/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social
If the operating system is FOSS, I’d be willing to pay 50% the cost of a Windows license but to the FOSS maintainers and the upstream distros they rely on. Gotta close the causal loop.
“I read a book with a typo once. Libraries are a scam.”
“Create a python script to count the number of r
characters are present in the string strawberry
.”
The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2
deleted by creator
Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.
Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).
Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.
See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.
In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.
Donate to Mozilla Thunderbird. Free software isn’t free.
Nvidia: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.
Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.
Amazon replacements:
As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.
Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.
Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.
I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.
In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.
Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.
Ultimately, the quality of your work is a function of you and your resources. Corruption and miscommunication plague all management systems. Corrupt management siphons resources away from otherwise good work. Government bureaucracy is another layer of management like any other. Customers are not just consumers but working people like you.
Hang in there.
When they were allowed to buy YouTube because their Google Video couldn’t compete was the turning point.
He wrote a book describing how, among other Unitary executive theory-friendly proposals, he would dismantle and reform the FBI into a Trump-supporting organization. See Government Gangsters (2023).
On his Trump loyalty
President Trump has proven that if you don’t bend the knee to the left’s disinformation attacks, you can win. In fact, as Devin Nunes and I learned during the Russia Gate probe, when they attack us, it’s because we are, as a friend once told me, “over the target.” Their attacks got louder and more desperate the closer we got to the truth. So we must stay the course. The more we expose of their machinations and lies, the more the American people will understand the truth and demand reform. That is how public officials keep the mission first, that is how they deliver accountability, and that is how they honor their duty to serve the American people they work for.
How the FBI can be made to stop investigating crimes of the President or Congress (e.g. the Mueller investigation, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc.)
Congress can remove funding from the Washington, DC, headquarters and instead reassign FBI funding—and therefore FBI personnel—throughout the United States, putting field-level agents back in the field. If Congress wanted to, it could reduce the FBI behemoth in Washington, DC, to just a single field office dedicated to investigating crimes within the district and place the headquarters anywhere else in America. They could even go so far as to have senior FBI leadership run the circuit, as it were, managing the affairs of the bureau from different branches and moving after a set period of time to reduce the chances of entrenched interests and political relationships being formed. Yet even if Congress doesn’t alter funding, the president and a reform-minded FBI director can internally reassign agents outside of Washington, emptying out the DC HQ in order to put agents back in the field. A new FBI director could also change the rules dictating that FBI agents must do a tour of duty in DC before getting a promotion, instead focusing on promoting those with the most experience and success in the field.
MAGA should he shielded from committing crimes like the January 6th insurrection
January 6th gave the Deep State and the entire ruling regime afraid of the America First movement the perfect vehicle to label normal, patriotic, God-fearing Americans as not just racists or white supremacists (something they had been falsely charging for years) but as insurrectionists or even domestic terrorists. In the past, they charged us with having bad opinions. They said our policies would hurt the country or even that we were bad, mean people. Now, they have gone a giant step further to make the ridiculous claim that we want to overthrow the government. This escalation in rhetoric is intended to try and legitimize their efforts to move the political battlefield from the court of public opinion much closer to the court of law, where they can prosecute MAGA Republicans by politically weaponizing federal law enforcement. Really it moves us one step closer to a world where dissent isn’t just deemed objectionable, but it’s ruled illegal. That isn’t America—it’s Venezuela, Russia, Iran, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or all the other hell holes of the world that we are happy we don’t live in.