AnyOldName3

Technically it was the Free Software movement that was a form of Leftism, and Open Source was Capitalism’s attempt to subsume it once it became apparent that it was capable of producing better software.

And unlike the original Star Wars film, which made the parallels to the Vietnam War paint the US in a bad light, the latest Star Wars film riffs off the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now!, but instead of presenting napalming the shit out of people as a bad thing, presents it as a good thing.

Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.

You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.

If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.

Someone sent me a link to a file through Limewire today. That had its heyday so long ago that I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever used it.

You need to explicitly grant the script admin access or have totally disabled UAC, which already punches a large hole through Windows’ security model. Malware that’s in that situation doesn’t need to block Defender to do harm.

To add to this, when forks do succeed, it’s typically because they’re either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.

I’ve yet to see anyone say anything about the trailer other than no, I’ll wait for the Jimmy Saville movie, so it’s safe to say that it’s widely considered absurd that anyone would make or want to watch the movie.

Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.

It’s not particularly wet, which is why fire fighters add a wetting agent to make wet water to extinguish fires more effectively.

There’s no point retaliating once you’re dead unless the enemy knows it’s something you might do. You also can’t make a plain A-bomb arbitrarily big as you need the fuel to be small enough to be subcritical until it’s assembled, and simple enough to assemble that it spends so little time critical but not supercritical that a random decay doesn’t cause a chain reaction to start before the mass is fully compressed. If it starts too early, there’s enough energy to blow the bomb apart, which stops the reaction continuing. The more material you add, the more often random decays happen, and the likelier it becomes that the reaction starts prematurely. The theoretical limit is somewhere between 500kT and 1MT, which isn’t very much for a city buster, especially if you’ve buried it. You’d have to use more than one, but a pure fission bomb is very senstive to nearby nuclear detonations, so only the first one would be likely to work.

That only debunks it if Lucas spent a lot of time thinking about Dutch and if Luke Skywalker is the only person who ever had a father.

This has the slight problems that:

• The UK’s now trying to make VPNs illegal, and was obviously going to because of the obvious flaws in the Online Safety Act.
• They consulted with MindGeek about the law before passing it, and they own most of the sites with a route to remain viable businesses under the current law, and several agree verification services, so they’re a much better company to blame for this.

Modern nukes contain a subcritical mass of fissile material and require an injection of tritium to arm them, and also require tritium for their second stage to get most of their rated yield. Tritium doesn’t last very long, so needs regularly topping up. If you’ve secretly buried a nuke, you’ll have to dig it up pretty often, undermining the advantages of secret burial. There’s also not much point in having a better nuclear deterrent than your enemy knows about, as the goal is to make them know you can destroy them so they’re too scared to attack you rather than to actually destroy them.

TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.

The vast majority of NATO that isn’t the US is covered by the EU’s Mutual Defence Clause, so this kind of already exists. It sucks for the NATO members that aren’t in the EU, though, e.g. Greenland.

Much more straightforward in British English where d and t are more distinct

I’m glad to see someone’s made this because it’s been bouncing around in my head for ages but I’ve never got around to putting it together and letting it out.

Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.

It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.