Hey, watch where you’re putting your hands.

neither device was ever built or tested

I know, right?

this post of mine

You have a typo in the title for the section about backups.

In that post you use the compose format. Have you used quadlet? My understanding is that’s the “preferred” way to do things, I’ve also had some issues and am trying to decide if it’s worth it. Any thoughts?

My old, crappy phone that retailed for $250 (got for much cheaper) had 4GB RAM (released 2019 or 2020), and my current one has 8GB RAM. The one before that had 2GB IIRC, and was released around 2017, and it was crappy for the time.

I feel jealous for the hearing impaired. Just think of everyone and they’re dog showing off how dumb it is all the time.

Never have I appreciated not having features so much.

My city library will pull from nearby libraries for a fee (like $2/work I think?), or I can use my card at those same libraries for free (just need to return to the same library), but AFAIK they don’t pull from anything beyond that. We’re a relatively small city (like 30-40k people), so maybe things are different downtown.

University libraries, however, will pull from pretty much everywhere, and they have access to a ton of online academic resources.

Well, except trademark and fraud. But there are plenty of workarounds to that.

The original 14-year duration w/ an optional renewal is pretty fair IMO. That’s long enough that the work has likely lost popularity, but not so long that it’s irrelevant. Renewals should be approved based on need (i.e. I’m currently living off the royalties).

The current copyright term in the US is utterly atrocious.

Oh, we should also consider copyright null and void once it’s no longer available commercially for a “reasonable” price. As in, if I can’t go buy the book or movie today for a similar price to the original launch (or less), then you should lose copyright protections.

What does that even mean though? Like, you would retain the ability to sell and modify it but not a monopoly on free distribution?

I think 10-15 years, i.e. the original copyright act in the US (14 years) is totally fair, and allow a one-time renewal if you can prove it’s still available for purchase and losing copyright would impact your livelihood or something.

Exactly! That’s what we had originally in the US, and I thought that was more than fair. I would add that the renewal should only be awarded if they can prove they need more time to recoup R&D costs and it’s still available commercially.

So yeah, something in the neighborhood of 10-15 years w/ a renewal sounds totally fair to me. Let them keep the trademarks and whatnot as long as they’re in use (e.g. you shouldn’t be able to make a new entry in a series w/o the author’s permission for the marks, but fanfic that explicitly mentions it’s not original/canon would probably fall under fair use), but the actual copyright should expire very quickly.

Mine doesn’t…

Yeah, probably. But just moving isn’t going to close that gap, they would need a significant reduction in haedcount or a significant increase in income.

I’m looking into Technitium, which doesn’t get a ton of attention here. It looks to be much more feature packed than PiHole (DNS over HTTPS, for example), and similar to AdGuard Home.

Paying for privacy should be necessary because it’s the only way to fund development of the software you rely on. If you’re not paying, you’re the product.

I pay for email and a handful of other services online. I would be happy to pay for online content if that eliminated ads and tracking. I want to help fund Firefox, but my only option is Mozilla VPN/Relay. Donations don’t fund development, and the rest of the paid products have privacy issues. I also have concerns about Mozilla VPN, why wouldn’t I just go to Mullvad directly instead of adding another party that can potentially track me?

I’m happy to pay, let me pay.

Looking over their financials, they’d have to cut l over half their workforce and relocate to a cheaper area (to cut salaries by more than half) to get close to being financially stable without search income.

Website should be sufficient.

750 employees, but the point stands.

It’s more like $260M, from their financials. Salaries in SF are expensive.

Here are Mozilla’s financials (PDF, covers 2022 and 2023), and skme highlights:

• “royalties” (Google) - ~$500M
• investment income - $10-50M ($1B in investments)
• SW dev expenses - $220-260M

They’re putting quite a lot of that Google money into investments, probably in case the gravy train dries up.

Mozilla has ~750 employees, about 700 of which work on Firefox in some capacity.

So, if we take $260M/700, we get $370k per employee. That’s pretty high, though I guess it makes more sense in SF. If they moved their operations to a less expensive state, they could cut that in half or more.

However, if the Google money ends, they would need to drastically cut their workforce, like by more than half, or raise a ton of cash some other way.