Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

The local teleco switched to Fiber. I get 2Gbps up/down. + phone for $80 a month. I had Comcast Business for $200 a month, I had a 3 year contract for 160 the first year, then 180, then 200. Except it didn't stay that consistent. Their fees increased. the contracted base amount stayed the same.

So I'm saving 140 a month now. i may drop the phone and save another 30. And my speeds are better. So far I haven't had any issues.with reliability. 2 months of service, it's been up while I needed it.

I can't say that for Comcast either. Even on a business account, I had regular outages.

Oh, fluffernutter.

ICE is only convenient because of a hundred years of infrastructure build-out. But you think having an electrician spend two hours running a 50 amp line from your panel to the side of your house, which takes a few hours, is somehow an insurmountable block.

"Nice horseless carriage, Mr. Ford, but can you produce enough to switch *all* transportation to it? As of today, call for horseless only transportation means that personal vehicle ownership becomes impossible. To put it differently, you can drive your horseless carriage only because other people drive horses."

US male life expectancy is 76.5 years. If I tell you every year that you're probably going to die by the time you're seventy-seven, and you hit seventy-eight, do you now believe you're immortal?

Stayed at a rental in Omaha... Beautiful neighborhood and a very nice house. From a glance. Great location. But the lawn wasn't great. Leaves needed raked, basically they did the bare minimum mowing. The trash was heaped up and overflowing. Did anyone show up and put the trash cans on the curb? The deck was getting a bit old, the grill seemed like a toss aside charcoal grill that wasn't super safe. (You couldn't kill the airflow when you were done to quickly drop the temps. I grill/smoke on charcoal a lot and would've thrown it away.) The inside was not great. Furniture was an odd ball mix of things from who knows where. Basement was very dank/musty/stinky. Other clues like that too. Basically this house should've just been sold off to a family that could love it and take care of it and make it a home. Very sad. Basically had all these clues that the owner/manager was doing the very minimum they could get away with. But hey, let's worry about what the renter should/shouldn't do...

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]

I'm still using Steam. Gabe hasn't done anything to abuse my trust.

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