stoolpigeon

Very cool. I've seen somewhat similar set ups for fly tying.

I can respect your opinion but we'll just have to disagree. I appreciate you taking the time to explain your position.

"Isn't that incredibly obvious? " I just asserted that it is not. That was my entire point. I'm not sure how you missed it.

Your assertion that everyone who doesn't agree with you is a liar is problematic. I recommend really thinking about it and the ramifications. You are saying millions of people all agree with you or they are dishonest. Or possibly confused and they will agree with you when the confusion is cleared (unless they are dishonest). I can say I am not convinced and I'm not a liar or a person who is defensive and embarrassed by my not knowing this previously.

I was not aware of this provision that the software must be available for any use until this year (I've been using/involved with FOSS software for about 22 years - unfortunately a good number of years less than half my life) and it didn't occur to me as being necessary because to me saying something like, "this is open source except for military use" or "this is open source for non-profits" seems just as reasonable as "you can't modify this code and distribute binaries unless you distribute that new code". For people willing to agree to the terms, it is open. For the people unwilling to agree it is not.

I've never been really involved on the legal end of it all. In business contexts I used whatever was approved and the personal projects I've done, I've always used an MIT license because it was the easiest for me to understand.

I found out about this on github when I saw some issues opened on a project, because it was described as open source but the license didn't fit the OSI description. I found it to be interesting but also disappointing because it seems to be an issue of "comply or be attacked". There were links about why the vitriol was justified, but I read through it all and wasn't persuaded that the anger directed at the project owner was appropriate.

A license by its very nature restricts things. It's just a matter of which things and I think there is room in this space to be a good actor and have a different opinion. As the GPL says, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions..."

I don't see a long chain from "I don't want anyone to keep you from reading and modifying this code" to "I don't want someone to use this code to create an environment that takes away the human rights necessary to read and modify this code".

The fallback position I've seen is the one repeated here - "Everyone already knows and agrees with this except bad actors." and I just doubt that's true. Too many people make software and it's too large a group for me to take at face value any claims regarding a majority understanding. I'd want to see something objective that shows the work was done to know this rather than it just being an opinion or reflective of anecdotal evidence.

"For most developers and even a fair number of users open source isn't a fuzzy concept but a very concrete technical term describing a very particular kind of license. "

A particular kind, yes. The OSI definition? I'd want to see something that showed objectively that this is what people think. I saw some projects I support come under fire for not being open source recently- I've been. a user and supporter of FOSS software for a long time. I didn't realize that making exclusions on who can use your software wasn't open source. If a developer doesn't want their code used in a weapons system, it doesn't meet the OSI definition.

I know it now, but then I think that leaves the software to use a term that's much less accurate. I don't think that happens because they have a profit motive and want to exploit the term open source. In fact I've seen licenses that are essentially open source except they try to stop people from making a bunch of money off of community work, including those currently controlling the project.

I felt that way until I saw what he did with the floppy drive. Best part of the build in my opinion.

Which makes the whole point of the post I just read moot. I just switch one company that controls my stuff to another company that controls my stuff.

Hosting a server from my house is a violation of the TOS from my ISP. My choices are them or DSL. I don't live in a rural area. I'm well inside a metro area of 5 million people in the USA.

when I was in high school in the 80s we'd do the flipping the polarizer thing a lot. Never went beyond that though.

The US is the only place I think I've had to remove shoes for flight security in years. But in Europe taking off a belt is often required while in the US it is not. In Budapest they stopped having us remove laptops from bags a bit ago. My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.

I just spent a week in Chicago - and the lack of a bus lane made buses our last choice. Traffic is terrible so bus travel is egregiously slow compared to the metro or trains. I'm used to Budapest where a bus is a great way to beat traffic.

I've only observed it from the outside (I worked on an aircraft carrier - but nothing to do with the power plants) but what I observed is that it takes a lot of people that get payed a lot of money in the private sector to safely operate and maintain reactors. I'm guessing that the building costs would be dwarfed by the long term cost of manning nuclear ships.

Yes. I still have mine and I didn't pay for it. I don't remember how/where I got it but it was free to me.

Yeah - I read it the same way initially and I was really at a loss. When I clicked through I figured it out.

I took over some documents from a colleague that left my office and found he had done all his work in word perfect. I was at a loss as I needed to get some of the information. I was really relieved to find out that Google Docs could open the files.

The two times I've been to SA it was for conferences and normally they had been held in Asia. It was a completely different experience going into them without some pretty heavy jet lag. Everything was better. And I could see how it impacted the people who had come from farther east or west. It was super interesting to see it play out. I don't know where we would have met this year - the pandemic took care of that.

From the post and op's comments - they really hate a lot of stuff. I find that people like this who can't really handle changes they don't like have a tough time communicating about it in an effective way or doing anything about it that is meaningful. Mostly I see them try to stir up trouble that could have a negative impact on the people actually doing things and that's about it.

One of the strangest feelings I've had is flying from Amsterdam to Johannesburg. It's a super long trip and so mentally I was expecting jet lag. But there was no time change. The season flipped but the time of day was right in sync with everyone back home in Budapest.

