Yeah if it were about security they’d check the version of HTTPS, SSL, TLS and all that stuff.

I saw an article about them attacking Lebanon now.

Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Please don’t legitimize terrorist groups by considering them to be the government of the country they operate in. Lebanon has elections, please support democracy and it’s not consider Hezbollah as Lebanon’s government, even if those psychopaths have control over a significant portion of the country.

That being said, Nasrallah is probably under significant pressure to do something to help Hamas in some way. Last week he put out some threats against Israel. Israel put out counter threats. In all likelihood that’s where things will stay, neither side wants a war with the other.

The media is always saying a war is imminent. Remember when they were claiming China was going to invade Taiwan any minute? There’s probably some outlets that’re still are saying that sometimes. It gets clicks, views, and ratings.

Who knows they might be right this time (a stopped clock is right twice a day) but it seems doubtful.

So, where will it stop?

In terms of Gaza, Hamas is still holding Israeli hostages. It’s not going to stop as long as Hamas is holding Israelis hostage.

Hamas is likely making a lot of money from the suffering of Palestinians. So they don’t have much incentive to release the hostage and put an end to the conflict.

So it will continue on as the IDF goes house to house trying to find the people that Hamas took on October 7.

Eventually either the IDF will find all of the hostages or Hamas will release them. Then it will end.

Wow you went in deep down the rabbit hole there.

Aging boomers are costing the healthcare system a lot of money. So there’s a need to increase tax revenue to cover the cost. When an immigrant comes to the country they immediately start working and therefore immediately starts paying taxes.

A lot of it is down to how lopsided the demographics are with an overly high percentage of retired population.

In economics you can’t solve one problem without creating others. But the problems solved are bigger than the problems created. And housing problems are a temporary problem. As boomers start dying off, the situation will correct itself, housing will be freed up and healthcare costs will decrease.

The Prequels were more world ruining movies than world building movies.

I’m not the guy you replied to, but MS fonts are kinda free to download. Not free enough they can just put them into a package but there’s a defined method for downloading them. Most distros have a package that will automatically do this. On Debian it’s ttf-mscorefonts-installer which will download the fonts and install them when it gets to the configuration part of the package install. You can probably search for a similar package for your distro.

I wish we had a TV tax in Canada. The funding of the CBC is a political football, so I sometimes feel like CBC News has to walk a tightrope to avoid having the government slash the budget.

It’s probably better that there’s just a tax on the device. Sure the UK government could meddle with that tax to cut the budget of the BBC, but it feels like it would be less likely since people would rightly ask why they’re meddling with it. People are less likely to ask questions if the government is cutting a budget because “gotta pay off the national debt!”

There’s nothing wrong with fried chicken. There’s nothing wrong with watermelon.

But if you’re trying to think of menu options for an event associated with black history and you just shrug and think “I dunno, black people like fried chicken and watermelon, so lets do that” you’re being so lazy you’d be better off doing nothing at all. I literally typed “black history food” into a search and got many pages with lists of options. So by serving fried chicken and watermelon it’s a statement “I don’t give a fuck about black people but since I’m obligated to serve some kind of food option I’m just going to stick with lazy stereotypes.”

It wold be preferable to do nothing and be honest about not caring than it is to offer a stereotype and then cry crocodile tears because people aren’t recognizing the token effort that was made.

Yeah there were some animal rights people that ran out onto the field at a ballgame I was at. The fine for running onto the field is $5000. There were two of them, so that was $10,000.

TV broadcasts don’t show people that run out onto the field since they don’t want to encourage it. So the only people that saw their banner were people at the ballpark. Someone shouted “get off the field you hippies” and the whole section laughed.

They probably should’ve just donated the $10,000 to an animal shelter.

It’s just how internet activist groups work. Most people aren’t motivated to improve things for their cause, they’re motivated to prove to others in their group how zealous they are. The more outlandish and untrue the things they say are, the more they prove their loyalty to the cause and the more points they’ll get from others in the group.

It’s the same pattern of behavior for every internet activist group. Whether it’s a vegan group, a socialist group, a MAGA group, an antivax group, Qanon, whatever. Promoting the cause doesn’t really matter, it’s about promoting yourself to others within the cause. Which is why you see insane lies about every kind of contentious issue. They aren’t trying to convince you, they’re trying to convince the others in the group how dedicated they are to the cause. “I’m willing to lie to help the cause!” gets a lot of points from the people already supporting the cause.

Key bindings and a good GUI aren’t mutually exclusive.

Key bindings are great for people that use the app a lot and want to be more efficient at the tasks they do most often in it. But most people aren’t going to be learning keyboard shortcuts the first time they use an app. And if someone uses an app a few times and find it frustrating to use, they never use it enough to want to learn keyboard shortcuts to improve their efficiency with the app.

So you open any other image editor, click the rectangle select button, draw a rectangle, then select a move button beside the rectangle select tool, then it moves the rectangle you just selected and you think “That’s fucking stupid, it should’ve moved the entire image, not the rectangle I just selected!”

Really?

He threw out the receipt after declaring it as a business expense.

For me it was the refresh. If a CRT was at 60Hz, I could see it flashing when I wasn’t looking directly at it. I had to have it set to at least 75 Hz (>80 Hz preferably) or it would give me a headache.

Yeah, right?

The fact that we know about this decades later is because people actually did care about it.

When LCDs (then later LEDs) improved this concern kinda faded away. Which makes sense.

Hmm… seems Vladimir Putin doesn’t like ChatGPT enough to have his sock puppet write some negative comments about it.

Eh… an organization will generally just comply with any law at first. Senior leadership would have to approve of not conforming to a law, so there would be meetings and deliberations on it. Considerations need to made about the safety of the employees and that kind of thing.

The extensions were only blocked for a week. So it’s not fair to claim Mozilla was licking Russia’s boot.

From the article:

The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.

or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

Well for the extensions that are open source it is possible for Russia to meddle with the code, but they’d have to get past code review. But this is concern for anything open source not just Mozilla stuff. It’s rare that something gets bad gets into an open source project, but it did happen a few months ago with ssh. Didn’t get past testing and required someone to work on open source projects for years before they got a level of trust to get something pulled into main source tree. So it’s basically the equivalent of getting a job at a company for years just to put malware into some proprietary software. Which could also happen, but if there’s a good code review process it shouldn’t happen.

Excepting those kind of weird scenarios, unless they’re extensions made by a Russian company that Moscow control over, then no, the extensions wouldn’t have been fiddled with by the Russian government. And if they were extensions the Russian government had the ability to change, they wouldn’t be trying to ban them.

What impact? You mean having Russians use a browser that allows the state to spy on them? If someone goes to prison for using Firefox to post something critical of the government, is that the impact Mozilla wants to have?

At a certain point you have to say “if the government of an authoritarian makes it illegal to use our browser because we aren’t going along with them spying on their citizens then so be it.”

It’s debatable at what point a software company becomes morally complicit with the oppression done by an authoritarian government. But it seems to me the wisest choice is to say “this is our software, take it or leave it.”

Maybe get a beret? But will it look weird if I wear a beret with my Che Guevara t-shirt?