Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

it is pretty clear trump would pardon or vacate any fine against a right winger org.

The president does not yet have pardoning power over civil judgements. Maybe a constitutional amendment to do that is coming, but we haven't had a vote on it yet.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

You make it sound as dangerous as a 1775 soap box that people like Sam Adams would stand upon and shout from, or a pamphlet-printing-press that someone like Thomas Paine might use, where in both cases the goal was often to rowse the rabble into protest and action.

But is the internet really that dangerous?

"The platforms" are, at best, a percent of the internet.

Sign up for a linode, put up any sort of website you can imagine on it, and explain why you would choose for the algorithms you write or install, to work the way that you fear.

It doesn't have to be as bad as you say, unless you want it. That's essential freedom.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion

It will result in suppression of all anti- power/wealth opinion, i.e. all criticism of government or big-pocketed business.

This change is sponsored by litigious motherfuckers. Trump is only the instance-du-jour, a few percent of the overall threat, though very much a shining example of it.

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

The world is heating up, and we need to continue to find ways to make food and energy production more sustainable, but coming up with these completely un-relatable and nonsensical figures won't help. It's about as useful as a 'carbon tax'.

When costs impact individual consumer wallets, that's when people start paying attention. Food shortages due to lack of water or shifting climates drive up prices and create scarcity. Water scarcity and resulting political instability is scary, and starting to rear it's ugly head in a few places.

Unfortunately, I think people are going to have to get a taste of the impact before they do anything meaningful about it. Time has shown you can yell about it all you want, but sitting down to figure out how you can accomplish these goals without reducing quality of life is the most important thing you can do. Leaning into modern, safe nuclear energy for energy abundance (in addition to solar) is much better than advocating for artificial scarcity and extreme conservation. Figuring out ways to more efficiently grow food at scale, as we have been doing since the mid-20th century, is better than advocating for immediate, drastic changes in diet. Lab grown meat that tastes and feels identical to the real thing but environmentally costs far less to produce once it's at scale? I think it's possible. Keep working on it. Hyper efficient crop growth? I don't think we've gotten close to what we can accomplish with a given acre yet, or vertical greenhouse farming. energy efficient de-salinization or condensing? It appears possible. Space-based manufacturing and asteroid mining? It's far better to mine the asteroid belt than the earth, and send the products downhill to earth. Metals that exist in abundance in the solar system should be gotten from elsewhere if robotic mining and modern delivery systems can make it economical. This is a GIANT untapped economy that will eventually bare fruit, but it may take a while.

There's a lot of things we could push really hard that we're not doing. Markets are lazy and want to optimize today and not worry about tomorrow, if there is no immediate perceived danger. It creates a kind of blind spot that can lead to the world eating its own tail, causing a collapse. We'll either figure it out or we'll collapse and have to start over, or possibly die out completely. I think there's a window of opportunity to continue to lift civilization to great heights, that will close in the next 100 years if the status quo continues as-is.

If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?

Europe is now eyeing similar bans, as well as proposals for a late-night "curfew", curbs on addictive features, and an EU-wide age verification app.

LATE-NIGHT CURFEW?!

If Europe isn't careful, they're going to teach a generation of kids that it's ok to do their FTPing during business hours.

Just a few weeks ago there was a slashdot post via the Reigster giving a good clue as to why people still pay for it versus LibreOffice/OpenOffice versions or Google Sheets:

"Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register."

You might say, "Well, if you have 20 million cells in a single spreadsheet you're doing it wrong" but excel has been abused in all kinds of ways for edge use cases and it will take it, and that's why people still use it. People have found it enormously useful to crunch vast amounts of data, and sometimes it requires astonishingly large cell counts. The world excel championships show just now useful it is for so many things. At an aerospace company I worked at, excel was the primary tool to calculate suborbital and orbital rocket trajectories given initial specific impulse, drag, mass, etc. The person who created the spreadsheet was a math and physics genius, and I referred to him as 'the Excel whisperer'.

Large companies that pioneered a piece of software have a first mover advantage, and then when they get big, they can afford to keep plowing money into improving the software and adding features to keep ahead of the competition that is less well funded, or relying on volunteers in the case of Open Source.

I ran into a similar problem trying to switch from Solidworks to a much cheaper lookalike competitor, as when you started to dig down there were some critical features that I needed that were just completely missing. I have the last bought and paid for version of Solidworks that they offered (2022) with no subscription, works great for my needs.

I use excel these days for a very complicated cost calculating sheet I developed to sell a particular product line with many different options. It calculates shipping weights and volumes critical for international container shipping quotes. It's a godsend. This sheet could be replicated on one of the free pieces of software, but since I own an Office 2019 desktop license outright, I'll continue to use it until I can no longer install it on future computers. You can still purchase a copy of MS Office 2024 desktop outright from Microsoft for $150. They don't advertise it much, but it's there on their website. I don't generally do software-as-a-service subscriptions, with a few very narrow exceptions. That's the one thing that will finally drive me away from Office, when 365 is the only option.