American here. Didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t want him.

I sincerely hope EU and other nations can and will step in to pick up the slack when US shirks on our responsibility.

Ukraine embodies the American ideal of independence far better than Trump will ever understand.

Third party voter here. I don’t expect any third party candidate to win. My home state of Connecticut is solidly blue. All of our electoral votes WILL go to Harris, no vote of mine could change that even if I wanted it to, which I don’t. I am no fan of Trump.

I vote for whichever third party looks likely to get the most total votes, because of a third party can drum up 5% of the total national popular vote they get a lot more federal election funds in the next election.

My voting priority is for next cycle, to get a third party on the debate stage. That’s what I’m voting for.

Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

VGW

Why do we force them to do that? How does that help? The condo could be just as easily bought by a single family. The only point I am making is that there are a few legitimate situations where a corporation would want to buy property and we should let them. Houses should be for people to live in. Not for giant corporations to invest in.

Saying that whatever Trump does is political suicide misses the biggest issue with this election-

Nobody cares what either of them say because an awful lot of the electorate simply isn’t listening.

The Trump voters would keep voting for Trump even if he joined the Nazi party. The rest of voters have either tuned out or are pushing Kamala simply because she’s not Trump so she must be better.
An awful lot of people have just made up their minds and aren’t listening for anything new.

So having a headline that Trump says something offensive is news to nobody. What would have been political suicide a decade or two ago is business as usual today. Whatever standards we once have politicians to, we no longer hold them to.

More likely, most of the sources that produce photos and videos would not be using the digital signatures. Professional cameras for journalists probably would have the signature chip. Cheapo Chinese surveillance cameras? Unlikely.

Yes, but quality over quantity. I was a redditor back in the early days, pre Digg migration. Being a redditor meant something back then, almost universally meant you were tolerant, usually but not always somewhat liberal, and with a very strong sense of fairness. I remember a good friend of mine started dating someone and when they mention their new partner was a redditor I am immediately thought oh good, that means they are very likely a good person (they ended up married). Reddit has of course grown since then, but not all of the growth is good. I used to go there for engaging discourse, knowing that I was surrounded by other relatively smart people and we could have respectful discussion on almost any subject. Those discussions are few and far between now.

So yes I would like Lenny and the fediverse to grow, but I am more interested in what kind of people we attract than simply growing numbers. When I would rather do is create a reputation that the fediverse is a place to come before respectful discourse and sharing of ideas, not just scrolling through page after page of mindless content like on a big tech social platform (FB / Insta / TikTok / etc).

Eventually, we will just have to accept that photographic proof is no longer proof.

There are ways that you could guarantee an image is valid. You would need a hardware security module inside the camera, which signs a hash of the picture with its own built-in security key that can’t be extracted and a serial number that it generates. That can prove that an image came from a particular camera, and if you change even one pixel of that image the signature won’t match anymore. I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Not mainstream at least. There are one or two camera manufacturers that offer this as a feature, but it’s not on things like surveillance cameras or cell phones nor will it be anytime soon.

How about, corporations can own single-family homes, but can only provide them for use by their employees or contractors, not rent them out on the open market and if they sit vacant for more than a couple of months there is some huge tax or fine?

I agree with this a lot. Boyfriend or girlfriend is the person you are romantically attached to. Partner is a MUCH stronger word, it implies teamwork and shared purpose; the understanding that you have each other’s backs.

There are also plenty of people who are married for whom the word partner does not apply. It’s sad.

I think a lot of people reject the title ‘partner’ because for a very long time before gay marriage was a thing, there was only ‘civil partnerships’ or ‘civil unions’ and thus ‘partner’ was the only accurate term, ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ couldn’t apply as they weren’t legally married. So they see ‘partner’ as a sort of ‘almost as good’ runner up.

There are a few, limited, cases where they should be able to. For example, if they have operations in an area that has frequent medium term employees coming in and out. It’s valid for them to say we will offer you a house for the time you are here. But I would generally agree there is no reason for an investment company to be investing in single-family homes. It’s good for the investment company, bad for society.

The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.

Here’s a fun one

You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

Enjoy your swim!

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.

Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

Complicating that however, is the fact that if it’s a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of ‘authors’ and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.

Here’s the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That’s it.

The ‘Winamp source license’ was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn’t actually own the rights to.

This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can’t be legally used or distributed.