I don’t know but my speculation:

• Europe’s economy (from which the Church’s income was largely derived) didn’t go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
• That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
• The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autonomous archbishoprics.
• Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.

The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope’s temporal power over the city, Rome’s population growth went stratospheric.

Source: https://www.jetpunk.com/users/quizmaster/charts/population-of-rome-over-time

Lots of things happen there! It’s party time all the time!

In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.

Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.

The city’s population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Middle_Ages

Thanks to multiple sackings, power struggles, plagues etc.

It only surpassed a million again in 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics

Musk probably has his own Night of the Long Knives coming sooner or later.

As in, he will be the target, not the perpetrator.

• Röhm = Musk
• Hitler = Trump
• Himmler = Vance? Patel? Other?

D’oh!

I wrote it one way (full words), then changed to the abbreviation… but obviously ballsed it up. 😊

You know what… it is 😉

(Giving me flashbacks to the days of the Slyck forums!)

As first torrents, then cyberlockers, and then streaming came to dominate, the other P2P networks and programs did one of the following:

• Shrunk to a much smaller number of users but still linger on.
• Software stopped being developed, domain name lost
• Purposely closed down to avoid legal consequences
• Pivoted to something else (like legal downloads or streaming e.g. Napster, Audio Galaxy, or a different P2P network, e.g. Limewire went from Gnutella to BitTorrent to… web file transfer?)

Every now and then, I try a Kad/ed2k client but soon return to torrents. E.g. a few months ago I tried out aMule on Linux… and got a LowID. 23 years after I first started using it, I still can’t dodge LowID 😂 It does have content, though.

Compared to previous times I revisited Kad/ed2k, some sites/services with ed2k links have now finally disappeared: MoTV (Ministry of Television), TV Underground, ShareTheFiles. I think VeryCD is still going though.

Shareaza is still a thing (at least, a fork of it is), still claiming to be the one P2P app to rule all the networks. One of only three clients left (according to Wikipedia) that still access the Gnutella network.

Just to see what’s up, I installed Gtk-Gnutella (last updated March 2024). I can find a few things in searches, but still waiting for them to begin to download. UPDATE: One just started downloading, although the speed is max 50 Kib/s, ETA is at least a few hours.

I might give a Soulseek client a try, as a hard drive full of music I got from Soulseek in 00s recently died (yes, it lasted 15 years!), and Soulseek seems to be the music P2P that never dies (and has a Linux client).

PS I don’t think Retroshare is a “new iteration”; it’s been going since 2006!

• “Westminster” specifically for Parliament.
• “Downing Street” for the prime minister and the cabinet.
• “Whitehall” for central government as a whole, ministries and departments.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Friday that the department was looking into program to help “mitigate any economic catastrophes that could happen to some of our farmers.” Asked whether that would include direct payments, Rollins said, “We’re working that out right now.”

So they’re looking into a mitigation program, they’re working out a payment system… now? After annihilating government programs, starting a trade war with everyone and wrecking farmers’ prospective income?

Thank goodness the US Govt is now in the hands of such professional, forward-thinking people who care about ordinary Americans and businesses. Such a relief after those radical lunatics who used to run things into the ground!

Aura Carreño Rosas is a Hamilton-based reporter from Venezuela, with a passion for pop culture and unique people with diverse journeys.

What??? A Venezuelan who hasn’t been rounded up, deported and slung into in a third world concentration camp without even the pretense of due process?!?

Come on Canadia, is that really the kind of country you want to live in???

/s

“It’s a fact: jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to make steel girders melt! It was the lithium-ion batteries from a Model Y and a Cybertruck fired by railgun into the Twin Towers, with Dick Cheney and Saul of Saul’s 3rd Avenue Deli pulling the triggers. People seen jumping out of windows were actually trans crisis actors wearing batwing suits, who nowadays tour encampments of Venezuelan gang members and Haitian cat rustlers across the Heartland with their drag, Spanish-language version of Hamilton. Buy my supplements!”

Whoa, sorry, don’t know what came over me there.

From Twitter’s “Fail Whale” to X’s “Fash Crash”. Make it happen, Anonymous!

A honey pot?

Can I download and run it on my computer without using Internet?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Can+I+download+and+run+photopea+on+my+computer+without+using+Internet%3F&t=ffab&ia=web

IPFS? Or some other distributed data storage system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Confirmed. I just opened a post I’d never opened before, and one comment was highlighted. It had been posted just four minutes earlier, so perhaps it is determined by a time limit.

Thanks. Although it just occurred to me: I’m pretty sure that was the first time I was viewing that post.