There's a big difference between "published" and "public domain".

You seem to be using the term "public" specifically to refer to the former and conflate it with the latter.

Electric cars are actually dangerous if they are too quiet. Pedestrians (and especially blind pedestrians) are put at risk when cars are too quiet.

I've heard people say this before, and just... no.

I don't know where you live, walk, or drive..., but where I am it's actually the exlusive responsility of drivers to avoid running pedestrians down, not the responsibility of the pedestrians to hear the cars coming up from behind them and jump out of the way.

When I've seen this disagreement play out before (about whether to shift responsibility of not running into people away from the driver and onto the people who'd be run into), it seemed to be pretty sharply divided along something like `city vs. country' lines: because outside of the cities, there are other things than people to worry about, like animals that don't care if its supposed to be their responsibility to stay out of your way--the responsibility necessarily falls to the drivers to watch out for and avoid hitting stray moose just walking or even running out in front of cars, even on 65-MPH freeways. And if you can manage that, avoiding something as slow as people in foot in scenarios like parking-lots is pretty trivial. And if you can't manage that, then it's little consolation that `well it was the moose's fault' when hitting a moose totals your car and sends you into a hospital bed.

Also, it's not OK to run over deaf pedestrians either....

M$ should prevent all machines in Russia from receiving software patches for their machines. As a result, they'll all be much more vulnerable than usual within a week. And even more so the week after and so on.

Well, given how badly Windows sometimes breaks because of Microsoft's updates, maybe it would be better for them to keep pushing updates to their enemies.

The number of real-world things that Red Green invented for a laugh just keeps growing.... This time, see "The Not-Chicken Franchise".

Well, on the up side..., they won't have that $35-50k anymore after they spend it--and someone else will.

It's called SMS. It is baked into every cell phone. You don't need iMessage, Android Chat, wherever. You simply send a text message to another phone, and it gets delivered.

IIRC, that's only unless your phone is an iPhone, and you are messaging someone who used to use an iPhone. Then your message doesn't get delivered. Because the SMS UI on iPhone is iMessage and iPhone users do need to use iMessage. iMessage is both the SMS UI and the thing that will use its on closed network instead of SMS to message any number that the iMessage network has seen online in an iPhone before.

So, once you've moved your phone number to an iPhone and used that iPhone to message your other iPhone-using friends/family/colleagues, if you then abandon the iPhone and move your number to some other type of phone, none of those people can send you SMS anymore. Maybe there's a way of getting Apple to "un-learn" that route these days, but surely there are people who respond by just giving up and going back to their iPhone so that they can go back to receiving messages from all of their iPhone-using friends/family/colleagues.

I guess your parents never hugged you when you were a kid?

And finally a classic non-apology. A classic sorry for the "misunderstanding". Not sorry for causing any hurt

I don't know, but when and where I come from, "Sorry you were hurt" is actually itself the standard non-apology. Hearing someone complain that they "want a real apology--the kind where someone apologizes for hurt feelings", my gut reaction is that it sounds like these people somehow grew up being constantly condescended to and never figured out that that's what was actually going on. That's not just cringey, it's terrifying--and do feel very sorry that those feelings are getting hurt, but much moreso is the sorrow I feel that those feelings are going to just keep hurting because of the way that their upbringing must have hurt their psyches. I've been there. There are therapies available to heal damaged psyches.

If he is unwilling or unable to learn how do public speaking in a way that does not turn off large parts of the modern tech-consuming public, then he should not be the figurehead of huge and (in the face of private companies trying again to lock the tech industry down) ever more important foundation.

And maybe that's true--maybe he shouldn't be `the figurehead of the FSF'. Let's assume it is. But..., well, a couple of things:

First off, I'm not even sure what you think makes him that right now: because he's one of several people on the board? He's not the chairman of the board, he's not the president (Geoffrey Knauth is), he's not the executive director (John Sullivan is). Could you explain what you mean here?

Is it because so many of the FSF's documents, and basically all of the foundational philosophy pieces, still say "by Richard Stallman" on them? Or something else?

Secondly: It sounds to me like the point that Sleeping Kirby was trying to make is basically that `their cure is worse than this disease'.