My daughter is a university student in the US and had something like this happen. I was on the phone with her when she took it to an Apple store and they told her they would wipe the machine. She has some stuff on there she really didn't want to lose (we've had a lot of talks about backing things up since then) and so I had her buy a new machine (she really needed one). And she's holding onto the old one until I get to the US to visit her this summer. I would be very, very interested in any information you can share about what you did. I have ideas of where to start but anything that could possibly help would be greatly appreciated.

It's unusual. But this hack was also unusual. All the rest I'd heard of had much more localized ramifications. This one they hit too hard and I'm not sure the apology will be enough to stop what they have probably put into motion.

As a US expat living in Europe, credit unions are a non-starter from me. Even big banks are not very good. USAA has been the best so far because they are set up to support military folks living over seas. I'm not in the military but I benefit from what they do to support those people.

"The average Gen X had no computer in their teens."

I don't think this is true. I was born towards the front end of gen x - 1969 - and I had a vic-20 as a teen. Most of my friends, including some that were definitely not in the "nerd" circles I ran in had them. I had friends with commodore 64s, tandy color computers, timex sinclairs, etc. Our high school had macs and my jr high had TRS-80s.

By 96 I had a packard bell 386sx that came with dos but ran windows. AOL was a thing and it was a very, very different world than dialing up BBSs on my vic-20 as a kid.

I don't know how much I agree with the author's premise, I would need to think on it more. But I think at least from the perspective of people my age - there is definitely a big difference between how we grew up and what was available compared to millenials. I didn't own my first cell phone until after 2000. By the time the first millenials were 10 in 2006, 77% of people in the US had cell phone subscriptions. By the time they were 15 in 2011 it was over 95%.

I think the article's tone is problematic and some of the assertions but I also feel some agreement in terms of how I emotionally viewed technology and the possibilities it brought compared to when I talk to younger people now and how they see it.

In general I'm not crazy about stuff that is based around praising one's self. I get a lot of marketing on facebook that assumes I want to buy t-shirts that brag about how awesome I am because of the different groups I belong to - including my age, gen-x, etc. I find it to be off putting.

That said - I see the author's point about how we grew up with a sense of the wide open possibility. There is a feeling I had as a teen that this new world of computing made anything possible. I had posters of EA devs up on my walls and my friends and I wrote our own games that we played.

As things moved along and dev tools got expensive I lost some of that optimism until I ran into FOSS in the early 00s. That reignited the whole thing for me. But I think it will be a constant battle against many forces to keep open platforms, tools and networks. At the same time I think regulation has to be a part of it. It's a balancing act like so much of life.

I think the key is finding how it impacts the majority of people and helping them understand why it matters to them. They may not understand technical or philosophical arguments - they need to see the real impact on their daily lives.

The little Hungarian town I live in Diósd, has one. It's on a tiny street (most are in the town I guess) and a bit out of the way, I'd love to know how frequently it's used. I've never seen one in the US but it strikes me as a great idea.

I think more than just the purpose it fills on its own, it's part of a larger set of community resources that make this a nicer place to live. There are places to get and deposit bags for picking up dog poop. There are cute signs that go with them. There are signs made by local school kids about slowing down around crosswalks, and flags for them to carry as they cross the street - so they are more visible. (There aren't too many of those as most streets in town are really small as I've said.)

We're a near suburb of Budapest and probably on the upper end of the socio-economic scale but I still think it brings up some great ideas of how to build a great community.

My wife and I live in Hungary. Every so often we visit Phoenix, AZ in the summer to see family. (My wife is a teacher so it makes sense to go in summer) and the hardest thing for us to do when we go out to eat is finding a restaurant that has seating where we are not freezing cold. It will be 40+ outside and 20 inside.

There is a courthouse in Phoenix, Arizona, USA built predominately with glass. Summer days there are in the 40s. It boggles my mind.

That article proves my point. They are taking about people buying air guns that fire rubber bullets.

In 2019 the rate of gun deaths per 100000 people in Hungary was 0.61 and in the USA it was 3.96

There are things I worry about but mass shootings like those that happen in the US on a regular basis are not one of them. Violent crime in general is very low here.

When I moved from the US to Hungary it took a year maybe for me to really relax and realize for the first time how much stress I'd been carrying - all around guns.

If you had tried to talk to me about it before I had lived here I would have told you that you were crazy and that the US is really safe. And in a lot of ways it is safe, but the emotional reaction is legitimate and completely understandable.

The first time we took our kids back, one night we were out front of the house we were staying in. A truck drove by on the street and the girls kind of huddled together. I said, "What's wrong?" They said, "We don't want to get shot."

When you live in an environment where the idea of just any random person having and using a gun is close to unthinkable, shifting to an environment where anyone could have and use a gun at any time is stressful.

No - it never did.

I think the cost of the tooling did matter but I also agree about licensing costs for their server products.

The first time I got to work with Linux for money (as opposed for fun at home) was when I had a project where the MS Licensing would cost a lot more than the hardware it would run on.

They let me do it with Redhat, PHP and PostgreSQL. They bought the box from Dell and that was it. No licensing to track or pay. The freedom was just amazing and made business sense.

I've never been anywhere near any volcano. If you don't mind - what does it smell like? Could you feel the heat from it? What was the sound like? If you don't have the time I understand but I'd love to hear what the experience was like to be that close.

This is the key difference. They mobile games don't want you to wait and come back tomorrow. They want you to pay to remove the blocks and just keep playing, today, tomorrow, every day.