kermitismyhero

Forgive me for getting angry at the wilful ignorance of so many useful idiots. I'm just kinda done with being "nice". Over a decade of vetted, verifiable leaks exposing the unbridled evil of the US military-industrial complex, and most Americans are just as lazy and stupid and cowed as ever. Wikileaks releases video of American helicopter pilots laughing while they gun down journalists, and Americans shrug.

So let me get banned for speaking my piece in a disrespectful manner. I welcome it. Frankly, if I could find a "delete my account" button, I'd hit it in a heartbeat. Sheep, the whole goddamn lot of you.

>Criminal charges are handled in US District Courts, and are Constitutionally guaranteed to be public.

If you think that the US DOJ hasn't spent a million man-hours to find some way to keep everything as secret as possible, you haven't been paying attention to their actions thus far. They will find some way to kangaroo-court him out of the public eye. They do it with foreign nationals all the time.

>He would be sent to USA to respond of his alleged crimes in front of a public court of justice.

Haha, no. He'd be sent to a secret FISA Star Chamber. There's no way he'd be tried in public.

And if the Swedish authorities wanted Assange to answer for alleged crimes in Sweden, all they had to do was publicly declare that they wouldn't extradite Assange to the US. That was the sole requirement he had made of the Swedish authorities in exchange for his willingness to return to Sweden. The fact that the Swedish authorities refused even that is deeply suspicious.

Strangely enough, there's the same sort of renewables-only electricity choices in oil-obsessed Alberta, Canada. The city of Calgary's rail transit system runs solely on electricity purchased from wind farms.

I didn't know that Andrew Askins ran Google.

In fairness to Asimov's laws of robotics, he invented them as a device to illustrate how fundamentally flawed those sorts of rules can be. His robot stories are about how unforeseen situations create unexpected behaviour, despite apparently simple and rigid rules. He wasn't really trying to promote those laws as a practical solution to future robotics problems. He wanted a source of conflict as fuel for stories.

>I really wish uBlock Origin at least had the option to enable a blacklist model

It effectively does have this capability. Just disable all the standard filter lists, and manually add one's own entries to the "my filters" section.

This method has the added benefit of enabling other useful privacy features that don't directly relate to display advertising, like killing off the nastiness of hyperlink auditing, CSP reports going to 3rd parties, prefetching, and remote fonts.

Exactly. Technology exists to solve problems. One of the greatest problems in today's world is the metaphorical tsunami of advertising sewage flooding our mental shorelines. Browser-based adblockers neatly solve that problem.

As for the "But how do we pay for all these free things then?" counterargument, I'd suggest voluntary restraint on the part of website creators. I can live with a few modest JPEG-only banner ads hosted directly from the site I'm visiting. If a site promises to not use animated images, streaming video, streaming audio, any sort of trackers, any sort of third-party content, and if they keep the screen-real-estate ratio of ads to content relatively low, then I'll whitelist them in a heartbeat.

Spotted the true Canadian. (Or possibly Michigander.)

>There should be a word for "overly concerned and judgmental about what other people do in their private life"

How about "vegan"?

>By this quiz rationale, your average vegetable wouldn't be vegan because it may rely on animal fertilizer...

Heck, this could be extended to the use of oxygen to breathe. It's another byproduct of a plant process that has animal waste (CO2) as an input.

>Vegans own smug and 'ethical checkmate' inanity

I maintain that the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim are one of the finest satirical concepts I've ever seen in fiction.

KDE these days seems like configurability-overload. I appreciate the flexibility but it just feels excessive to me. I think a lot of the options should be tucked away into an equivalent of Firefox's about:config. For me, something like XFCE has the ideal config panel complexity. (Of course, it's all subjective.)

The recent extension-disabling problem made me realize how awful the unfiltered web is. Trying to use mobile Chrome for the first time ever was a dreadful experience. I legitimately had no idea that mobile Chrome doesn't have any extension capability whatsoever. I always assumed it was a Firefox-style unified experience where the same desktop extensions worked on mobile. I was horrified to discover otherwise.

Ads ads ads everywhere. How do people actually live day-to-day with mobile browsers that have no true adblocking capability? Using mobile Chrome is like taking a stroll through a plague ward.

>Tumblr used to be, it might as well be dead now, it's going the way of MySpace (sold off a few times, passed around, until it's hardly valuable at all).

That will turn around quick if Pornhub actually succeeds in buying it.

>GPay

I'm very happy to live in Canada, where Google Pay is completely irrelevant thanks to Interac. I can walk into any business with a payment terminal and know that my debit card will just plain work, no matter my back or credit union. And I can send money instantly online to anyone else who also has an account at a Canadian bank or credit union.

Of course, this means that my bank knows all my transactions, but not using a bank is orders of magnitude harder than not using Google.

