You stole those words, pirate!

I'm not going to argue sides with you two, but this sentence stood out:

No one cares about your line, we only care about the line defined by the law.

Beware: the law and its definitions aren't very well coded, and a lot of it comes from judicial decisions. Let me ask a very simple question:

How do you determine if an act is fair use?

Just kidding. I lied! That question is actually pretty hard.

So we end up with judges asking about the "four factors" (purpose and character of use, nature of the copyrighted work, amount and substantiality of what was copied, effect on the original work' market). If you go read US Code, looking for definitions, you won't find any of that there.

The lines can move, because the lines are made up.

We'll find out if you're right, when Congress introduces the new budget. Maybe they've decided to slash it, maybe they haven't.

Either way, not a mere President's call to make. And of course, it obviously goes directly against the voters. For whatever reason, last November the voters in all 50 states did vote for members of Congress, instead of abstaining and saying "I don't want representatives in the House or Senate anymore."

This can be pretty easily fixed with a constitutional amendment to dissolve Congress and transfer all its former powers to the President. We could probably get rid of SCOTUS in the same amendment, making everything much simpler while also keeping it legal.

Amendment ratification, of course, comes with the usual caution "beware voters." They might still be a little too pro-America right now; not everyone is with the new program yet. Fortunately we have a whole year until the budget after that, to wear the voters down so they'll agree that a President is all we need.

Egg prices are in line with everyone's predictions, making them kind of uninteresting.

On the few occasions during the campaign when Trump was able to speak whole, coherent sentences, everything he said indicated that he was going to use the power of government to raise prices. He said he'd raise our taxes and interfere with the labor market.

So we've been expecting inflation to balloon in way that makes 2024 look like the good ol' days. What's interesting about the fairly low prices we're still seeing right now? That only means we're in the beginning.

Ask again a year from now, when prices have hopefully stabilized. Things'll finally be expensive then, and the prices of Feb 2025 will be just another wistful American daydream.

I hear that Mexico calls the Rio Grande by the name "Rio Bravo". We get to call the gulf what we want to call it. If you pendejos don't like it, just tell Google to change it on your local version.

The only way interest rates are coming down in the near future is if .. the fed chairman is replaced by someone really irresponsible,

Sounds like it'll be happening some time in the next few weeks, then.

Bowling league doesn't take cards.

that's pretty much the only place.

No, I'm not saying I'm surprised. I'm saying that's what I see happen.

Do you think I'm the only lazy ass willing to take off in the middle of working hours? If you do, I've got .. uh, I'm going to sell you a .. damn, I'm too lazy to finish this joke.

typical user is not capable of managing their keys and that means that recovery would not be possible. This in turn will create false perception among non-techies that encryption is dangerous for your data

False perception? It'll point out a real thing: when encryption is done right, nobody can access the data unless they have the key. So it's both a danger and a strength.

There's no reason to not point this out and let people learn from it.

If they think they can do things well, they have a chance at keeping their data secure.

If they don't think they can handle it, then they can accept the risk of having a "privacy butler" like they always have. A butler who can easily betray them, but might not, or might only betray them within limited scope (i.e. your nosey neighbor might not know whom to contact to get the keys or data, even if certain other parties do know).

Be careful talking about it in public and making it seem not cool, or else you risk making it the next retro-fad like LPs. "My parents and grandparents think it's not cool? Oh, I am so there!"

People have been bitching about the ads for years, but they've been doing more than that: they really have been not going. Look at all the I-don't-go comments and look at the theater closures. I think the market is working. Why bother using government force to make it not-suck, when people have already found an even better, most-possibly-effective method of making it not-suck, by abstaining?

I took a decade or so off from theaters but am now trying going once or twice a year (at least it adds a little diversity to "date night"), and guess what: I don't see crowds. I see a big room with 15 people in it, or at least when we take off work and go to a theater on a weekday afternoon. Lots of people are Just Saying No and saving their money to spend at home in front of their giant TVs.

And if theaters want more people to show up, then they can advertise: "We don't need the gummint to make us tell you this: we have 0 minutes of ads. The 2:30pm movie starts at 2:30pm" and I think it would make a difference. No?

Next car I buy, I might need to fork it. Are there any forkable new cars for sale? The '99 Maxima is getting a little long in the tooth.

You don't really want semi-skilled programmers churning out poor quality applications, this creates a security nightmare.

Yes, I do. I want eleven-year-old amateurs cranking out all the poor-quality code that they feel like writing, in whatever language they want to. People have to start somewhere.

(And if someone else decides to use that code, I just want that person to understand what they're doing and if be responsible for what they decided to do. But that's a tangent issue.)

"The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."

The antitrust case was overturned by the Appellate Court in 2001. The DOJ and Microsoft settled the outstanding portions in November 2001.

Android Inc. was started in 2003, and was four guys using pre-existing Open Source components to build an OS for mobile phones. Google bought them in 2005, and the first handset using Android was released in 2008.

Bill, you had seven years and the entire backing of a massive corporation (including all of its employees and intellectual property) after the antitrust case was settled, and couldn’t pull off what four guys started and Google finished in five using Open Source components.

Yaz

One reasonable compromise might be to limit EV subsidies to be a maximum of 1% of ICE subsidies. Subsidize EVs only $10k for every million dollars of ICE subsidies. Or would that be too much? Maybe limit it to 0.1%?