No, what makes the poor majority choose to voluntarily vote against their own interest and shoot themselves in the foot is not the fact that there’s a powerful minority, it’s the manipulation.

Are you not aware of how popular capitalism is with the masses? the poor majority is primarily capitalist in all the capitalist countries. The majority disagrees with your idea of communism being the solution.

Manipulation is the name of the game. Appeals to compliance and stability, pushing narratives to vulnerable people in ways that is hard for them to examine them critically, politics being intermixed with social psychology, group-thinking and sometimes even reaching the levels of religious belief.

Manipulation is a tactic used by Nations of all colors… and it’s specially obvious with governments that explicitly seek lack of transparency, opaque systems, suppression of political opposition, silencing dissent, censorship… and… yes, lack of separation of powers (which does help with all of those). Like I sad before, the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in.

The moment you punish people for expressing being unhappy is the moment you can no longer trust that people will be honest when asked if they are happy. This adds extra levels of complexity, it only seems simple if you only look at it from a very superficial surface level.

Ah sorry, I misunderstood completely, I didn’t read it right. For some reason I thought you were talking about the router / wifi service being SOWPL.

what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism?

You are assuming that people will never ever choose the group of old men… or that the group of old men isn’t gonna create an alternative progressive looking group that actually is just as bad, but happens to be very good at propaganda, marketing and appealing to popular social media poison trends / manipulation.

And I say “never ever” because the most dangerous thing is that a malicious group only needs to gain power once, in such a no-barriers system, to impose a dictatorship.

If electing officials were that easy, the people in Berlin would not have needed a referendum to push for this law, the elected officials would have pushed for it instead.

Of course, you can advocate for having direct democracy at any step of the way, but then you are essentially also doing separation of power, since you are essentially translocating the tribunal to the entire population, and it would be just as separate and varied as the whole country itself. I’d argue that direct democracy is the opposite of centralization of power.

It’s so much of a hurdle that all fascist regimes have been forced to weaken the division and ultimatelly break it completelly in order to build a fascist regime.

A “progressive law” is easy for a fascist in power to overthrow if they actually are able to weaken the division of power.

Why do you think Trump has been able to do a lot more in this term than in the previous one? Because he has been able to weaken that division, the judicial system is on his side, and he has a lot more connections with people inside the state now.

Ok,. so lets imagine your example from Berlin: would the situation have been better if there was no division of power and the same group of old men in a tribunal were the ones deciding the referendum should be made, deciding what laws should be passed, how should they be written and in which manner should they be executed, with which level of strength?

Division of power also means that if a group of old men in the legislative dictates a horrible anti constitutional law, there’s a chance the law can be repelled due to the judiciary being compelled to do so.

He didn’t say that separation by itself is sufficient. So naturally just having separation is not enough.

However, it’s a fact that a dictator needs, by definition, to break the separation of power in order to truly become the authoritarian leader with control over the country.

So NOT having separation of power is actually necessary to destroy a democracy.

I feel that trying to defend those things that someone would need to break in order to remove democracy is not a bad idea if we want to maintain democracy.

There are also a lot of other things that are necessary for a dictatorship… such as the dictator not being held accountable (meaning… transparency and mechanisms for accountability would be another principle to maintain democracy), or the dictator suppressing political opposition or dissent (so protecting opposition, whistleblowers and dissent, instead of prosecuting it would be another one). And I’m sure there are many others.

I mean… sure, you can, in theory, have a democracy without those things… but the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in…

IANAL, but I feel that coffee shop case would not be different if the software were under AGPL… if you are providing a service to other people, even if “the other people” are the customers to your shop, it could be argued that under the terms of the AGPL (not to be confused with GPL) they should have the right to see the source of the service that they are making use of.

But if the SOWPL requirement really does apply to private code that isn’t providing service to others, the implication would be that even if you are the only user (no coffee shop customer), and even if you are the only one who knows about it, you would still need to make the source code public in some way… which I feel this is very impractical and probably unenforceable anyway.

Even if you did block it, the fact that you blocked it is also trackable… so it might actually single you out even more, and it’ll still allow them to fingerprint your browser (you can test your fingerprint here).

