Copyrights (rights to media content) do not lapse because of failure to enforce them.

Trademarks (the right to call your product a specific name) can lapse if members of the general public start associating it with a type of product rather than your specific brand. This happened with “zipper”, “jet ski”, and “popsicle”. But you can’t sue Grandma Smith because she mistakingly referred to an Xbox as “a Nintendo”.

Pretty good track record with videogames too.

I agree to some extent, as there are plenty of distros that don’t do anything significantly different from each other and don’t need to exist. I also see what you mean about desktop environments. While I think there’s space for all the small exotic window managers that exist, I would say we probably don’t need as many big fully integrated desktop environments as there are now. (Maybe we should have only one aimed at modern hardware and one designed to be lightweight.)

That being said, there is plenty of duplication of effort within commerical software too. I would argue that if commercial desktop GUIs currently offer a better user experience than Linux desktop environments it’s more in spite of their development model than because of it, and their advantage has mostly to do with companies being able to pay developers to work full time (instead of relying on donations and volunteers).

There are a couple reasons I think this:

• In a “healthy” market economy there needs to be many firms that offer the same product / service. If there is only a small number (or, worse, only one) that performs the same function the firm(s) can begin to develop monopolistic powers. For closed source software development this necessitates a great deal of duplicated effort.
• The above point is not a hypothetical situation. Before the rise of libre software there were a ton of commercial unices and mainframe operating systems that were all mostly independently developed from each other. Now, at least when it comes to running servers and supercomputers, almost everyone is running the same kernel (or very nearly the same) and some combination of the same handful of userspace services and utilities.
• Even as there is duplication of effort between commercial firms, there is duplication of effort and wasted effort within them. For an extreme example look at how many chat applications Google has produced, but the same sort of duplication of effort happens any time a UI or whole application is remade for no other reason than if the people employed somewhere don’t look like they’re working on something new then they’ll be fired.
• Speaking of changing applications, how many times has a commercial closed source application gone to shit, been abandoned by the company that maintains it, or had its owning company shut down, necessitating a new version of the software be built from scratch by a different firm? This wastes not only the time of the developers but also the users who have to migrate.

Generally I think open source software has a really nice combination of cooperation and competition. The competition encourages experimentation and innovation while the cooperation eliminates duplicated effort (by letting competitors copy each other if they so choose).

I vibe with this a lot. I don’t think the movie needed to exist in the first place, and if it did it would probably be better if it were fully animated, but nothing about the trailer provoked any strong emotions in me.

I’m not going to watch it but I also didn’t go “wow this is an insult and a tragedy”.

I guess I’m happy for all the tiny children that are gonna watch it and probably love it though.

While I agree that it’s somewhat bad that there is no distinction between lossless and lossy jxl in the file extension, I think it’s really not a big deal compared to the present situation with jpg/png.

The reason being that if you download a png file you have no idea if its been converted from jpg, if it’s a screenshot of a jpg, or if it’s been subjected to lossy reencoding by a tool or a website upload process.

The only thing you can really do to try and see if the file you’ve downloaded has suffered encoding loss is to do an image search on it and see if there are any better quality versions out there. You’d do the exact same thing with a jxl file.

The ads are subliminally manipulating the sort function of my spreadsheet that calculates the unit cost of every product in a category.

Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.

Plenty of people blow their brains out. 1 in every 12 autistic people attempt it anyway.

Not directly related but something I found while looking that stat up: a full 18% of 8-year-old autistic kids apparently have a suicide plan.

No better than what?

One apple (223 g) is supposed to be 116 calories.

Damn Small Linux can run a graphical desktop environment with as little as 16 MB of RAM (although 24 is recommended).

That really makes me want to see a Wii with a mouse and keyboard plugged in displaying a spreadsheet or something. Unfortunately DSL only supports x86. Theoretically it could be ported to PPC like Void Linux was, though I don’t know if all the tweaks they did to make the kernel and pre-installed packages as small as possible would make that harder.

Trying to create a cheap microwave burrito that’s also healthy and filling seems like a pretty noble (if difficult) goal to me. Making it vegetarian also decreases its ecological impact (though I don’t know whether or not Adams cared about that).

Trying to fortify each burrito with 100% of your daily vitamins was a really stupid idea though. It was unnecessary (just take a multivitamin if you feel like you need it), it made the burrito taste worse (Adams described it as “chalky”), and it was potentially unhealthy if someone were to eat multiple burritos per day (and thus receive multiple times the recommended daily dose of… everything).

An arch user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have to read the news before every update and apply a manual intervention a few times a year, and there’s only been like one time in history that an update made people’s installs unbootable despite them taking those precautions”.

A Debian user defines “doesn’t break all the time” as “I have a cron job running that periodically runs sudo apt update. I have no idea when it does this or what’s changing when it happens and nothing bad has ever happened to me”.

Like, the fact that unattended-upgrades comes pre-installed and enabled by default (for security updates) in Debian GNOME vs the fact that informant exists to force you to read the news in Arch before you update should tell you that the two distros exist in two different universes.

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Krankenwagen

It’s just a silly name for DPI, but it does exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement#Mickey

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He must listen to arcane tomes in audiobook form while doing crunches.

Absent the effect of gravity hair strands have a tendency to straighten and spread out. Usually astronauts with long hair tie it up, but there are some pictures showing what this looks like:

Makes me wonder whether that’s depicted in the manga.

Sorry I took so long to reply

Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier I don’t really have a problem with small dick jokes or the phrase as such. Like you said it doesn’t really affect an underprivileged group, although I think in certain uses it definitely is toxically masculine.

I was replying to you not really because of that, but rather because I’ve seen the same reasoning, literally almost word for word as what you wrote in a few of your earlier comments, used to justify the use of slurs. Like I said I really wish teenaged me had been exposed to the point of view I’ve been trying to convey. Because of that it’s a mode of thinking I really want to try to ward people away from, even if in this case it was used in regards to something fairly innocuous.

My thinking here doesn’t have to do with being polite or individual instances of hurting individual feelings. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking on this case-by-case basis, but the world doesn’t just consist of you and the one person who has a 0.001% chance of getting their feelings hurt by one interaction.

It has more to do with the fact that when you put toxic shit out into the world you are actively making it worse. For example, every time someone who’s “not a racist” makes a biggoted joke actual biggots get a little bit more bold. And every time someone conflates being considerate of the implications of their actions with having a small penis toxic masculinity gets reinforced a little bit more.

It’s like littering, no single person does much harm by themselves but the cumulative effect is pretty bad. So, I’m not trying to put you down or verbally joust you. I’m trying to make sure a place that I care about, --this community-- remains a pleasant place for everyone. And since we’re both here, and we both dislike misogyny, we probably have pretty similar worldviews and we probably care about this place a similar amount. I hope that means we can work together instead of fighting.

To that end I want to say that I’ve tried to be polite and diplomatic. If I’ve come across as smug or something then I’m sorry. And I realize that the person that initially replied to you was a bit of an ass, but that’s no reason to take it out on me.