Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@ndegruchy@fosstodon.org @cavaliertusky

From what I've seen, it looks like their plan is going in the direction of "virtualize Win32 in containers on top of a locked-down iOS-like base Windows platform".

For example, https://www.osnews.com/story/131368/how-windows-10x-runs-win32-applications/

@Vergam It'd certainly keep me away.

I refuse to endorse any system which discriminates against people who can't afford to meet a certain hardware or bandwidth standard.

(Which is also one of the reasons that I steer people away from Discord whenever possible. Above and beyond the usual reasons, they reserve the right to demand SMS verification (with no exemptions) to regain access to your account if they ever see you coming from what they see as a suspicious IP.)

@cavaliertusky I wonder if it's the orange-ness.

Our current two cats are the first orange ones we've ever had and they love hanging out in the bathroom too.

@reykjalin @sir @newt

Three years later, the state of things then prompted a video explaining how to play the system to use Content ID yourself to ensure that, no matter what happens to your account, nobody else can take 100% of the revenue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz14Ul-r63w

(The TL;DR is that there exist distribution companies like cdbaby you can partner with, who have access to Content ID, so he composed an outro tune to use on his videos and had them monetize that for him, minus cut.)

@reykjalin @sir @newt Given that it's 42.5 minutes long, I haven't had time to watch that yet, but the super short abstract reminds me of Jim Sterling's "Copyright Deadlock" trick for giving the finger to people abusing YouTube monetization to steal ad revenue on videos they don't have a right to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM

@rfquerin Don't let misinformation spread.

(But I'm not exactly the best person to ask. I have no fear of being "that guy" and generally feel that, if someone has a problem with it, I should seek better people to interact with anyway.)

@apetresc Dark Mode? I'm pretty sure I remember seeing and annoyedly dismissing that announcement for being so bulky yesterday, before it hit April 1st anywhere in the world.

...or, actually, now that I think about it, it might have been the day before, because I was already quite annoyed at the SE crew not having the foresight to dismiss all the "You can now follow things" popups in the tabs I'd middle-clicked open after I dismissed the first one I saw.

@strypey It's not all rosy though.

* Too much interest in "the cloud" by the majority of computer users.
* We're seeing more IM moving to platforms that use web-based clients rather than a stable protocol something like libpurple can easily clone and keep up with.
* Microsoft requiring locked-down Secure Boot on ARM-based devices to get Windows Logo certification and cheap OEM licenses (and, one would guess, any other non-x86 ISAs).
* etc.

@freemo @LittleWytch Intentional or not, I just can't implicitly promote it, so I always use "post" as the noun and either "post" or "send" as the verb.

@freemo True or not (and Snopes more or less agrees: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/ ), the tone of that article makes me very suspicious of using them as a *reliable* information source.

...something that seems to be backed up by a quick check of what the Mises Institute is on Wikipedia. By their very nature, think tank websites seek to promote a specific view of the world... that means that, at best, they'll promote facts that support their views and downplay ones that disagree.

@skunksarebetter Good to see Synergy got forked after that decision to take it paid.

@mgiagante @n8 ...or saying that "Twitter" is the place you go to be a twit.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Oh, and I can't remember if it was something I read or something I figured out on my own, but the stupid "I have to be taught to share a ball" argument by a former RIAA or MPAA exec led me to the reason it's so hard to stamp out piracy:

We have an instinctive understanding of scarce (property) vs. non-scarce (information) and an instinctive drive to gather and share non-scarce things for the good of the tribe... that's what gossip is.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party) wrote some *excellent* articles on TorrentFreak on the topic:

https://torrentfreak.com/author/rick-falkvinge/

He points out things such as how authors and artists are technically entrepreneurs and we should question thoroughly the idea that a special class of entrepreneurs should get to free-ride off a small amount of work for the rest of their lives while no other class of entrepreneurs get to do that.

(Work is supposed to be trading something scarce, like the worker's time, for something scarce, like money. Copies of a recording are non-scarce. Performances are scarce.)

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir

Here's a quick history of copyright law:

The Statute of Anne (1710) was the first government-regulated act in the western world and it boiled down to a pact with the printing guilds trading monopoly for censorship.

The U.S. constitution (1787) tried to salvage the idea by granting congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". ("useful Arts" meaning maps ant the like)

That's why the Copyright Act of 1790 only protects "maps, charts, and books" but not things like music or newspapers.

Also, it was intentionally designed to allow American to ignore foreign copyrights and that was key to the U.S. becoming the cultural juggernaut that it is today.

(On a side-note, Hollywood is in California because it was beyond the reach of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.)

From what I remember, the modern scope of copyright involved a chain of legal goalpost-moving where they first managed to argue that a book of sheet music was a book and thus managed to get rid of the "musical compositions aren't protected" and then managed to argue that, because a piece of sheet music is protected, a recording of that sheet music should also be protected.

Examples of things still not copyrightable include clothing designs, jokes, and recipes.

@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir

I remember reading that 90%+ of revenue is made within something like the first 10 years and the rest peters off at a rate which makes it not worth the cultural hit to protect.

Beyond that, bear in mind that copyright was never intended to protect fiction or music or the like.

@sir I used to act that way.

These days, I'm so massively behind on the DRM-free games and used novels I've collected that it'd feel wrong to shun what I paid (almost nothing) for to pirate something instead.

(It also lets me feel satisfaction in knowing that companies can't whine about piracy being why they didn't get my money, because I neither pirated nor paid for whatever it is they're unwilling to offer on my terms.)

@elfio @normandc @brandon @DonMcCollough@fosstodon.org I doubt I would either... but who can say.

I do have a hobby built around collecting books and games, so who knows what I might do if I got used to a larger income.

@obi For whatever reason, I find that switching a UI from dark-on-light to light-on-dark makes it more of a strain to recognize letter shapes with the same font at the same size.

(Except for the terminal, where UI configurations are so built around the assumption of the intuitive meanings of and contrast relationships between various colors that, aside from cranking up the brightness on the blue to improve the readability, I can't find any way to improve it beyond trying different fonts.)

@obi It allows you to merge the entire public contents of another instance's local timeline (specifically, whichever toots they expose through their whole-instance RSS feed) into either Home or a custom list of your choosing.

As for how you use it, hit the gear icon, choose "Follows and subscriptions" from the sidebar, choose the "Domain subscribes" sub-entry that appears in the sidebar, hit the Add button, and it'll ask for you a domain and a list to merge it into.