Since a bit earlier or so I’ve read.

Sauron used conversations and scenes to turn Saruman charmed and deadly frightened. Over the palantir, which was a device to see the future, the past, the probable, close and far away. Thus also a communication device.

So basically their name refers to knowing things which are not their fucking concern. Not what you said.

EDIT: Still, the way communication of Saruman and Denethor with Sauron turned them both mad - is a good metaphor of how lots of awesome technology was misused to almost ruin humanity in the last 30 years. I wonder if it’s reversible.

They could mean that they were a Unix user since 1991. They could also mix up years, which would be natural. Say, with 1993 or 1994. In any case you’re the obvious RH shill here.

This is a good example of RH shilling.

Also not uncommon to see “community activists” popping up here and there, with no history at all, doing small things and then somehow participating in coordinated RH-aligned action eventually. Remember that moment Stallman was pressed into defense? Not that he’s a very nice person, but the campaign was interesting in the sense that not many normal people participated in it, mostly such activists.

Also Fedora and “well-built” - it’s glossy and smooth-looking, but not “well-built”.

Also this

from paranoid people new to the community who don’t understand how this ecosystem works.

is a marker of RH shill too. They usually start with casually stating that everyone is fine with RH and the only ones complaining are noobs, nuts and troublemakers, we don’t do that here. Except it’s not true.

Quantity of development doesn’t equal quality. I personally think if RH were to vanish overnight, Linux would be fine. Of course nobody spends additional effort on projects mostly done by RH. If there’s no RH, either the projects will be dropped for lack of necessity or there will be said effort from other sources.

Amount of contributions doesn’t equal quality, mind that. RedHat also does work to sink projects which don’t fit their strategy for Linux development, and I want to ask by what right they even have such a strategy and try to impose it upon others.

What “they made” 50 years ago is of little value now. Expertise matters, and it’s lost with time passing.

Still - yes. Nationalization is a bad solution because it gives the state power to nationalize. Seems a truism.

Just let NASA work in its normal role. Instead of replacing that with SpaceX contracts.

Nobody thinks about that, just about hitting the people they don’t like. They don’t think of consequences, they don’t think that nationalization means humongous companies and wealth in fact changing hands in favor of people who already control the government.

That’s every fascist regime in history BTW - make your natural opponents hang themselves. Like in Russia in 1999 groups people most hurt by Yeltsin’s regime were deceived into voting for Putin, because he managed to create that “Soviet intelligence agent” image, despite being continuation of said regime. Or again in 2004, when he managed to take credit for growing oil prices, which meant that said groups of people feared literal starvation less, and the factor they’ve grown by compared to 1998 was so huge, that Russia’s level of life really didn’t catch up, but that was enough. Hold people in misery, throw them bones, they’ll be grateful.

Also why most Russians gloated over Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, other oligarchs being beaten by Putin.

Cause the oligarchs seemed the face of that regime, except Putin was its soul materialized. They somehow thought that when he hurts all the oligarchs enough, things will be good.

DOD is also responsible for what they accept.

Alaska. SW prequels. There’s also the Soviet movie “Until first blood”, where kids play “Zarnitsa” and learn something.

The internet has plenty of people who don’t want to spend their effort for others’ moneymaking.

All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.

Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.

Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.

But in general what’s hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn’t go there.

Say, it’s not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person’s “internet identity” (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that “internet contact directory” like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.

OK, I’m sleepy. Just - it’s technically possible.

Modern web page design is garbage and unreadable.

Because it’s a “newspaper meets slot machine” design. Kills two birds with one stone, hijacking media (censorship is invisible) and making money (invisible too).

I don’t need to know stacy from North Dakota’s thoughts on an article because 99% of the time it’s toxic anyways. Or misinformed.

And also because not every place is supposed to be crawling with people.

No. You have a toolbox, it’s called a web browser. To unite the particular websites you have a web ring, or your own bookmarks. There were also web catalogues.

First of all, it was performed the way that nobody knew what to even do with those privatization vouchers. They didn’t directly give anyone stocks, just vouchers for part of a company etc. Those had to be exchanged for stocks.

People didn’t know what to do with them, people had problems feeding their families, and people were offered some money for them. And people thought that’s what capitalism is, you get offered money for something, you give it. Nobody scams you, right?

Since those oligarchs happened to all have right friends, it’s without any doubt not a mistake that those stocks could even be sold.

And - attention - another history lesson. All the Soviet propaganda against religion led to everyone becoming “kinda church-loving” in the 90-s initially. All the Soviet propaganda for scientific view of the world led to thousands of sects and charlatans, together scamming most of the population. All the Soviet propaganda for honest and labor ethic led to most people not even considering such scams really scams, because in Soviet propaganda doing business was treated same as scamming someone.

