Having a fetish is not a crime. Acting on it is. Pedophilia is the latter, not the former

If it isn't too late for that, The Line should be reimagined as The Circle. No 2 points will be too far from each other

I believe they changed that law recently last year, where now expat workers are now freer to find new jobs and change employers. It's still pretty bad in other Gulf countries, like Kuwait and Qatar

Yeah, one video that I watched about this project suggested that it should have been a circle, rather than a line, in which case, it could have been a self contained project, with everything being managed from a hub at the center. Otherwise, it was a good project, and a major improvement from what MbS' uncles used to do when they were kings - pissing away money on dawa and jihad activities worldwide

There was one video I saw that suggested that had the design been a circle, as opposed to a line, it would have been more easily self-contained and managed. What I do wonder is how many Saudis have the skills needed to provide the services needed by this project?

You love being pedantic, don't you?

We had this discussion some days back in the thread about the end of life of HP/UX. Someone mentioned that the only thing that could strictly be called "Unix" using the old Unix System Labs definition would be any SVR4 based editions, such as Solaris, and thereby, their FOSS versions like OpenIndiana and Illumos. BSDs wouldn't qualify, since they didn't emerge from the USL code

It's another thing that all the BSDs and Linux's would pass the entire X/Open suite of tests that have to be passed for Unix certification, but that nobody would be willing to pay X/Open the fees needed for that certification

I also wish that applications that advertised that they work on Windows, MacOS and Linux also worked on the xBSDs. At least the root ones - FreeBSD and NetBSD. I also wish that there were Type 1 BSD-based hypervisors: BHyve is Type 2, while Proxmox and ESXi are both Linux based

On, this story, it's just about the login manager, but as far as BSD goes, some years ago, I used to use PC-BSD while it lasted. It had a beautiful package installer called PBI (Push-Button Interface), and it had Lumina as the desktop environment. It got abandoned as a project when their team decided they were more interested in working on a NAS project. However, today, any FreeBSD user could install Lumina, and since that is Qt based, they can install application like Collabra on it

IMO, the bigger objection is paying it to new "owners" who had nothing to do w/ the production of a movie. Like say a movie was made back in the 70s, which I'd like to watch. I'd have no issues paying to watch it, if it went to the people who originally made it and warned a living from it. But if the media house they worked for got acquired by a bigger studio, and over time, those people have retired or died, then I don't quite get why I have to pay another entity for them, when they had no involvement in making it

The copying music thing is something I've seen argued in the past as well. Even back in that day, when one copied a song that one had already bought - be it on a gramophone record or a cassette, the question is - did that person buy the songs, or the media? Given the price difference b/w blank cassettes and cassettes of various albums, obviously the former. Once one bought the former, was s/he at liberty to copy it to a media that was more convenient?

Remember, in those days, we didn't have MP3s, editable playlists (like on Apple Music or Spotify) or such conveniences. People had to buy entire cassettes/records if they liked just a few songs on it, sometimes as few as one or two. So once a person had sunk enough cash into, say, 10 cassettes, s/he'd want to pick the favorite songs on each and copy it into a blank in the order of his/her choice. So that s/he wouldn't have to shuffle cassettes in and out of the Walkman while walking, or even worse, while driving. Those people weren't cheating either the record producers or the artists: the latter had already been paid for their product. These people were just taking what they had bought, and organizing it into something more convenient/manageable for themselves

It's a lot different today, when one can buy an individual song for $2-$10. But back in the day, one had to buy an album of some 10-20 songs, if one wanted just that song. Then one had to determine how badly one wanted that to pay for all 20

Other thing about him is that in his student days at MIT, people used to share logins and not have passwords to anything, so that anything anyone created was accessible by anybody and everybody. Which was fine in a campus environment, and at a time when the only people connected to any internet were students. That was before virus authors and other malware creators were rampant

But somehow, he expects the same level of openness when the internet exploded, and started getting used by normal people, not just universities, defense agencies and computer companies. Somehow, the idea of scalability varying from entity to entity doesn't quite strike him

Actually, he changed his views on that late, once someone described to him how it left him/her (forgetting which) badly damaged. But it is bizarre that it had to be explained to him before he accepted that minors are not mature enough to know the consequences of consenting to sexual acts when they are still young

Anti-"TiVoization" is only there in GPL 3, which, other than GNU utilities, I'm not sure is used as a license by most FOSS projects. Linux uses GNU 2.0, although if the whole OS is re-written in Rust, I suspect it may end up using a more permissive license, such as MIT

His views on this are well known, if one has read the dozens of essays he has written on the subject on gnu dot org. In one of them, he explained how Copyleft was invented to use Copyright laws against it i.e. to prevent something from being used in a Copyright. Of course, end result of that is the GPL license being incompatible w/ most other licenses, and is a part of the reason basic GNU utilities are getting re-written in Rust. So that they can be re-licensed under MIT or other more permissive licenses

On another point, he has also written that software should not have owners. If one wants to know the consequences of that, one just has to look at several FOSS projects that were abandoned, and have no maintainers. Yeah, they're still in the public domain, one might still find them on Github, but unless one is oneself a competent coder who knows how things are architected and how to change them, that "no-owners" software is little use to anyone

I know that: I was referring to the rebranding of Office 365 Microsoft 365 to CoPilot 365, rather than referring to individual parts of it that failed. But somehow, Microsoft doesn't seem to want to publicize a CoPilot outage, since it would sully the brand they're trying to force-feed the public. In other words, use Office's popularity to pump up the CoPilot numbers, but when Office goes down, it's Microsoft 365 going down, rather than CoPilot going down. Which is technically correct, as long as one doesn't pretend that CoPilot is Office, or vice versa