It seems to be that it depends entirely on the intent of the simulation: an experiment to find out what happens after setting the clockwork in motion, or a carefully stage-managed zoo. I say that because the partial simulation would require complete understanding of and integration with consciousness a priori, intent to mess around with conscious minds, and the Great Makers giving a shit whether we knew it was a simulation or not. That is, some sort of cosmic fishbowl for minds.

I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.

I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.

Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.

Has it? My complaints are: I have to use VPN software for work that replaces /etc/resolve.conf with a symlink to another location, one that sandboxed snaps can’t access. There’s no way to grant them access; the “slots” that you can connect are fixed and pre-defined. You can’t even configure the file path; it’s defined right in the source code. Not even as a #define, but the string literal “/etc/resolve.conf”. That seems like poor practice, but I guess they’re not going for portability.

Also, I have /usr and /var on different media, chosen for suitability of purpose, and sized appropriately. Then, along comes snap, violating the File Hierarchy Standard by filling up /var with application software.

Minor annoyances are the ~/snap folder, and all of the mounted loopback filesystems which make reading the mtab difficult.

Thanks. That is what I’d expect, and highlights the disconnect I saw in this comment chain: I think what some other folks were trying (less-than-artfully) to say is that there’s a difference between what one might expect case-insensitive means as a computer programmer, and what one might expect case-insensitive to mean in human language. All three of those should be the same filename in fr_FR locale, since some French speakers consider diacritical marks to be optional in upper case. While that might be an edge case, it does exist. English is even worse, with a number of diacritical marks that are completely optional, but may be used to aid legibility, e.g. café, naïve, coöperation. (Whether that quirk is obvious or not, or whether it outweighs any utility of case-insensitivity is not something that I have a strong opinion on, though.)

I don’t have Windows here to test, so I keep wondering, are all of these forms the same?

• facture-février.pdf
• FACTURE-FÉVRIER.PDF
• FACTURE-FEVRIER.PDF

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

Only if you have installed the correct license file.

Impressive still! I had assumed that it was the output of a translation program.

Oh, man, as the network admin for several hundred machines, “Windows” and “works” in the same sentence is hilarious.

However, I must point out, Celsius is not metric. It’s been adopted as the step-child of SI, but it’s not metric. You can’t meaningfully multiply and divide degrees Celsius; 100°C is not ten times hotter than 10°C Celsius. Sure. you can use the metric prefixes, just like i could measure things in kiloinches, that doesn’t make it metric. It’s just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit, and people have to make arguments regarding water and life to try to pretend otherwise. True, it’s officially defined in terms of Kelvin, but then, so is Fahrenheit.

I want the bad-grammar version of Old English.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)

I used to deliver the newspaper to Chris Farley’s parents. I saw him only once when he drove by on his way to their house, but he smiled and waved at me. Another time, I was out early delivering the Sunday paper, and a man jogging by waved to me. It took a bit longer, but I later recognized him as Tommy Thompson, the governor of Wisconsin, and later Health & Human Services secretary for Pres. Bush.

Oddly, his predecessor at HHS was Donna Shalala, who’d been here as chancellor of the university, so I may have seen her around, too. The most famous person that I’ve seen IRL was Cindy Crawford, but I didn’t interact. She walked by in a hallway at the student union, like a totally normal person.

Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

You get thrown out of a farmer’s market if you show up naked, though. Probably thrift stores, too.

Does that make the rest of the world Themians?