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Comment Re:Life? (Score 1) 38

> I'll choose Christianity if I'm forced to pick a religion.

Why not Satanism? Church of Satan if you're a selfish asshole, The Satanic Temple if not. Neither are theistic or even supernatural, and both allow you to eat what you want AND masturbate yourself raw if that's what you're into.

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Comment Re: Having your cake and eating it too (Score 1) 30

> If I want to broker my house through MRED exclusively, and also advertise on Zillow, how is that a problem?

"If I want to sell my shit on Amazon, and also want it to show up on eBay seareches, how is that a problem?"

It's a problem because Zillow doesn't want to give their business to their competitor. YOU, the seller, do not factor into it. Get fucked. This is why I said you're conflating "private." It's not about you. Nobody gives a shit about you, capitalist at the door should've told you. *shrug*

> Neither Amazon nor eBay list products sold by the other site, at all.

Correct. You get it but somehow you don't get it.

> A better analogy would be a Google Products listing that points to Amazon products.

Incorrect. For that to make sense, Google would also need to be directly involved in selling products in the same way Amazon does. Google has practically no products that are sold to the general public on the open market, much less shit like furniture and toiletries. Google's main business model is being a tool to find things, and they sell their user's eyeballs (and browsing data) to other businesses. Google's and Amazon's business model are synergistic. Zillow's and MRED/Compass' business models are competitive.

Maybe you don't understand what Zillow is or does? Do you think it's just Google for houses? It's not; it's closer to eBay for houses. Might help you to understand Zillow's business model before wondering why it's not in their interest to include MRED/Compass' *private listings* in their results.
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Comment Re: Having your cake and eating it too (Score 3) 30

> If I want to sell my house, why shouldn't I be able to sell it and advertise it how I want to?

You can. Nobody is saying you can't. That's not the problem.

  > Why *shouldn't* I be able to access Zillow's advertising service and sell my house privately?

I think you're conflating the word "private" here. This isn't about you listing your home as a "privately" as a private individual, it' about MRED maintaining "private" (e.g. exclusive) access to that listing. MRED and Compass are monopolizing the rights to broker your property's sale but still want Zillow to do the advertising for them.

  > Selling and advertising are two different things, there is no ethical reason to tie them together.

Correct, but Amazon should not expect eBay to show Amazon store page results when you search for things on eBay. Amazon maintains a walled garden of sellers and you must go through Amazon as an intermediary to buy and sell anything there. You want to list your stuff for sale on Amazon but still want eBay users to see it... why should eBay accommodate that bullshit?

MRED wants access to Zillow's users while simultaneously cutting independent brokers out of the business, and Zillow justifiably has a problem with that.
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Comment Re:Weaponization of lockouts (Score 1) 62

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

At some point people have to learn and fight back.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

Comment Re:Win the battle, lose the war (Score 3, Insightful) 62

More likely they'll separate the OS and the TV code so they can ship the open source OS along with their closed source software

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

Comment Re:Federal Bribery and Taxpayer Abuse. (Score 1) 101

Every republican that acts like it's bad, probably voted for it. Every democract that speaks out against it probably voted for it.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 19

"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"

The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.

Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.

If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.

Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.

Comment Re:Why dont people like cameras? (Score 4, Informative) 61

> How can it be abused? I don't get it.

Really? You can't imagine a single way that a corporation or the government could abuse the ability to identify, track, and instantly locate any person at any time for any reason? Nothing at all, huh?

> yet I never heard of one case of a street camera being used to hurt someone let alone end lives

https://www.businessinsider.co...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cou...

https://coloradosun.com/2025/1...

https://www.dailyjournal.com/a...

https://www.americanpartisan.o...

Those examples took basically no effort to find; now imagine if they want to target someone ON PURPOSE, like a civil rights leader, or to harass/round up people who participated in a protest.

Or just be a creep and stalk their ex or random women;

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

Oh, also the system is hilariously insecure, so it's not just cops, corps, and spooks who can use it.

https://stateofsurveillance.or...

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Comment We already had grammar checking (Score 5, Insightful) 50

OpenLibre already had grammar checking. It was free, didn't require a lot of hard drive space (a few MB at most?), and ran locally and almost instantly without needing a high price graphics card.

In fact we've had that ability for over a decade now.

> Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!

Fuck you, Keith.

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/TexMaths is also an existing LibreOffice extension

Comment Apple? Screwing over a partner? (Score 1, Insightful) 14

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

Comment Re: If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 157

Okay so, thanks for tacitly admitting half your argument was bullshit by pretending it didn't exist when directly challenged. I'll take what I can get,

Most of Norway sees an annual high in the 10C/50F range. The highest seasonal temps in late summer is in the low 20C/70F range. Most of the country is at or below freezing most of the year.

Yes, they are driving them in the cold. You are doing a lie.
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Comment Re:If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 157

"EREVs" also have a "full on engine" that needs just as much maintenance. They're also very inefficient because the conversion chain of fuel > mechanical > electrical > battery > electrical > mechanical is much worse than fuel > mechanical.

There are reasons to have that kind of system but efficiency ain't one of them, and if you aren't aiming for efficiency in a personal vehicle what the fuck are you even doing.
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