.

And that's one version of Immutability. Valve doesn't go the full nine-yards here, just enough for their use case. In other Immutable Distros, versioning is taken even further, where you can control multiple versions and reset the OS state on the fly as needed, keeping any changes to a minimum and in controlled sand boxes. There's a ton of use cases for these, but the most obvious benefits are for enterprise and mass-market solutions, where a single configuration is multiplied across a large amount of servers, or end-user devices, allowing for easier diagnoses of issues and pushing of patches. For end-user clients especially, if they aren't expected to be customizing the OS to begin with, it makes support much easier for IT.

For your average Linux user, the benefits aren't as large, as you'll often want to be able to tweak things to your liking. But your Average Joe that just wants a computer that can surf the web and install some apps that can be found as Flatpaks, an immutable OS that they can't easily screw up is a plus.

FTUSA is amazing. It's either free or super cheap, depending on your state and income. I wish I knew about them sooner. I did my taxes on my phone at work during a slow shift.

Article says they were paranoid about security issues.

Xitter

LOL, my brain read that as "shitter" and I found that pretty fitting.

After cracking open my own Deck, replacing the SSD or Thumb sticks is dirt simple. There are even drop in Hall effect sticks you can get. The only real trouble is if you need to replace the battery. The screen and battery are definitely the hardest things to replace in the Steam Deck.

PS: REMOVE THE MICROSD FIRST! I've seen people forget their card is in there and literally snap it in half when opening up their Steam Deck.

But for real, if I can point to any other developed country in the world and they're paying way less for the same thing sold in the US, then it shouldn't be that high in the US either. I get making a profit off your research, but especially when taxpayers helped fund said research, there should be no reason we're essentially subsidizing the cost of the drug in the rest of the world.

Denuvo doesn't prevent games working on Steam Deck, but depending on how it's implemented it can cause other problems like preventing a game from launching if it hasn't been able to connect online in a while, or weird performance issues. It varies from game to game.

Without arguing the benefits/drawbacks of software patents, isn't slide to unlock only a fundamental concept because Apple invented and popularized it? To me, it only seems trivial because it's ubiquitous, whereas that might not have been the case before the iPhone.

Software patents that boil down to "real life action, but we did it on a computer" are just obnoxious. Sliding a bolt to unlock something is something we've been doing for centuries, but suddenly Apple put it on a screen and gets to prevent anybody else from doing it? That makes no sense.

I don't see why this is unique to software. As long as the proof is convoluted enough, how would it differ from making a physical D-pad? Both are made from already discovered axioms/materials, and both are transformed via known ways in a unique order into new tools to accomplish a particular task. If a D-pad patent should be allowed, why not a compression algorithm?

Hardware patents make sense, as it's actually possible to come up with multiple solutions to the same problem. You can create a D-pad multiple different ways, as proven by the many different D-pad patents, as the goal is just to create an interface between electronic inputs and a logical physical shape. How you do it doesn't matter as long as the result is reliable and satisfying for the end-user. The 4-directional shape of the d-pad wasn't the patent, it was how the d-pad worked. Sure some people have preferences to one design or another, but that's where they made the innovation.

But there isn't multiple ways to create Pi. Pi is Pi. Just because you discovered a math equation to define it first doesn't mean you get to claim dibs on it. You could claim that you wrote code that calculates Pi more quickly on a specific computer chip or something, but that's copyright, not a patent. Patents shouldn't be used for things that can be copyrighted, and vice versa.

There's a reason why we have separate systems for copyrights, trademarks, and patents. Copyrights protect creative authorship, ways to express things. Trademarks protect identification, how people recognize you and your creations. Patents protect invention, novel processes to accomplish an action.

Patents are for protecting the processes you develop, not the resulting actions. You can't patent boiling water to create steam, but you can patent the steps you took that led to water boiling and becoming steam.

To bring it back, what process did Apple develop for slide to unlock? Slide to unlock itself is an action, not a unique method of solving a problem. Like patenting the mere action of putting a key into a hole, instead of how the mechanics of the key itself actually opens the lock. They wrote code that interpreted "Box moving from position A to Position B allows access", but that's a copyright. Nobody would argue that they should be able to copy what Apple wrote to make that happen. But why does Apple get to claim that the action of moving a box is something they invented? Because the user can use a human finger on a screen now? Apple didn't invent the capacitive touchscreen, somebody else did, and Apple paid them or a licensor of the tech for using their patent, they didn't invent anything there. So all you're left with is the action, moving a box with a finger, which shouldn't be patentable. And the code that interprets the action, which should be a copyright not a patent.

What's the current reliable KDE Distro? I've been rolling with Kububtu for a while now, but Ubuntu's Snap mandate has been getting annoying.

That tip of a handle bar that makes you wonder if that square counts or not.

Also it's better for Devs than buying grey market keys bought using stolen credit cards.

Apparently they snuck a clause into an update to the ToS at some point, after years of saying they'd never do such a thing. So people agreed to a loophole without realizing. The legality of such a thing is highly questionable, hence the rumblings of potential lawsuits are already brewing.

Yeah, that's the extra stupid part. Not only limiting the amount of content people can see, but also the ads he needs money from.

What's the low-down on if extracting the EXE and putting it on Windows 10 works?

I just wish compatibility was better. Even if I save in ODT format in either Word or Writer, opening the file in the other program almost always results in formatting errors. Not to mention using DOC/DOCX.

HDMI came from the TV manufacturers and was earlier than DP. While DP came from VESA and Computer OEMs.

HDMI being in TVs gave it a far wider penetration in the consumer market, and so when people wanted to hookup their laptops and other devices to TVs, they'd need HDMI.

Ironically, as ports have been simplified to almost just USB-C on many devices, DP's market share actually grows as it's cheaper and easier to include for OEMs, and if the consumer has to buy an adapter anyway, it might as well be on their dime to pay for HDMI, rather than the phone or laptop maker.