I like the bleep-boo sounds of the command prompt scrolling by on computers.

“.9…” is repeating, but rational. So it’s actually “1” . Let’s do the math.

.9… / 3 = .3…

.3… = 1/3

1/3 x 3 = 3/3

.9… = 3/3

3/3 = 1

.9… = 1

Still not convinced? We’ll use algebra instead of fractions.

0.9… = x

10x = 9.9…

10x - 0.9… = 9

9x = 9

x = 1

But the “…” matters.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Yes. But at the same time I’m actually okay with ads for products that are legitimately good and are relevant to me, so long as I know they’re an advertisement.

Products need marketing. It’s reality. I’d rather get my marketing in the form of a recommendation or review from a trusted source than a random video shoved down my throat.

A easy example of a good source for me is MKBHD. He gets free stuff and sponsorships, but is selective regarding what he’ll accept sponsorships from, is very clear when a segment is sponsored, and will absolutely say a product is bad or overpriced even if he got it for free.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

We actually bombed the moon on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement!

Seriously though, it was a middle finger to Bush more than anything.

Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.

It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.

Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.

I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.

If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.

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It shows how important having a charismatic person is to make any venture a success. We’re all humans with limited time on the earth. We can’t possibly experience everything. All we see and do is filtered out of necessity. A charismatic advocate of a product/movement/idea can get people to pay attention.

The best musician in history is probably unknown because they didn’t have a good manager/agent.

The greatest painting ever made was probably thrown away because nobody ever knew about it.

Hype men are necessary.

Jobs was an asshole.

Also, he got shit done. He wasn’t a technical genius, but he and the team he built could pitch the shit out of products. Apple’s value has rarely been in its technical superiority, but in branding.

“Bullshitting” is an essential skill, not a distraction. The greatest idea in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about it.

Marketing, scmoozing, etc gets a bad rep. But no matter how good your output, product, research, etc is, it has very little value or impact if people don’t get on board.

If you can’t play the game, team up with someone who can. And don’t forget that while that schmoozer may not have your technical skills, they have a skillset you do not.

It wasn’t Woz or Jobs. It was both.

That’s like somebody saying in 1912 that fax machines could never be invented because no printouts were magically appearing on their desk. The technology had to be invented before it could be used. If a time traveler has to step out of a machine, that machine has to be invented first. The idea is that backwards time travel would only be able to travel as far back as the invention of backwards time travel.

That being said, from a physics standpoint I can absolutely see backwards time travel as being impossible. We can’t move negative distances across spatial dimensions, so why would we be able to move backwards in time?

It also partially explains the Western feeling to Star Wars. Lots of Kurisawa films were made into Westerns.

Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven (and Bug’s Life!). Yojimbo and Sanjuro became A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More.

Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that’s a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.

Our residents don’t want neighbors. They don’t want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.

I don’t live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won’t cover a week’s mortgage for some of these houses.

Do you think we don’t have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?

We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don’t get used because it’s 110° for months at a time and you don’t want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.

But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don’t bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.

People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.

The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.

It’s an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.

I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.