This is actually a topic in Asimov's Foundation sequels. There's a galactic-standard hour, day, and year, and every plant maps their rotational and revolutional patterns to that. A main plot point was trying to find THE planet that had true 24 hour days and 364.25 day years, since that might have been the birthplace of humanity.

I use Brave too and am frustrated by that... I put an extension that exports my history periodically, so at least I'll still have it. History Trends Unlimited.

I wish they could make it a configurable option to turn off the trunctation.

While we're fixing history problems with Chrome, why not make it stop truncating history at 90 days. Many things in life happen on a yearly cycle. It would be great to be able to see things I was looking at a year ago (holiday gifts, items for a class I'm planning, etc.) as I'm looking for things this year. What a stupid policy.

I just threw one of my Roku devices in the trash. It looks like Apple TV is the only one that doesn't enshittify too much and I just ordered one. But they don't play from local media servers (DLNA) natively, so you need an app.

I feel guilty for the people I recommended use a Roku over the years. They used to be a pretty good product. At least Apple isn't likely to be purchased by a predatory private equity firm.

I've been a Firefox user for decades. But I'm tried of their updates breaking things and taking away functionality. I'm updating, but to Brave. Goodbye Firefox.

Same here. I only play table-top and boardgames online with friends (e.g. Lords of Waterdeep, Dune Imperium, Ticket To Ride) rather than low-latency higher action games. But even with these, if they manage to run on a default Steam install on Linux, they run really slowly and often have odd glitches.

So I dual boot. It's the only thing I use Windows for.

Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.

No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)

This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.

Sure, ChromeOS is based on the Linux kernel, but hardware compatibility is complicated. Here's a site devoted to hacking chromebooks and chromeboxes and the compatibility page tells quite a story: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.mrchromebox.tech%2F...

Basically, many of the components in many of these machines are custom and there are no Windows or Linux drivers available for them. For example, you might re-flash it to install Linux but the sound and touchpad won't work.

Several scientists in my field post about new publications, upcoming conferences, new developments, etc. on Bluesky now.

Indeed, if I recall, the drives are formatted ext4 and put in a raid configuration (if there are multiples). As long as they're not striped, it should be possible to just connect them to a PC running Linux and mount them to get the files off. If they're not in a mirrored config then it could be trickier since you'd probably need to get them all hooked up to the computer and get them mounted together (probably using mdadm).

I only ever set mine up in mirrored raid - but I also block their IPs from accessing the internet, so I don't get automatic updates.