Retirement doesn’t exist. Only hospice.

Absinthe makes the mind go wander.

I was going to make that point. Especially in the horror or boner comedy genres where being outrageous is the point, movies are often edited for an R rating for theatrical release and then will proudly boast being unrated on the DVD packaging.

The MPAA is not a government agency, it’s an industry self-rating board. Same shit, different decade as the ESRB. You can make, distribute and exhibit films without an MPAA rating in the United States. But, most theaters especially the large chains will refuse to show your film, it won’t be broadcast on television, and most if not all cable channels will refuse to show it, either by contract or simply as a business decision.

Can you create a movie similar to the “Serbian Film” while overseas but will it be approved by the MPAA for theater screenings?

Yes. A Serbian Film (2010, directed by Srđan Spasojević) was rated NC-17 by the MPAA and its first ever screening was in Austin, Texas.

Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn’t that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn’t your ISP collecting that bill though.

In the early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to have an ISP that wasn’t your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don’t remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising “more local numbers?”

Well into the 90’s, you’d have use for a modem even if you didn’t have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You’d dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.

Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It’s the 1990’s, nobody’s got a Venmo account, hell you can’t rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don’t ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer’s modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download…almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.

Fortunately Lemmy is an open source project with accessible documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html

Dolly Parton was a major philanthropist, she did a lot of work in children’s literacy.

That technology 100% exists and I’m in favor of installing it.

The GUI app stores are much better than any helper script I could write.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Something I would approve right now is a solar panel that plugs into the wall, and then a device plugs into the panel. So functionally the panel is an extension cord that generates a little bit of power. It would only power things down stream, wouldn’t put anything back onto the grid, but if you have a load that’s continuously heavier than what the panel puts out, like say a refrigerator, who cares? It powers the device from solar and makes up the difference from the wall.

I have a device that does exactly that with the addition of a big honkin’ battery. It can power devices entirely independent of the grid, function as a UPS, and it even has time of use functionality. If you’ve got variable rate power, this unit can be set to run on battery when power is expensive and recharge when power is cheap, while blending in solar as much as possible. It won’t put power back on the grid so it’s already UL listed and as far as I’m aware it’s already legal everywhere in North America (I have the US model with NEMA 5-15 sockets) as we speak.

Radar doesn’t work underwater. Sonar does, though most subs want to be stealthier than constantly shouting downwards.

apt-search and dnf-search both exist. I have used both. I prefer a GUI for that because they’ll provide things like screenshots, no CLI tool does, neither to TUI tools like Aptitude.

Cats are a newtonian fluid with a melting point somewhere around 75F. If I cool the house to 74 or below, Izzy loafs or curls up in a ball. If I let it get warmer than that in the house she stretches out. They remain viscous and cohesive with a high surface tension.

Note this testing is done at around 29.8 inches of mercury ambient pressure.

Then make themed instances. Everyone wants to make general purpose instances probably with our particular brand of politics on it so we get soc dem c/linux and dem soc c/linux and communist c/linux and we have no values of our own other than hatred of America c/linux.

Make an instance where only communities about music are allowed. Or about sports, or TV/movies. Let that be where that content lives, on a website that refuses to host religious content like c/fuckcars at the domain level.

Phrased another way, trying to make !charlottehornets@sh.itjust.works is trying to start a niche community in a niche community in a niche community. Founding !charlottehornets@sportslemmy.net is one fewer shell of nichedom.

Well here’s what I’ve seen tried:

Make a WHOLE BUNCH of communities on a general purpose instance, one for each team in a league, and then add a bot to each one that posts game results or scores or whatever the fuck they’re called, so that anyone sorting by New sees nothing but redundant sports statistics until they go through the process of blocking everything you’ve done to make the rest of the platform usable again.

The United States was at one point a manufacturing powerhouse. We built the materiel to fight our own two front war and a lot of the kit used by our allies. Our solution to any other nation on Earth trying to put the thumb on the scale should be to shrug our shoulders and just fucking win. We’ve got manpower, energy and resources falling out of our ears.

It was both better AND cheaper.

I’ve seen similar tariffs circumnavigated by putting cheap crappy seats in the bed of the Subaru BRAT or selling a Japanese truck as a “Ford Ranger.” Or importing parts and assembling them in America rather than just importing the whole truck.

Tariffs are politics, politics is bullshit, therefore tariffs are bullshit.

If a few individuals did it, no. Plugging in a 200 watt source would be equivalent to unplugging a 200 watt load. That’s the equivalent of turning off 4 incandescent light bulbs. I think I might have seen the power grid handle that kind of “disruption.”

On the other hand, imagine if 100 million people go out and buy 100 watt solar panel kits. The load on the power grid is going to vary by a gigawatt every sunrise and sunset. A city in which a million people have 100 watt panels will have to handle a variance of 100 megawatts every time a cloud rolls over town.

At the individual level, what concerns me about the “panel you plug into a normal outlet” form factor is that it breaks a bunch of fundamental principles of the power grid, like “sources of power should be sockets not plugs, so that it’s at least nominally difficult to touch live wires.” Having a source of power on the load side of a circuit breaker further rustles my jimmies. I think the only thing that’s going to stop them from causing problems like overheating wires in walls is the practical limit on panel size.

If you’re going to plug solar panels into the grid this way, they’re going to have to be well engineered or they’re going to hurt someone. You don’t want to own one of these if Big Clive has a lot to say about them, and since most of them are going to be manufactured in China…just expect an increase in residential fires as more jurisdictions approve them for use.

And I don’t think it works at all for manufactured goods.

For example, in the 70’s or 80’s Yamaha came out with their Virago line of motorcycles. They were American style teardrop tank cruisers set to compete directly with Harley-Davidson, except with objectively better engines and lower prices. The only thing Harley had going for it was their trademark engineering mistake. of a single pin crankshaft.

Harley asked the government to step in, the government applied a tariff to motorcycles over…some engine displacement, I think it was 1200ccs or so. Yamaha responded by slightly reducing the cylinder bore to bring it down to 1150cc and made a range of lower end models all the way down to 250cc, none of which qualified for the tariff, and Yamaha is still selling cruisers in the US to this day, meanwhile Harley-Davidson is a popular designer clothing label with a small vestigial powersports division.