I've seen a lot of people use "illegal" as if it specifically meant a crime, not a tort. In most cases, copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.

> It doesn't help Linux adoption if 98% of games are playable but that remaining 2% is what 70% of gamers are playing

Well that isn't the case. It's not "70% of gamers are playing", it's "played 70% of the time". Extraction shooters, battle royale shooters, mobas and gacha MMOs are played a lot in terms of hours played and in terms of money extracted. But far less so in head count. Unless you're addicted to one of these games, it doesn't matter much whether Steam has them or not. If you're trying to sell a game, and it's not in one of these genres (or not realistically competitive in them - even in the age of AI this is ridiculously capital intensive to compete in), then you're also much better off on Steam.

Covert Russian network exploited French riots on social media, EU report says

Covert Russian network exploited French riots on social media, EU report claims

Covert Russian network exploited French riots on social media, EU report alleges

Which of these is a real Reuters headline? They're all uncontroversially true statements, but you can steer things a lot without actually lying.

(This type of manipulation is so obvious, Reuters has taken steps to curb it - it's always "says" now from them. But the papers that use them rarely care that much about being subtle.)

Do these IRC clients support persistent chat history, file drops, and link summary bots? Because those are among the major features that Discord, Slack, and the like offer compared to IRC. I'm aware that a set of protocol extensions collectively known as "IRCv3" exist, but what sub-64K clients support them? And what public servers offer them?

Rust compiled to wasm, maybe?

None of that contradicts my view that the Republican party is the party of telling the rich blowhards "do as you please, let no one stop you!" and the Democratic party is the party of telling the rich blowhards "Trust us, let us handle it, we're on your side here". Given that, sure, it's surprising that Trump was ever a Democrat, but when you look at Bill Clinton it's not so hard to understand it was under him he was. They were both Epstein-lifestyle to the core.

More truth here than you probably think... Trump was a democrat once, a big Clinton backer. Then the caliph decided he could do better than his wise vizier (He couldn't).

There's the party of letting the rich do as they please, then there's the party of attempting to protect the rich from their own worst excesses. Obama was quite explicit about it, telling them "I'm the one standing between you and the pitchforks".

At least in the current climate, some actually meaningful changes might be necessary to protect the likes of Musk, Bezos and Ellison from their own stupidity.

You are correct that 307 days of the year counts as "most of the time." My city of 200,000 doesn't run any public transit on Sundays or major holidays. Instead, bus drivers on all shifts are scheduled to be home with their respective families.

You all speak as if this isn't down to the whims of the wig clowns.

Good, cause I didn't hear that.

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

They've already burned millions on lost races. The silver lining to patronage politics is that everything bet on the loser is lost.

How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.

And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.

And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.

Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.

I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?

Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.