I've always found it disturbing how Gargron rarely makes any attempt to disabuse people of the incorrect notion that Mastodon was the start of, and the canonical example of, open and federated social networks.

If anyone deserves that sort of credit, it would arguably be Evan Prodromou and the original identica a decade ago. Though I could wrong, and unaware of anyone prior to him working on this sort of federated and open twitter clone.

>I suppose after that would be New Sagan

Oh, I don't know. Sounds like that sort of rocket would cost billions and billions of dollars.

In fairness to SpaceX, Falcon Heavy's long delays weren't a result of mismanagement or false claims. The delays were due to Heavy turning out to be largely unnecessary for routine operations and development being put on the back burner. Falcon 9's capabilities (particularly in the engines) were improved to the point where it could handle missions once thought to require Heavy. Those same continual improvements meant that it was a more efficient use of engineers' time to wait for the more-or-less final Falcon 9 design before starting serious work on Heavy.

But I do share skepticism on Blue Origin. It's hard to develop rockets in total secrecy. If New Glenn was anywhere close to flying, even in an expendable test configuration, we'd at least know that much even if they chose to keep the details confidential.

It's also easier on the learning curve. I've just gotten back into coding as a hobby after a two-decade-long gap. In that time every few years I've tried to pick up C, and always ended up bewildered and frustrated by garbage collection matters. Maybe with formal instruction I could have figured it out, but the learning curve as a weekend/evening hobbyist was like a vertical cliff.

But in one month with Go, I've gone from "barely remembers his teenage QBasic days and dabbles in VBA at work" to "writing genuinely useful utilities with minimal time investment". I'm sure the language has limitations, but I've yet to run into any that are personal showstoppers.

This is like the software equivalent of Red Letter Media's video library.

I did see and disable the telemetry option in the preferences the first time I used it, and so far it seems to behave itself and not quietly re-enable telemetry.

When I discovered VS Code a few months ago (I'm a hobbyist just getting into coding, not a professional) after many recommendations from friends who code and are die-hard open source true-believers, I did a legitimate doubletake after reading the name of the company that developed it.

I then spent an hour researching it, trying to find out what the catch was. Was the wikipedia page entry a prank? Was I getting some kind of malware masquerading as a pro development tool? Was is a temporary trial before big licensing fees were demanded of me? Does it need some sort expensive companion server that only runs on Windows Server? What's the catch?

But no, no catch. It's free, and it's open, and it works great. But every time I launch it I feel like I've walked into some weird alternate dimension. I have to remind myself that yes, this is reality: I'm using a native-Linux, fast, reliable, extensible, MIT-licensed editor made by freakin' Microsoft. So strange, man. So strange.

I think it's funny because the entrenched establishment politicians like Steve Bannon are also the ones most opposed to Sanders and his allies.

>"I think ultimate success is regime change ... the goal is quite simply to break the back of this totalitarian mercantilist economic society."

The really funny thing is that Bernie Sanders' supporters have the exact same goal in mind.

After the Wikileaks Vault 7 releases, specifically the details about how Marble and Umbrage make it easy to implement a digital false-flag attack, I don't see how anyone can be certain of the identity of a sufficiently skilled attacker in the modern era. Any state security agency in any reasonably-advanced country likely has their own equivalents of the Marble and Umbrage tools at this point.

Was this attack from China? Was it from the US making it look like China to justify US economic and diplomatic retaliation? Was it from Germany looking to embarrass the US with a false-false-flag attack making it look like the US made a false-flag attack on China after the US spied on Merkel's phone conversations?

We could go down rabbit holes forever. Who can be completely trusted to speak openly, knowledgeably, and honestly on specific instances of attacks? Every last individual and organization in that world is neck-deep in their own agendas.

Mastodon and similar projects like Pleroma are old school wild-west open source distributed endeavours, not "notice me, Facebook-senpai!" SV startups. Anyone who thinks that the developers and users involved in those projects give a damn about branding is deeply out of touch with that culture.

Sounds like it might be fun to load one's devices with infinite zips labelled with tempting filenames, like "red light district itinerary.zip". https://research.swtch.com/zip

Oh they absolutely were. Their research into the time periods in which they wrote sketches was often far better than that of "serious" films and TV series. Notably, Terry Jones has had a deep professional and personal interest in medieval literature and art his whole life. I'd bet good money on his being intimately familiar with medieval killer rabbits when they worked on Holy Grail.

Many people are otherwise using their ISP's DNS servers, which are often even worse with regards to performance and reliability. Long ago I did tech support for an ISP, and I'd say that 9/10ths of our "outages" were due to our overworked ancient DNS servers failing. I'd go off-script when I took calls during those kinds of outages, and just help people set 4.2.2.2 in their router's DNS settings the moment I saw a strong signal in the line test and hosts not resolving. Managers made snide comments about that not being the official procedure and "not displaying confidence in $ISP", but it fixed the problem.