AnyOldName3

With how the law is written, if you think anyone might ever make a mistake (likely), think the government might ever bother going through the hassle of enforcing it (probably less likely if you’re not running a big website), and don’t have loads of spare money to pay huge fines with or to pay an age verification service with (likely), then blocking the UK is the only way to be compliant. It doesn’t require a technicality. The law just doesn’t have any leeway for honest minor mistakes or small hobbyist websites.

Some instances use the image proxy and others don’t. It seems that mine doesn’t.

Fun fact: I can’t see the screenshot as I’m in the UK and your instance has taken the maximally paranoid literal meaning of the OSA and blocked access just in case anything’s accidentally not flagged as NSFW.

Godwin’s law isn’t claiming that it’s fallacious to compare things to Hitler or that the person who first mentions Hitler is wrong, it’s just observing that comparisons to Hitler eventually happen if an argument goes on long enough. It’s kind of obvious, too. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument, and as long as whoever you’re discussing something is isn’t ludicrously off the deep end, they’ll agree that Hitler is obviously bad, so if someone says something, and that thing when taken to its logical conclusion would imply (in the logically guarantees sense rather than subtly suggests sense) that Hitler wasn’t bad, it’s quick and easy to point that out as a demonstration that the thing must be wrong.

In this specific case, though, it’s even simpler. Hitler and Thatcher are both obviously bad, and they were putting words in my mouth about Thatcher when objecting to a comment where I’d explicitly called her evil to suggest that I was claiming she wasn’t evil.

Unironically, if you bing Windows API related queries rather than googling them, you’re much more likely to find a relevant manual page that answers your question clearly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is actively worsening Windows-related queries to make Windows look bad and sell Android devices and Chromebooks. Another example is that googling msvcp140.dll not found or similar queries gives you loads of dodgy download this individual DLL here and put it in System32 and we promise we’ve not tampered with it websites instead of the page for the universal MSVC redistributable installer that’s the only supported way to get the DLL (and a bunch of other related ones) as an end user.

As for silly nomenclature, generally on Windows, API functions are much more likely to describe what they do and much less likely to be a town in Wales. If you don’t already know what fstat does, it’s much easier to guess that GetFileTime would be the right function to get a file’s last modification time than fstat, for example.

But her favourite story book said that if she destroyed all the industry then the invisible hand of the free market would liberate all the workers from drudgery and they’d all become doctors and live lives of luxury and never have to do any work.

Thatcher was a die-hard believer in Ayn Rand’s economics, and a core part of that is that people are poor because you give them the opportunity to be, and then through several unexplained leaps of logic, that if you take away the option to be a bit poor, instead of making everyone even poorer like obviously happens in real life, somehow they’ll instantly gain qualifications in unrelated fields and become rich. It’s insane, and yet somehow a wildly popular worldview among the ‘intellectual’ right, despite being dismissed as moronic by anyone with two braincells to rub together and every serious academic.

It’s roughly equivalent to claiming we should enslave short people and call them house elves and then as a result we’ll all get wands and certificates from Hogwarts that let us do magic (except the house elves, who wouldn’t need wands), but then instead of being placed into a secure hospital to protect the public, you get put in charge of one of the most influential countries in the world, and by an unrelated coincidence, the North Sea Oil Boom happens and makes that country more wealthy, so then decades later, magic being accepted as fact despite being purely from a fantasy novel full of plotholes.

Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.

It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.

It’s cheaper, so if you’re not keen on crime, that’s a reason.

It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.

There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.

Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.

It was a Thatcher-era thing, and despite being evil and wrong about nearly everything, she at least thought what she was doing would help normal people. In the case of privatisation, it was accompanied by a big push to get normal people to buy shares in the newly formed companies. As a result, the water companies are mostly owned by pension funds and there’s a large chunk that’s normal people owning a tiny bit each. That’s then meant that any attempt to claw back illegally paid dividends (the companies have a legal duty to invest in keeping the water working and haven’t been doing so) would tank loads of people’s pensions, as would dissolving the companies or putting stronger restrictions on paying out dividends.

The whole system’s all knotted together in a way that makes all the obvious solutions cause other big problems, and the government can’t afford to cause big problems when the polls have Reform so far ahead on account of them just claiming the obvious solutions will work flawlessly and not giving a shit about whether that’s true. Everything’s so on fire that it can’t be extinguished within a single electoral term, let alone rebuilt, so it’s become the priority to avoid upsetting anyone before the next election, lest the flamethrowers get voted in again only with napalm as fuel this time instead of petrol because the Tories have been eclipsed.

It’s not clear that the AGPL is enforceable in lots of countries, so the GPL is safer if you don’t need the extra restrictions.

The open source movement was corporations trying to have their cake and eat it too with the things the free software movement had done. That means organisations calling attention to open source without mentioning free software will always push against copyleft as their goal is to get free labour and testing for things megacorporations use while reserving the right to take future development private.

You can’t. Blocking commercial use stops a licence being open source. If you don’t want commercial competition, then you need copyleft, so anyone using your code has to share their modifications with whoever they give binaries to. If they end up using your code to make a better product, then it’ll have to be open source, too, and you can incorporate the improvements back into your version.

That’s not entirely true anymore. Sound engineers did lots of experiments with microphones placed in the ears of plastic heads, and as a result, we know the modifications that need to be made to a sound to make it seem like it’s coming from so specific point when played through headphones. It works with both over-ear and in-ear ones and works well (despite what the other poster said) as pinna squiggles are accounted for and it turns out that humans don’t need their own personal pinna shape for it to work.

You can find impressive demos by searching for binaural sound, both from microphones in a plastic head or with simulated HRTF.

The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they’re just people selling keys they’ve generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it’s students reselling free keys they’ve got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer’s enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft’s eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can’t be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it’s also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

It can’t be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn’t officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they’re buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they’re likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

Thermal paper is generally not recyclable, which is another downside.

Variations of this meme get posted every week, but I’ve never experienced it, despite having had tens of grub updates murder-suicide the Windows boot loader and grub itself across five or six different machines. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to rebuild a Windows boot partition, but the frequency that I’m hit with this problem is one of the major reasons I avoid using Linux. Eventually I’m going to have to switch, but that’s driven mainly by Windows getting worse rather than any of the pain points I’ve had when trying to switch full time in the past having been fixed.

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.