Beard, not mullet.

Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.

I’m for ending the war through a unilateral surrender of Russian forces and the trial of Mr Putin for crimes against humanity. However, my opinion doesn’t have a lot of influence over whether that happens.

Similarly, I’m for ending the war in Gaza through the voluntary disarmament of Hamas, the repudiation of terrorism as a way of life, the handover of illegal settlements to displaced Palestinian Arab civilians, and the prosecution of Netanyahu for treason and war crimes. But I don’t expect to get to make that decision either.

I think they’re still on Bawdy Satans or something. Fools!

Microsoft, the state of South Dakota, and the Freemasons have been infiltrated by the Unified Buttjones Imperial Court (UBIC), formed in 1834 by the merger of the Imperial Buttjones Society and the All-Ireland Industrial Arsing Federation. UBIC agents camouflage themselves as janitors, assistant product managers, or beagles, and spread an invisible green slime over toilet seats to infect the minds of their targets. Through this mental infiltration, they obtain control over the vazween or pony-flavored sector of the human soul, creating Inter-Vazween Buttjones Networks (IVBN) through repeated application of the Greater Invoking Pentacle of Pony Erotic Revelation (GIPPER). Using an apparatus constructed from illegal immigrants, UBIC uses the IVBN and GIPPER to insert bugs into Windows, Masonic initiations, and the Lewis & Clark State Recreation Area. Anyone who denies this obvious truth is a buttjones.

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

Plenty of goth squirrels in parts of the Bay Area, California too.

In Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon … in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo’d.

Mispi

https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.

“Heck, I had a truck like that once.”

“Evolution is so complicated. Can’t you see that it’s just simpler to admit that God did it?”

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.

Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.

There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.

“The Electric Company” came on TV, so of course we were dancing around the TV in excitement … and knocked it over. Crash!

It’s not clear there is one! One of the nice things about liberal-democracy is that different people can create different forms of social and economic organization to meet their needs and interests. A family business, a worker-owned cooperative, and a publicly traded corporation can coexist in the same economy (and even on the same street). People can start monasteries or communes in the woods if they want to; or move to the big city to seek their fortunes.

But again, freedom isn’t free: there has to be enforcement of individual rights and fair trade to ensure that the most powerful & successful don’t get to run over everyone else with force and fraud. Right now I suspect this looks like some form of liberal social democracy; probably with more worker protections than the US has right now, but probably with less bureaucracy than the EU has right now.

Kaczynski’s madness was manufactured through calculated psychological abuse in the Harvard laboratory of one Henry Murray. Look it up, dude.

Free markets can’t exist without enforcement of rules against violence and fraud. Without such enforcement, race-to-the-bottom effects mean that employment devolves into slavery and all markets in goods become dominated by “lemons” (fraudulent goods).

An actual free market in labor requires limits on what a powerful employer can demand from workers. An actual free market in goods requires protection of customers from fraud, and arguably also from monopolies. Both of these require something like a state, an entity empowered to intrude into other people’s business in order to enforce rules.

Even starting with anarcho-capitalist principles, consistency ends up endorsing a minimal state: see Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (However, Nozick’s path is not the only path by which a state-like entity could arise; rather than from ‘protection agencies’, we could imagine it arising from labor unions or cooperatives instead.)

In gist, “freedom isn’t free” — if you want to have a free market in labor or goods, you have to have enforcement against those who would deprive others of freedom through force or fraud.

Kaczynski was not an anarcho-capitalist, in any event, but an anarcho-primitivist — whose beliefs led him personally to commit murder, and who endorsed the mass murder of almost all humans. It’s worth noting that Kaczynski was also arguably manufactured by psychological abuse; he was a gifted mathematician until he became the victim of an MK-ULTRA program.

People pay for this?

Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.