What, am I the only person who always found his looks offputting? It’s like he has some money and okayish starting parameters, but went through typical sleazy ‘pickup artist’ bullshit. Silk shirts and such, eugh.

the phone companies would be able to charge peak megabyte hours to specific websites

ISPs in the US were aiming to do that, since video traffic dominates the web pretty heavily now. But that could be easily abused, so they were slapped away with the net neutrality regulations, which iirc Trump rolled back.

I just don’t believe it applies in this specific domain any longer.

You referred to the megabytes thing in the past tense, yes, but the reasoning applied back then. In fact, gigabit speeds are still not prevalent worldwide (nor just in the US, from what I understand about their shitty ISPs). I can easily saturate the 100 mbps allotted to my cable-connection plan in the neighbourhood that doesn’t provide much choice, and I’m pretty sure mobile connection isn’t better than that in most cases.

Cory Doctorow predicted this fifteen years ago, although in a different context (transcript here).

Cory Doctorow predicted this fifteen years ago, although in a different context (transcript here).

like when cellphone companies tried to claim megabytes were a precious finite resource

Limiting the usage of a shared channel is a valid approach, it’s remarkable how so many people just absolutely refuse to understand this. You can use the entire bandwidth of the shared channel for a while, when your webpage is loading. If you use the entire bandwidth nonstop, you fuck over everyone else on the channel. So the company has the choice between giving you fast load times but limiting your usage otherwise, or giving you 32 kbps unfettered.

If you want an entire channel of guaranteed bandwidth with unlimited usage, you always could and can get it — under business plans, which are orders of magnitude costlier, because they don’t share the channels.

In a similar fashion, if your healthcare system is entirely free, it’s getting clogged with retired old people who are lonely and have nothing better to do. If a doctor visit costs even a couple bucks (depending on the region), the doctors are suddenly much more free to deal with real cases.

There was famously a guy who’s said that the world needs like five or so computers. But that was when each computer took a whole room.

I’ve heard that bricks are much more effective IRL.

I don’t know how one would have a positional numeral notation without zero, even if it’s denoted by an empty space. Sure enough, reportedly the symbol for zero appeared in the Hindu numerals, derived from the non-positional Brahmi system. Although apparently both ancient Babylon and China already had their own positional notations, both with a space for zero.

Arabs added a system for fractions instead.

Which, coincidentally, is originally Indian just like ‘Arabic numerals’.

Arabs were also a thing before Islam.

Technically Arabs just brought over the Indian system. Would be fun if e.g. Slavs brought it instead, and it would be called Slavic numerals.

Afaik it basically introduced automotive safety as a thing in the US. People just didn’t care before.

By that time ‘Dracula’ was already plagiarized as ‘Nosferatu’ in 1922, since F.W. Murnau wasn’t given the rights to adapt ‘Dracula’, so he shrugged his shoulders, changed a few things and made his own film. Inventing some stuff on the way like Nosferatu being affected by sunlight, about which Dracula and folklore vampires never gave a shit.

The 1931 ‘Dracula’ is notable partly due to its set having been used at nights to make a Spanish-language version in parallel. Which is considered better than the English-language one, because its crew had access to the English dailies and could check what worked and what didn’t.

Bad news, the scene was CGI’d because logs don’t bounce like that.

Just get a bidet. And a Squatty Potty, while you’re at it.

Reminds me of how someone posted that he likes to tell people that he’s not gay but his husband is. And then watch the reaction.

Belarus is already just short of merging with Russia. Their entire law and bureaucracy are tuned to Russian ones, except of course for the death penalties for dissenters. They straight up have this thing called Union State.

Fun fact: on the day of Kissinger’s death, Rolling Stone rolled out the article ‘Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies’, which on my machine takes twenty-eight screenfuls.

The next day, they published ‘Henry Kissinger, Notorious War Criminal, Lauded By Media’.

Thank god Henry Kissinger wasn’t as bad as Obama.

It was bad when Gimp had floating windows. That was changed long ago. Since then, the layout is basically the same as in PS: tools on the left, layers on the right, the image in the middle. The biggest difference is probably that the tools panel isn’t in one column by default and takes some screen space — but it can be resized, though idk about the minimum width.