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  In case people wanted a 2nd chance to object to a compulsory user account age recording + reporting law (the only people who objected in #California that I have found being only interested in 'gratis' free software on the Google and Apple Stores), #Colorado has a bill going through its state legislature right now. It is much the same text, which seems on course to be model legislation, as #California's, and so will also apply to 'operating system's on 'general purpose c...

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  @gettie@fedi.catto.garden Actually, it's 'yes' as a login-name here that causes #OpenBSD to issue a message. (Also 'root', 'daemon', 'operator', 'bin', 'build', 'sshd', 'www', 'nobody', and 'ftp'.) @domi@donotsta.re @prahou@merveilles.town #ColoradoLaw #CaliforniaLaw #AgeVerification

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  @davecb@hachyderm.io Quite! See https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116156019252249071 for what kicked off David Chisnall's post half a day beforehand.

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  Most #JasonStatham movies are not worth it. I've mentioned #Homefront and Crank: High Voltage. The only reason that I stuck with #TheBeekeeper (2024), despite Statham once again strutting around muttering expressionlessly, fighting people, and stealing other people's cars, was the cast of British actors (from #MinnieDriver through #JemmaRedgrave to #DonGilet) all putting on their best General American accents and pretending to be the upper echelons of the U.S.A. intelligence services a...

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  @reallyflygreg@mstdn.ca @toddalio@mstdn.ca I'm inclined to believe that it is indeed the people who don't understand technology (specifically: they think that everything works like their smart 'phone or Microsoft Windows 11 PC do) making policy; or that they did understand the technology and were just crap at drafting legislation such that it could distinguish the Microsoft Store, Google Play, the Apple App Store, et al. from #Ubuntu's package repository and #OpenBSD's port...

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  @montyontherun@bitbang.social The definitions are broad, so to quite an extent they would. There are users, who have accounts, on general purpose computers, and run applications. The only hope for #mainframes seems to be that they likely don't have things that fit the definition of a 'covered application store'. But they might; especially if the mainframe is nowadays running a Linux-based operating system. http://linuxvm.org/info/distros.html #Debian and #Ubuntu have package r...

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  @keefeglise@mastodonapp.uk Have you at least been taken to the Gateshead Metro Centre? #Newcastle #Gateshead

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  @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social @sharongascoigne@mastodonapp.uk #FilHenley just put me onto these. They're a bunch of high school children from #SanAnselmo, #California. Not my instruments nor style of music. But the claim is that they are very good technically. Fil was waxing lyrical about there being not a scintilla of AutoTune and the skills of the drummer and guitarists. And YouTube commenters have said the same. So I thought that I'd ask two people that I see regularly talking a...

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  @jmax@mastodon.social You are likely going to regret that. (-: When discussing the energy–momentum relation, mass *is* by convention rest mass, as the usual formulation E^2=m^2×c^4+(p×c)^2 is in terms of rest mass m. The relation says that energy does not imply mass when m=0. Energy implies the momentum portion of the sum, which photons have, defined as p=h/λ. With m=0 the full form reduces to E^2=(p×c)^2 which after substitution for photon momentum becomes E=c×h/λ=h×f . But this does no...

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  I'm up to #NCISSydney episode 1.7. The life threatening risk at the product launch was ordered to be made real by the CEO. None of the other CEOs listened to or took advice not to turn up when it meant being incommunicado. A bus factor of 1 was ordered by the CEO. VC money was spent by the CEO to ensure that the taxi drivers weren't a handy low-tech safety net. All of the multiply-redundant ways in which bunkers (including the very real ones at the place in the story) are designed n...

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  Someone has run a plasterer's trowel over #RobinHoodsBay . https://mastodonapp.uk/@botrhb/116107799813695923 #YorkshireCoast #Yorkshire

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  @ratsnakegames@mastodon.social No, it doesn't. As I said, I'm talking about the original Notepad. And that gained significantly simply by having a better keyboard than a Model F XT or AT and better graphics than CGA. It was basic things like SVGA graphics being able to display more characters on the screen with the same font sizes; dedicated editing keys; and Windows's ability to set a colour palette. Even just in its original form, it got more usable. Whereas there were no si...

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  @john@social.gozzys.com How long did you hold out before creating an account? #Wikipedia

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  #MyWeirdSchool (2025) is unlike the novel series that it is very loosely based upon, but it is fairly standard antics-at-U.S.A.-middle-school stuff for #Nickelodeon, taken standalone. (The source material, for starters, is set in elementary school.) Although it does seem that it's going to take a few more years before the knowledge sinks in, institutionally, that Nickelodeon's strategy of letting TikTok and YouTube be a filter for its casting process, and a ticket to greater audience n...

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  @cafuego@misanthrope.social It does bring home how very flat those parts of WA and Queensland must be. @infobeautiful@vis.social #Australia #Queensland #WesternAustralia #geography

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  @acb@mastodon.social At this point, I recommend a short story by #RoaldDahl titled "The Sound Machine". It's collected in More Tales Of The Unexpected, amongst other places. The story was published in 1949. Botanical science finally caught up with fiction in 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2023.03.009 @cstross@wandering.shop @jmax@mastodon.social #biology #botany

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  @jmax@mastodon.social The question is: Are they actually dead at that point? What constitutes death for a plant? It's not lack of brain activity. Warning: Go too far down this road and you realize that the #potatoes that will happily begin growing shoots if you leave them in the sack for too long are alive and screaming when you drop them into boiling water. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190687724.003.0010 After all, part of the point of #cooking is to kill otherwise still-alive org...