I don't know, I probably can't say it better than what The Doctor said at the end of the `The Zygon Inversion', so I guess I'll just defer to that.

I guess Saul Bass also said something relevant about `radical ideas vs. institutions'.... On the whole, RMS et co. actually seem to have done a remarkably good job at avoiding that trap, whereas I see no reason to expect that this "whole bunch of new cruel people" is going to do well at all--they seem to have already fallen into it.

Doesn't work out the same at all for the recipient of the donation....

Honestly, I think the way I most often use the Pythagorean theorem is when I divide up a slice of cheese when making sandwiches for my kids: because a full square of sliced cheese is just too big, but split the one square slice diagonally both ways so that you get 4 right trigons, then those can be trivially recombined into 2 squares that are each half the area of the original square with no waste.

The Brits seem to remember the small pens they used in the Argos store to write down the catalog number then wait until someone retrieves the item from somewhere in the back (which is Tardis like, it-holds more items than can possibly fit into the building itself). The stores themselves had very little to browse and buy directly.

The American version of that was probably "Service Merchandise": you could browse through the store..., sorry, showroom (or catalogue, I guess?) with a piece of paper and a small pencil, write down the item numbers and hand the order to an employee, and then all of your items would come out on a conveyor belt.

My favorite as a kid was the Edmund Scientifics catalog.

I think they've also stopped producing their general scientifics catalog, bur they still send out a printed catalog of the `toys and other stuff foe kids' section.

Also, American Science & Surplus still does a printed catalog and it is *awesome*! If you know Edmund Scientifics (notable for, well..., "scientifics"), Building 19 (notable for having random merchandise and a generally attitude of silliness), the Duluth Trading Company catalog (notable for having hand-drawn pictures of everything), AS&S is like all of those rolled into one plus the humor cranked way up (visible in all of their descriptions, and in some of the oddball items they carry, and also in some of the weird deals they sometimes run [like "if you can guess which item in this season's catalog is fictional and add it to your order, we won't charge you for it but we will throw in something neat for free"]). There's a link at the top of https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciplus.com%2F to request printed catalogs.

The good? Well it's faster, with more memory, has a modern power plug (USB-C) and they fixed some shortcomings with USB and network, if I recall.

Are they finally using a USB controller that can support more than 7 USB device endpoints? Because that's the bug I've been waiting to see fixed.... It would be really nice to be able to plug in, say, an LTE modem + Wi-Fi module + camera or serial adapter and still have interrupts work.

So there were multiple people that were wrong. That doesn't make Trump less wrong. And he was in charge, so his being wrong is arguably worse. And he has continued to be wrong through this whole thing,

So far I've generally been respondimg to people's panic by advising that it's a better time to learn something about epidemiology, statistics, data-visualization, geography, sociology... than to fan political fires.

I guess "US civics" needs to be on that list as well, given how many people are equating the role of "US President" to "person in charge" or "boss of everything" (and even using it as a lynchpin in arguments), when that's basically... an "alt fact". Republicans liked to use that against tactic on the previous president, and there was a nice video debunking it from the perspective that was most relevant at the time.

Even postulates like "the president is the head of the executive branch, FEMA is part of the executive branch, therefor the president is in charge of FEMA" are grossly oversimplifying the relative roles of the presidency and the congress and even the whole "legislative/executive/judicial" divisioning--to the point where the arguments are invalidated (they're called "checks and balances" because the branchea actually do have to interact to control things [to the extent that the federal government actually even has control over things at all, which is a lot less than people think!]).

Maybe education/learning about civics should even go to the head of the list of things to teach/learn about--or at least be put almost first, right behind teaching/learning about education itself (and what "teaching" and "learning" even mean); maybe there's something seriously wrong with our understanding of what "understanding" even means if we keep thoroughly failing in so many critical subjects simultaneously.

I don't know how Apple can get away with charging *tens of thousands* of dollars for their computers when you can get a perfectly capable raspberry pi for only $25.... I know there's the whole "Veblen goods" thing that comes from being fashionable and "cosmetic", but 2e5% markup seems kind of high even for the fashion or cosmetics industries!