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Comment Build a house, go to jail (Score 1) 251

Housing prices are relatively higher, but not that much, not if you buy the size of house that people bought 50 years ago.

Changes to building and zoning codes over the past half century have made building "the size of house that people bought 50 years ago" illegal in many cases. You can't buy such a house if such a house isn't on the market, and you may not build a new one under current law.

See also "Why minimum lot size reform should be on every city’s housing agenda" by Patrick Tuohey.

Comment Torvalds was naturalized in 2010 (Score 1) 114

Linus Torvalds is a dual citizen. He was born a citizen of Finland and became a citizen of the United States in 2010. (Source: "Linus Torvalds, already an Oregonian, now a U.S. citizen" by Mike Rogoway, citing a post to LKML by Torvalds)

It'd be more interesting to count commits by nationality. I'm pretty sure Torvalds no longer has the lion's share of commits.

Comment Control of Secure Boot via the Windows copyright (Score 1) 102

Microsoft has no control over secure boot. You can even load your own custom keys for the Windows boot process

Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 43

No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

Comment You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 0) 35

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

Comment Why we don't polygraph people anymore (Score 2) 116

I can think of a few things leading to Voight-Kampff-style polygraph tests being phased out in this timeline

1. Several U.S. states have banned reliance on polygraph test results by employers. "Polygraph" on Wikipedia lists Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Delaware and Iowa. In addition, the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act 1998 generally bans polygraphing by employers outside the rent-a-cop industry.
2. Autism advocacy organizations raised a stink about false positive results on autistic or otherwise neurodivergent human beings.
3. The LLM training set probably picked up answers from someone's cheat sheet, such as "The turtle was dragging its hind leg, and I was waiting for it to stop squirming so I could see if it needed to go to the vet."

Comment Free apps are more likely to use protocols (Score 1) 68

you have your itinerary saved in a note taking app that isn't on the appstore

If an app meets F-Droid's licensing policy then it is more likely to follow the principle that protocols are better than platforms. This means there are probably other apps, probably including apps on Google Play Store, that can reach the document repository where you saved your itinerary.

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