dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Given that I’ve consistently pirated Windows since I was tall enough to reach the keyboard, I am positive have never been in compliance with the Microsoft ToS. Somehow, I’m not too worried about it.

Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.

Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.

I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…

doesn’t have Microsoft store

That is not a drawback.

I once heard it also involves a miserable little pile of secrets.

If your site did not call visitors a flak monkey at least once I will be sorely disappointed.

If the case were that it weren’t, Path of Exile just to throw one example out there would have been piledrivered into dust by Blizzard for wholesale copying the UI layout for Diablo 2. Or better, Binding of Isaac for making an incredibly superficially Zelda-looking screen layout and despite being hugely popular, conspicuously not drawing the ire of the single most litigious batch of motherfuckers in the entire video game industry.

So, no, I’m pretty sure nobody can sue you for making a UI that looks similar to another UI.

Or a very badly made wall…

Tofu dreg construction, perhaps.

One can surmise it’s actually a life-sized model kit tank made out of cheap plastic, akin to how it works in Ground Defense Force! Mao-Chan.

The general consensus of the internet seems to be no, although this surely varies to some degree based on the laws in whichever country you’re in.

Before anyone tries the other avenue of attack, titles to things generally cannot be copyrighted, either. Content of a work can be, but the name of it cannot.

This is one of those things that sounds simple and intuitive on paper (“just” take all these communities of the same name from disparate instances, smash them together so they all display on the same page) but once you start thinking about the details it becomes clear that it’d be a logistical nightmare and a clusterfuck to actually implement.

For a start, moderation would become diabolically complex.

• If multiple communities across instances are merged, each has its own moderators. Who can moderate which content? Everyone? Only the moderators for the instance in which the content originated?
• If it’s the former, what’s to stop a rogue moderator from a bad instance from merging their community and then deleting content/banning users who aren’t theirs?
• What happens if a user gets banned from one instance, but other instances have merged content in this community under which that user is not banned?
• Who decides what community and instancewide rules apply to the merged instance of that community, which will inherently include users from outside their instance?
• Who sets what the banner and sidebar look like, considering that nobody from any given instance can “own” the entire supercommunity?
• Etc.

I think the only way this could possibly work at present is if were client-side, i.e. you can create your own supercommunity by merging content into a single page on your own device, but purely for display and in a read-only fashion. This would not provide the implicit benefit I think you’re angling for, though, which would be solving the Fediverse fragmentation problem.

I have no idea what you’re talking about, says the chump who has a series of precisely 103 formulaic knife reviews posted here.

Bob.

The answer is apathy.

You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.

Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.

But until your instance upgrades to 0.19.5, the image you originally uploaded but have hence unlinked is still there albeit unused, on the server forever and ever…

religious reasons

I’ve just remembered. We’re all Shakers.

Why yes, the rest of my deck is Millstones, Ancestral Recall, and Ball Lightnings. Why do you ask?

With a Nixie tube display like that, you’re usually looking at much earlier.

I found this on that model: https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/monroe620.html

That blue spell was probably Ancestral Recall, but I’m sure there were others of its ilk.

Anyway, while we’re at it I like to trot this one out every now and again for everyone to gawp at.

And here we thought baraminology would never be useful for anything.