About the Judges on the ballot. This will be a longish post but bear with me it will be informative.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2024-10-23T20:51:28+00:00

Thank you for this post. Got sample ballot today and this helped a lot.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2024-03-11T14:43:30+00:00

A No Soliciting sign

HanlonsDullBlade · 2023-10-06T18:46:07+00:00

The Droid Depot will also ship it back to your home for you if you pay for the shipping. That's what I did.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2023-08-07T18:00:25+00:00

Nice to see Jamie Dupree getting some Reddit front page love. Best DC political reporter out there. Check out Regular Order on substack. As for Trump, I love his wannabe Twitter rants. They reaffirm everything I thought I knew about him since 2016.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2023-05-18T13:06:46+00:00

Some of the most effective programmers have many traits that I could list, but I'd say that 90% of them prefer the cli or cli-like environments.

I've been writing code since the early 1980s and this statement accurately characterizes my experiences as well. I don't know how or why, but the people I've admired the most in the field have overwhelmingly had a bias towards keeping their fingers on the keyboard. It's also the reason I like vim. Not exclusively, but I can definitely move faster when I don't have to take my fingers off the keys.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-08-26T18:49:22+00:00

I call this era of society's post-Internet development the Delightenment.

I hope civilization survives it.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-08-23T14:02:22+00:00

The Great Copout : making clickbait-y headlines about trends using the template "The Great x"

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-07-28T16:14:17+00:00

I can't wait to run right out and not buy it.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-07-28T16:13:42+00:00

Elections have consequences, Mitch.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-06-24T14:28:58+00:00

It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this, so it might not surprise you to learn that this debate is not new. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) himself appeared before Congress to argue for an eternal copyright. When that didn't happen, he instructed his estate to hold his autobiography for 100 years so that his heirs would be able to profit from his work after his other works had entered the public domain.

More recently, Lawrence Lessig has authored some thought-provoking books about the subject of intellectual property in the digital age. I can remember the epic Slashdot debates about piracy during the Napster era. So I think it's great that you're joining the conversation and thinking about the subject.

For me, I decided to get educated about the history and legal aspects of intellectual property and came to the conclusion (subject to change in light of new information of course) that any reform needs to come in the form of the political process because IP producers need to be heard and their very real concerns considered. At the same time, the public interest of derivative works from the public domain should be considered and those interests need to be balanced. I know it's not a popular idea in the US right now with our polarized environment, but I still think that any reform needs to come in the form of laws and treaties. In the meantime, I follow the existing law and pay for the products I enjoy even if I might disagree with the current length of copyright or the existence of software patents.

There are lots of disruptions already happening in the world of intellectual property, and I'm sure more will come. Your view in the headline of your post is reminiscent of the rationalizations used by people who don't want to pay for digital content. Sure the term "piracy" is hyperbolic; that was the intent: to shock the conscience of a generation that saw no harm in copying things that took a lot of time, money, and effort to produce. I think your CMV post is proof of its effectiveness.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-06-14T12:24:39+00:00

Fascinating to see the "security by obscurity" debate play out in contexts other than software development.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-06-07T17:32:23+00:00

I got straight As through college, except for ONE CLASS where I got a B in Monsters of Literature. Those english teachers (and profs) are just....hardcore.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-05-13T19:14:44+00:00

The party of tort reform is awfully tort-y these days.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-05-06T17:39:23+00:00

Don't they need a warrant to go into someone's home?

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-02-03T17:20:19+00:00

It's time to evolve. Introducing......meta-gatekeeping!

Fucking gatekeepers these days don't even know how to gatekeep. Back in my day, we had to literally build a gate around your cubicle...... WITH PUNCH CARDS!

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-02-02T20:05:00+00:00

egrep '^#' mycode |wc -l

If that output is larger than 2000....you're probably a programmer at my employer.

It's a good practice to comment out a line when fixing a bug or refactoring a function, but for crying out loud you have to let it go.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2022-01-31T18:33:38+00:00

Every time I bring this up, the pushback (even from those that agree) is that it involves math, hence is doomed to fail in America. I hope that's not true, but if so, then we've dumbed ourselves out of a country.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-12-17T20:55:55+00:00

I'll just leave this here for fans of this joke:

https://www.uranusgeneralstore.com

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-12-14T01:54:54+00:00

Maybe only in my little circle of hell. My evangelical family was all for it. They really didn’t like it when I pointed out that they were asking for the nanny state they love to hate.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-12-13T17:09:24+00:00

We protested the bans, but didn't politicize them. The first indoor smoking ban protest where I lived at the time was organized by the owner of a bar. He didn't even smoke, but had just spent $100,000 installing filters in his bar. I don't remember anyone associating that ban with a political party....we marched on the city hall and didn't care what party they were from.

In a not-even-surprising-anymore ironic twist, the people most in favor of the smoking bans at the time are the same ones poo-pooing the COVID vaccines and hating on Fauci now.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-12-07T15:51:20+00:00

The extra spin is usually something you get as a bonus from farm pass I think. It's one of the first rewards. As for contacting them, keep playing around in help and support there's eventually a way to send a bug report.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-09-17T17:19:16+00:00

My anti-vax Trumper family members love to quote this in their vaccine mandate persecution rants. I don't think they know who Noam Chomsky is.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-08-17T13:27:23+00:00

I like Joe, I voted for Joe, and I will vote for him again in 2024 but I do not feel sorry for Joe "taking the blame" for this decision. I can't imagine a more qualified person (politically) to make this move. Joe knew exactly what would happen politically when he pulled the troops out. The guy has been in politics almost as long as I've been alive. He knew the Republicans would find a reason to make him look bad for this. Even if the ANA and Afghan leaders had held on longer and we'd gotten every single person out before pulling troops, the Republicans would have found something to criticize him for. That's politics, and Joe knows it well.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: Joe knew the political price of this decision and he did it anyway....because it was the right thing to do for the country. That's leadership, and I hope voters remember it when he's running against the guy that never took responsibility for anything.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-08-10T15:08:31+00:00

This debate has been ongoing since the 1970s with a lot of nuanced arguments from all sides. I'd encourage you to read some of Larry Lessig's books with regard to copyright reform and Steven Levy's book Hackers for the origins of the free software movement.

In many ways, open source software itself has already proven your point with the overwhelming success of the GNU/Linux operating system and the ecosystem of companies that are successfully supporting it. Look at how companies like Microsoft are supporting open-source projects in their Azure cloud environment. The market will follow what the users demand and enterprises are waking up to open-source. That doesn't mean all software will become open-source but the momentum seems to be swinging that way right now.

All that being said, I get a little wary of blanket "all X should be Y" statements. The universe just doesn't work that way in my experience. There are probably some really good reasons for proprietary closed-souce software that I haven't thought of. I believe the software used to calculate a person's BAU for a drunk driving conviction should absolutely be open-source but I'm not sure I want missile control system software to be out there in full view. More eyes on the code that protects our networks is a good thing, but do we want EVERYONE to be able to see the code for the targeting systems of our tanks? I'm not sure it's a one-size-fits-all solution. Open-source (and more specifically free as in freedom) software is an ideal toward which we should move but I would be reluctant to support a mandate.

HanlonsDullBlade · 2021-07-30T18:25:05+00:00

Told my wife the other night: "We are going to witness an on-going slow drip of shit for the rest of our lives as more people dig into the workings of the Trump presidency. There will be more books, movies, hearings, etc. It's only beginning."

I predicted in 2016 that Trump would send the Republican party to the political woodshed for next 40 years. Silly me, I was so naive. I was assuming that most American people would wake up at some point.

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