I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://informationr.us/

> Respectfully, that's not what banning "tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner" means.

Respectfully, you need to read a little more carefully. Those items are generally, but not strictly, prohibited. The criteria is "reasonable" and "significant amount of time." Words like "reasonable" and "significant" need to be legislated over between AirBNB and the hosts on a per-case basis.

Case in point:

> And basic cleaning has been a pretty standard clause right from the beginning

So what constitutes "basic cleaning" and at what point does it become a "significant effort?" Is cleaning the dishes you used really that big a deal? Collecting your trash and putting it in the can outside when you're done? These are not property maintenance tasks like you implied in your original post either (" literally-condemnable shack").

What is explicitly prohibited: "Hosts may not communicate new house rules or requests in other sections of their listing page or after booking, including by message, signs in the home, or in person." There is no room for debate here; hosts must be upfront with all of their requirements. That's the real meat here and the real underlying problem; it's less about doing your own dishes and more about penalizing you for not doing them despite never having been told to.

> AirBNB / VRBO / whatever gets a cut of every dollar. They benefit from junk fees,

Apparently not as much as they benefit from cracking down on them, apparently, because that's what they're doing when they say "Hosts are generally not allows to.... Impose fines or other penalties on guests."
=Smidge=

> This has nothing to do with taking out the garbage, and everything to do with making it impossible to be an "absentee landlord" (or at least hiring a cleaning service)

This is about not being able to stick extra requirements into the agreement after the space is booked, which prevents property owners from sticking guests with extra fees for not doing things they were not told they had to do.

=Smidge=

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

D'oh. Mod me down; I deserve it for my fuckup.

the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on device consistently for all players from a single-seed happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.

No it isn't. Your phone is a supercomputer by 1980s standards, and seeded generation (whether from a PRNG or hashing coordinates or whatever) goes back to at least then (and probably '60s/'70s). I'm not slamming the game, and seeded generation is often a good idea, but the idea that you can do it on handheld supercomputers is not remarkable, even the tiniest little bit.

You wanna see something super-fucking-impressive on an iPhone? Go back to the very first model and behold that it runs a truly-remarkably decent web browser. That was way more futuristic than this.

When the web was born JPEG was already there. It was adopted from (ok, almost) day 1, along with GIF.

> Communism is a classless form of socialism.

No need to engage with you any further. Thanks for saving me the time.

=Smidge=

That has nothing to do with socialism.

That has everything to do with authoritarianism.

"Ooga booga Socialism" is authoritarian propaganda. Unfortunately it's very effective against people who don't actually know what Socialism is, such as yourself... for example, you seem to be describing something closer to Communism (but still wrong).
=Smidge=

Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.

I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.

That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.