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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

    Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!



  • My thoughts exactly. I have absolutely no sympathy for Nazis, or anyone else who thinks mass murder and genocide were good policy. But one of the things that makes a free society different from Nazi Germany, is free expression. If we limit free expression to only things the people in charge want expressed, no matter how noble the intent that starts us down a very dark path very quickly.

    The way we fight Nazis and racism is not by beating them up or jailing them. It’s by teaching each other and our children why they are wrong, by learning and understanding what it is like to have racism directed against you. And thus, we defeat racism not with force but with empathy.

    As far as I’m concerned, this is the sort of policy that would make Hitler proud. It’s the sort of policy that would be enacted in Nazi Germany, or Soviet Russia.






  • Just like conservatism, the problem is what parts of it you push.

    Focus on divisive issues like gun control, open immigration, and hyper inclusion of any possibly marginalized group and you push people away.

    Avoid the wedge issues, and focus on things that will make everybody’s lives better, like honest government, social safety net, and good health care, and you bring everybody together.

    If you look at the entire range of issues, including the ones politicians don’t often talk about, you might find that Americans generally agree on more than they disagree on. But rather than focusing on those shared agreements and trying to build a better country, both parties are focusing on wedge issues where there is strong disagreement.


  • And you are doing the same thing that the other Democrats are doing, focusing on the steak rather than the sizzle. If you look at the things Trump has actually done in his life, most of it is just looking out for #1. And after his first 4 years, I don’t think we need another 4. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I was not impressed by his presidency.

    But that’s looking at steak. He may not have much steak, but he has an awful lot of sizzle in excess.

    You have a country that is (to continue the analogy) starving and malnourished. One candidate shows you a ton of sizzle and steam and flame and makes your mouth water. The other one just keep saying that eating red meat is bad for you.

    That’s why Trump won. You need to understand that for a lot of people, voting involves emotion and desperation. You see the factories you work at closing, hearing about a giant tariff on Chinese goods sounds fucking awesome. You work lower end jobs and see companies switching from full-time American workers with salary and benefits to part-time immigrant workers making minimum wage, closing the border sounds like a great idea. And that’s not because of racism, it’s because you don’t want to be competing for jobs with people who will accept minimum wage and live 10 to a flat so they can all send money back home. There is of course little or no steak behind the sizzle, Trump’s first term showed that. But to an emotional voter who is desperate…


  • No they aren’t, and with that attitude we will continue to repeat this mistake over and over and over.

    The people want change. A lot of change. You can work 40 hours a week and barely scrape by paycheck to paycheck, and it’s been like that for years. Housing is even more unaffordable.
    Nothing has changed for years.
    People are angry.

    Donald Trump taps into that. That is his whole message. That he is an outsider, he is not the status quo, he is the one who shakes things up. He does not listen to PR people. He says what’s on his mind. He is the closest thing to a Bulworth candidate we’ve had in quite some time.

    I personally think he is a liar and a criminal, but not everybody shares that view.

    What does Kamala have going for her? She is the vice president, next in line of a succession. There is no radical reform there. It is status quo. And let’s not forget that before Biden dropped out and Kamala was crowned successor, she was pulling very low even among Democrats.

    The problem is not that America refuses to hand the country over to a woman. The problem is that the DNC keeps putting forward the wrong people as candidates, and expects the whole nation to vote for them simply because they’re not Republican. It doesn’t work that way.

    My point is though, as long as you blame sexism or racism or whatever for Trump’s win, you hide the real problem and thus prevent it from being fixed.

    It NEEDS to be fixed.
    For the good of the country, we (Dems) cannot expect people to just vote for us because we’re not Republican. We need to offer them something better. Obama did that. That’s why he won. Hope, change, yes we can. That was something better. And so he defeated a real non-crazy Republican.

    Whoever is the next Democratic candidate, they need to do that. Offer a real message and a real plan. Not just ‘I’m not red’.



  • If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

    I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

    If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

    At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.


  • Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

    The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

    Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

    However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.



  • Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

    Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

    Complicating that however, is the fact that if it’s a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of ‘authors’ and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.


  • Here’s the story:
    Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That’s it.

    The ‘Winamp source license’ was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

    There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn’t actually own the rights to.

    This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

    Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can’t be legally used or distributed.


  • The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

    If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

    There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.


  • with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

    Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

    I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

    But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

    Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.