For the Greek gods, the greatest sin was attempting to be like them.

If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.

Stuck a wire in a power outlet.

Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.

At least Oracle Weblogic is being useful for someone.

I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

This user’s name is displayed in Arabic, although the characters in the URL are Latin.

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.

Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.

Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.

Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.

Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.

So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.

Star Wars at the video arcade.

The Shaggs, but I enjoy them anyway.

I’m left-handed myself, but I never notice if others are.

It seems like it used to be a bigger thing a few decades ago, when writing by hand was more common.

Garlic.

After ruling for ten years he was overthrown, had his nose cut off, and was exiled to the Crimea. Suspected of conspiring to return to power, he was summoned back to Constantinople for additional punishment; but instead he escaped to the Russian steppe where he married the sister of the Khazar kaghan. The usurpers bribed the kaghan to extradite his new brother-in-law back to the Byzantines, but Justinian was warned by his Khazar wife and killed the kaghan’s officials sent to arrest him. Then he escaped in a fishing boat to the Balkans, married his daughter to the Bulgar khan, and convinced the khan to lend him an army to defeat the usurpers. So after a ten-year exile he returned to Constantinople at the head of a barbarian army, but the city refused to surrender. Finally he used his knowledge of the city’s infrastructure to crawl in through the sewers, re-took the palace by surprise, and ruled another six years before being killed in a second rebellion.

If we’re going for “cool story” rather than “admirable person”, then the Byzantine emperor Justinian II.

The only time I prefer physical books to ebooks is when there’s a heavy focus on maps, diagrams, or other illustrations. In those cases I generally want the physical book to be as large as possible, which usually means hardcover.

I’m all for removing the influence of money from politics. But as long as money remains the main medium of influence, people not donating to political causes as a matter of principle is effectively removing the influence of people from politics.

Rather than creating a custom terminal app, could you create a user that only had permission to run the restricted commands, with a profile script that gets run at login and offers a menu of common tasks?