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  @InTheseHeels@mastodon.ie There comes a time in everyone's life when one learns where Smooth Chill is on the tuning list. Or even sneakily configures it as one of the presets. Magic Chilled or Mellow Magic, if one must. (-: #radio #DAB #SmoothChill #MagicChilled #MellowMagic

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  Here's a thought experiment to ponder. Take the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, and replace dog with AI agent. https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1991/65/section/3 It even has provision for falling back from the owner to the person(s) immediately in charge of the relevant computer system. Six months in stir for being the owner or enabler of an "AI" system that blackmails or extorts people (both of which have already happened in the real world — This part is not, alas, hypothetical.). #...

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  Seeing that so-called "AI" today libel someone with the goal of extorting that person into not obstructing it, made me think that the first time that I saw a human being use that exact tactic must be around 20 years ago, now. I just checked. It's actually more than 20 years. Yes, the text is still on the WWW. Yes, undoubtedly the #LLMs are trained on the reams of examples of this (and related evils) that malicious humans have provided the world with over many years. #AIs #AIsl...

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  @gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe @joel@gts.tumfatig.net It's a good test. I probably haven't used open mode since I started building #STEVIE from source back in the 1980s. Which of course I used on VDU terminals, not the paper ones. (-: The test for it being Bostic #nvi , in my experience, is whether it supports :qa . #vi

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  People waxing lyrical about using 'original vi', both nowadays in 2026 and back in 2006, haven't a clue what that is. There's only one family of operating systems where 'vi' will actually run the original vi program by Joy, Horton, et al.: #Illumos and its derivatives #Tribblix, #OmniOS, and #SmartOS. *Everyone else* uses one of the ground-up clones. On #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD, it's Bostic's early 1990s #nvi, which was derived from Kirkendall's elvi...

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  @hitthetowpath@mastodon.scot 'Menu' is, however, already a different key, usually to be found next to the right GUI key at location A11 on the #ISO9995 layout. The 'Super' key from the 1970s Space-Cadet keyboard long pre-dates the 'Windows' key from Microsoft's 1990s Windows keyboards. It is indeed a bit misleading to conflate the two, and confuses the Hell out of novices looking for 'Super' when their doco says to use it. The irony of using 'Super&#3...

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  #Fortress (2021) is an abysmal movie. The protagonist, with whom we are apparently meant to sympathize, being a cryptocurrency scammer trying to fleece his parent for more money, was not a good start, and it went downhill from there. Pretty much everyone's acting was either completely over the top or wooden as Hell. The plot was ludicrous; the ubiquitous special effects mist and random camera angles, annoying. The final straw, at which point I just stopped and deleted it from the TiVo, w...

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  @ianbetteridge@social.vivaldi.net Several very cynical answers, here. But the correct answer is to refer to ancient prophecy, where such events of the future were foretold — Yeah verily! — back in the Apollo Era. You are, after all, talking of what we coyly refer to as Space XXXX. In and out the Eagle: That's the way the money goes. https://artstation.com/artwork/3dozPB @davidgerard@circumstances.run @simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @blabberlicious@toot.community @londondreamtime@mastodo...

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  @ianbetteridge@social.vivaldi.net Taking the 'and' to be a logical operator, obviously 'No.' anded with anything is still 'No.'. Except in #Python, of course. (-: #ComputerProgramming #logic #QuestionHeadlines

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  @spytfyre@mastodon.scot An unpaid support nightmare. I'd have been getting 'phone calls at all hours. The relative's complaint was that keyboards like that make the keys too small and awkward, and the way that G-Board dynamically varied the hit rectangles under the covers made things even more difficult. Keeping the idea of miniscule QWERTY rows that are offset by ⅓ to prevent the non-existent 19th century typewriter levers from jamming, and making it even busier still, was not...

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  Thumb-Key installed on a relative's 'phone. I didn't enable anything fancy, or enable the #MessageEase compatibility layouts. But I was explicitly asked to install Spanish and French alongside English. I made the relative make the layout switching gesture multiple times, so that it stuck. Otherwise I knew what the first panicked 'phone call would be. First panicked 'phone call: all of the letters have disappeared from the keyboard. There is a setting in the Thumb-Key se...

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  #SameTimeNextWeek (2017) was definitely more cheery than #OnTheBeach. Although it did have its sad moments, given the storyline; there were some lighthearted moments as well: and of course it had a positive moral at the end. It's yet another made-for-#USTelly romance and morality tale. Entirely predictable, usual nonsensical character actions and misunderstandings just to drive the plot, largely Canadian cast, and once again #Canada masquerading as generic small-town U.S.A.. The script c...

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  I thought to watch something not recorded by the TiVo to take a break from trying to clear some recording space. So I looked at what was on the various channels live. There was a 1959 #GregoryPeck movie, set in Australia, post-war, with submarines. It was called On The Beach. I was expecting some technicolour romp with lush South Pacific scenery. Perhaps some surfing or swimming or something. How wrong I was! It's a black-and-white post-apocalyptic tale of how Australia is the last pl...