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Comment Not offering less common board thicknesses (Score 1) 174

I've noticed that a lot of these US-based PCB fabs that offer manufacturing have a limited selection of board thicknesses, such as 1.6 mm and little else. That doesn't help if you're interfacing with another device that needs a 1.2 mm thick PCB, such as a Nintendo Entertainment System Control Deck.

Comment Fair Access to Banking Act (HR 987 and S 401) (Score 1) 237

The bigger question is why aren't there laws requiring payment processors to blindly accept all payments and only report fraud.

Because not enough Americans have called their Representative in support of H.R. 987 and their Senators in support of S. 401. These bills, collectively the "Fair Access to Banking Act", would do much as you suggest.

Comment Serious artistic value = get out of jail (Score 1) 237

Incest is illegal, and depictions of incest are also illegal in many states.

Laws banning depictions of incest are unconstitutional under Miller v. California if said depictions have serious artistic value. This is true under both current state law and the proposed interstate definition of obscenity.

Comment Re:Common GUI API (Score 1) 219

What is the POSIX specified API for graphics, again? There isn't one.

True. Regulators would need to pick a GUI API stack as the baseline for interoperability, much as regulators picked POSIX.1 stack back in the day. I'd even be fine with a regulation that requires an OS publisher to support "either X11 or Wayland" because applications meant for one can run in the other through XWayland or Weston, as can apps made for the subset of Win32 supported by Winelib.

Comment Re:Apple Mobile Device Service (Score 1) 219

Does Apple allow users to play their own personal music files on the iPhone?

The included Music app plays music that was synchronized onto the phone using either Finder for macOS or iTunes for Windows. Apps other than the included Music app play music loaded onto the phone as files, such as through libimobiledevice for Linux, but these songs can't be part of the same playlist as music rented from Apple Music. Combining purchased and rented music in a playlist is a big sticking point for my roommate.

your roommate could stop renting music from Apple, and instead procure music files in other ways.

That's a lot of CDs to buy and store, especially when a relative's letting her use an Apple Music subscription without charge.

Comment Re:Apple Mobile Device Service (Score 1) 219

If I want/need to listen to something from [major record labels] I use one of the free streaming services

Free streaming services behave more like noninteractive radio than like an interactive jukebox. All playlists are shuffled. This is because copyright law in my country (USA) provides for a cheaper performance royalty for qualifying noninteractive services.

the thing is to get software which exports a list of the songs and playlists you have and then get copies from wherever available on the internet

Say I've extracted her playlist as a list of artists and titles. Right now, Amazon appears to have a monopoly on selling lawful DRM-free downloads of major-label music over the web. Google closed its store years ago when rebranding its rental service as "YouTube Music", and Apple's store has always run in a proprietary native application, not the web. So it's either enrich Jeff Bezos or "No, I'm not buying two thousand dollars of used CDs just to be able to use that Linux thing you keep talking about."

Gradually move away from an iPhone to a device you actually own.

Which device might that be that operates on the major cellular networks in the USA? I've read takes that one doesn't meaningfully own an Android-powered phone in the same sense that one doesn't meaningfully own an iPhone. In the interest of reliability, Google has been locking down Android tighter and tighter over the years since Android 10 changed W^X behavior so as to break (for example) Termux.

Comment Common GUI API (Score 1) 219

You want laws that somehow force diversification of operating systems? How on earth is that supposed to work?

Here's an idea: All graphical operating systems published by gatekeeper-class companies (as defined in the Digital Markets Act or foreign counterparts) would need to support, at minimum, some specific GUI API for developing local applications. For comparison, the US government used to require POSIX compliance. Microsoft delivered the bare minimum POSIX support in Windows NT versions 3.1 through 4.0, though initially not enough to be practically useful because it lacked networking and graphics.

Comment Apple Mobile Device Service (Score 1) 219

If there's an application you are using there's probably enough other people that it would be worth getting together and funding an F/OSS alternative to escape onto.

How would one go about building the FOSS alternative to Apple Mobile Device Service, the component of iTunes that synchronizes music into the Music app of an iPhone? That's probably the biggest thing keeping my roommate on Windows. She wants to play purchased songs (ripped from a CD or purchased on Bandcamp or Itch.io) and rented songs (from her Apple Music family plan) in the same playlist. Because Apple Mobile Device Service is a driver, Wine doesn't run it properly. Last I checked, libimobiledevice for Linux could write files but not the music database used by the Music app, and VLC could play purchased songs stored as files but not rented songs.

Comment Excel macros in Amazon marketplace template (Score 1) 28

Is it at work? Then it is your employer's stupid choice.

I guess it's the whole industry's "stupid choice" to sell products on Amazon then. When I worked for an online toy seller in 2010-2019, Amazon's marketplace service provided an Excel spreadsheet with macros used to perform local preflight validation before sending a product listing or inventory change file to the server. You'd put in product listing information, and it'd tell you what you would probably need to change before the server would accept the file. This was optional but highly recommended to reduce server-side processing errors at least until I wrote my own validation routines in Python. Excel could run the macros; LibreOffice Calc could not.

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