It might make more sense to randomize / spoof the data so that it becomes inconsistent and useless so that you aren’t identifiable.

it’s Stupid Man’s Maginot Line and in case of real attack will be broken effortlessly

The Maginot Line was not broken, it was avoided. The nazis were essentially forced to take a different route to reach France, through Belgium. The issue was that it gave the defenders a false sense of security and the alternate route was not well protected (they thought the rough terrain would be a deterrent). It was an error in strategy, but the line itself held.

Do we know if the idea is to really have only mines?

The article gives as example some razor wire reinforced fence area through the forest that’s likely gonna be targeted (the picture does not show what’s on the floor, but you can see the area has surveillance cameras too). I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea is to have some multi-layered protection, Surovikin-like, but of course the mines is what will break the news, since they could affect civilians the most.

alias lt='ls -t | less'

Good idea! I’ll steal that but I would rather be able to give a directory path as parameter (and show in colors, and don’t pause if less than 1 page of content, and support the scrolwheel), also piping ls forces it to be 1 single column so might as well show more details, personally I’m gonna use this instead:

lt() { ls -t --color=always -Fgoh "$@" | less -RF --mouse; }

Also, printf '\a' will output an alert bell character which should make the terminal beep/blink and be highlighted for attention by your wm/compositor if it’s unfocused.

I have that aliased to a to get notified whenever a long running command finishes just by adding ;a at the end.

Aren’t all motivations emotional?

I mean… what would be the “logical” reason to use FOSS? I feel you can’t just use pure logic as a form of motivation, ever. Something that only uses logic and not emotions cannot take any action like a computer algorithm made of pure logic with no hard-coded instincts that simply operates mathematically, in reality there’s no logical reason to act in one direction or another… morals/goals are always emotionally grounded.

I feel the problem has more to do with social reasons, and pragmatic reasons.

What determines a behavior being “extreme” often has more to do with what is the average behavior of the people you surround yourself with. It’s a relative term.

In a world where everyone used free software and saw that as the norm, with things being designed around software being free, someone going the extra mile just to use proprietary software would be seen as “extreme” too.

Also, I’m not convinced that the numeric balance of who killed the most from the other side in a war is what should determine who is in the wrong.

That was long ago, I wonder if he might be using now GNU Guix, since it’s a GNU project.

• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): The first implementation of a set of methods used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, emails and files that ultimately became a standard called “OpenPGP” (RFC 4880), the program itself was commercial/proprietary. Sometimes “PGP” is also used to call the standard itself for short.

• GNU Privacy Guard (GPG): A popular Free and Open Source program from the GNU project that uses/implements the OpenPGP standards

If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.

Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).

I wonder if freeing up those resources also implies that much of the adware Microsoft often includes in Windows might be removed too.

if it’s not: I’m skeptical that the gain in resources would be enough.

if it is: I’m skeptical that this OS won’t be locked down as much as possible to prevent it to be used for anything useful beyond this specific gaming usecase and/or specific to pre-authorized devices.

I think Microsoft benefits too much from the adware they add to Windows to allow this new version of the OS to potentially be used as an alternative.

Consider for a moment that browsers still support multiple protocols besides hypertext transfer.

When the protocol is not https, then it will show it. In fact, it will show if the page is http and not https.

The lock icon (the one showing certificate information when clicked) only shows when the page is https, so essentially that icon replaces the https://

You can increase the number of items shown by bumping up the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults setting in about:config.

But you won’t get a scrollbar even if you bump it till it goes beyond the height of your screen.

I mean… it would be simpler if it didn’t run any commands.

I think the point is that the UI of the bar wasn’t really more complicated before. So it’s not like the bar itself has really gotten any simpler. Specially if they aren’t removing the previous ways to access those functions.

That said, I do like the idea.

The approach to taxing isn’t determined by this tool, but by the government. What this tool tries to prevent is hidden money exchanges, which affect both methods of taxing, not only flat taxes but also income-based taxes (since a hidden sale is giving the seller a hidden income and potentially placing them at a lower income tax class).