So nobody even thought what’s happening is wrong. And the part of the population which did understand was those who got the shorter stick. People losing themselves in a bottle or a needle, people literally dying from hunger, people having to do crime or prostitution or mercenary work to survive. It was an unholy kingdom where for a part of the population it seemed they are almost the middle class now, just like in those American movies and ads, and the other part saw those ads and those people daily, but could barely survive.

And then, after a few years, the former part grew some understanding that Russia is approaching fascism, and the latter part, which already lived it since 1993, was so broken that it obeyed the fascists after they gave it a bit of a life without hunger and depression in the 00s.

See, there is a layer of the Russian (and general ex-Soviet) culture, in vibes and emotions, showing things as they really were, but it’s horrible to look into that. It was plainly impossible for a normal person to accept some group of people like Anatoly Sobchak’s daughter as opposition. After real opposition figures were being marginalized, jailed and even murdered for a few years. After the Chechen wars. After the way that privatization happened, and the 1993. Nobody would follow people who are just a subset of the same evil, except playing clean because it’s in fashion.

Then, of course, such a decision, so to say, made by a whole country leads to madness.

And this is what we live since then. Those stormtroopers on crutches storming Ukrainian positions - they know that their orders come from the evil itself. They are not fighting for something or against something, only to feel that evil as more material, or take their share of the suffering, or prove something to themselves. It’s a whole society of depressed people who need to prove something to themselves, because everything around is both evil, fake and dirty, one yearns for purification. It’s desperation of the better kind of people, whether you believe it or not. The worst kind finds ways not to die. It’s even natural for humans, like best shown in Japanese culture of honorable death. In European military cultures honorable suicide was a thing, well, in 2022 a few Russian generals shot themselves. I’ve read about them.

It’s really disgusting to be of the “fat” part of the population of these two.

How’s visiting dozens of pages different from visiting dozens of websites?

And BTW, on sites where feeds are in fashion, maybe some kind of Usenet upgraded for HTML and Markdown and post\author hyperlinks would be more in place.

Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.

We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.

Should just avoid them. That’s hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.

I’ve recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it’s designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It’s not obsolete. It’s a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.

And even the Web as in year 2000.

Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.

But they can be applied to the old model, and it’s simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person’s public key. Overlay networks are a thing.

We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.

The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don’t use it to the full extent.

Yeah, people who thought Google wasn’t openly strangling the free (as in libre) stuff because they weren’t that evil - these people just have bad memory. In year 2012 it clearly felt that corps, Google and Facebook and MS and Apple and everyone, are on the move to capture it all without a way out. They kinda made the illusion of being softer later.

So the question is - how do we even advertise legal but unpleasant for them things, avoiding their censorship.

The devices are sold together with the operating system (often unchangeable) and packaged applications and means of installing software, right from the markets.

I mean, I have a solution. It’s counterintuitive and seems unconnected, and too direct, but I guarantee you it’ll work.

Forbidding companies to do moderation or refuse to accept content without technical problems, or banned content (CP and such), and similar good justifications. As in - if your service is up, and there’s user content served from it, it shouldn’t be removed without legal substantiation. It doesn’t matter it’s free, that doesn’t mean you can do all you like. You are not a media outlet, you are a platform for many media, that’s how you work in fact, so yes, your actions do constitute censorship if you do moderation. If you can’t afford to keep it free with such rules, then start charging money for hosting, as it normally should have been.

And, of course, this should include public offering status, the prices should be the same for all users.

I mean, if we had this from the beginning, we’d probably still have the Web like in year 2003.

Reading all such things I’m starting to think “what if I can drive?” I’ve always thought I can’t, but since everyone around who thinks they can drive like suicide bombers, maybe I should find those driving lessons.

Because laws were made by incompetent and malicious people.

Laws should mandate protocols and formats, not implementations. Protocols and formats mandated by the law should be simple. The whole humanity was just fine transmitting telegrams by Morse code consisting of letter groups. Then it was just fine with fax. If what we absolutely require to stay productive needs to be so astronomically complex that one programmer, given ready libraries for XML, encodings, compression etc, can’t write a fully functional and usable by everyone editor for that in 1 month - then such a protocol or format is not good enough to be mandated by law.

even then Libreoffice isn’t good enough for half the staff in my accounting firm because it lacks certain features for now.

The worst part is where some functionality breaks in a document bigger than a holiday card. I mean formulae vanishing.

I think OOO around year 2009 was very stable and without such annoying bugs. But I haven’t tested it there TBH.

Seriously, feature parity is a dead end. If there were a cross-platform office suite that would at least support the absolutely necessary things with a format not much more complex than org-mode, big documents (300 pages without degrading performance) and UTF-8, it would be fine. I think. That format can even be XML-based, just … why would you have vanishing objects in a document past their certain number? Do they have an unsigned byte counter somewhere?

I agree he’s not a criminal, but I also don’t understand why is it a pardon without abolishing the law by which he was convicted.

And the way copyright is being treated today, where it’s applied only if you are not a big corp, sucks just as badly.

In this case at least the guy is not in prison anymore.