AbouBenAdhem

I think she’s making the same mistake Obama made with healthcare: coming from a background as senators under Republican presidents, they gravitate toward proposals that would likely have passed as-is in the Congresses they served in; but when it’s a Democratic president making the proposal, it needs to be more robust because Congress will water it down as a matter of principle no matter how moderate it is to start with.

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

An ad-blocking DNS server on your local network should work for apps too, right? (As long as the ads are hosted on known ad servers.)

Currently on the worldbuilding/outlining phase.

I’m using a customized self-hosted Semantic MediaWiki installation, and can’t imagine doing it any other way—it’s like Wikipedia with the added ability to aggregate and live-update information from related pages. For instance, I can create a story event page with the place, date, and list of characters involved—and just from that, each character’s page has a map of all the places they’ve been, a timeline of all the events they’ve been present at, and a list of all the characters they’ve met; and it all gets updated whenever I add or edit an event.

Plus it’s on a web server, so I can access it from any device with an internet connection.

Coffee isn’t a true bean—it’s more closely related to gardenias.

Not advocating for restoring the mammoth, but this is a dangerous line of argument.

With climate change and ongoing mass extinctions, many current species are or will soon be in the same situation that re-introduced mammoths would be—and you could use the same argument to say that trying to preserve them is cruel so we should kill off any current species facing environmental stress.

Their announcement reads like an update of the classic “If by Whisky” speech.

Pulp Fiction.

I mean, every process requires an energy output similar to a very small nuclear explosion, for some definition of “very small” and “similar”.

Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.

Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.

Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.

Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.

Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.

So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.

Évariste Galois is spinning in his unmarked common grave.