That was a late-stage enshittification; it’s only been that way for a few years, and it was primarily used to suppress dissent.

It is absolutely not something we should be porting over to the fediverse.

Where do you get this idea?

Where do you get the idea that it is at all possible to stand up on your soapbox in the town square, addressing every Tom, Dick, and Harry, yet keeping certain members of the public from hearing your speech?

When I logout of my instance, you can’t distinguish me from any other anonymous user. I’m part of the anonymous masses. If you want to keep me from seeing your content, you can’t post it for the anonymous masses to see.

Facebook (and other proprietary, centralized services) give the impression that this can be done, but the way they are doing it is by refusing to show content to anonymous users. You can’t do that with federated services.

Both. Sometimes a third.

The morning one is the long one, the central part of the 20-minute shit/shower/shave trifecta. Then there is the afternoon one, to rinse off the work-grime before starting the evening. If outdoor activities are on the evening itinerary, a third one: rinse off dust, sweat, urushiol oil (poison ivy), check for ticks, stretch sore muscles, etc.

But on the rare, lazy saturday? Fuck it.

California’s new age verification law puts the onus on the operating system. When you install or setup your computer of device, you will be required to state your age, or the age of the child that will be using the machine. Sex offender App and Web developers are still required to demand the user’s age before providing their services, and children will still be required to announce their minor-ness to P(a)edophiles.

But, California will not require photos or ID scans, so it’s only the second worst of the three available options. The best option, of course, is to allow children to not tell potential pedophiles that they are kids.

Sex offenders (Domestically or abroad) who develop apps or web services will be compelled to collect age data from any minors who use their services. Kids who use these services will be compelled to give their age to these offenders.

You aren’t understanding my point.

My point is that you can continue to import and sell the exact same physical device, just with a little change in marketing, and possibly software.

My point is this: Once you have acquired the device, there is fuck all the FCC can do about you converting your “ham radio” back into a consumer-grade router.

This only applies to routers.

It’s not widely known outside the ham radio community, but part of the 2.4GHz wifi band overlaps the 13cm amateur radio band. If you turn off 5GHz wifi and lock the 2.4GHz AP to Channel 1, it qualifies as a ham radio, and can be sold as a ham radio instead of an AP/Router. You do need a ham radio license to operate it as a Ham AP, but you do not need a license to buy a Ham AP.

If the end user wants to turn on 5GHz after the fact, there is not a damn thing the FCC can do about it.

Parents, schools, employers, and governments, already use content controls to restrict users from accessing undesirable sites and services on the internet.

Searching the terms “content blocking” or “parental controls” will get you lists of apps and services doing just that.

Parents already have the capability. This law doesn’t provide any additional capability for parents to parent their kids. This law seeks, instead, to remove the power and responsibility of parenting from the parents, and assign it to pornographers. They want the operators of adult websites around the world to be the ones determining whether or not to provide content to their kids.

What this law actually does is provide a means for a website to determine whether an adult or a child is trying to access their content, and to use that information to decide what content to provide. The thinking is that a respectable services like Netflix will be able to decide to provide only age-appropriate content, blocking kids from adult content.

However, that also means that services like “KidGroomer dot com” will be able to provide different content to adults than it does to children. To an adult, they can portray themselves as a site that provides information on how to protect kids from grooming. But when a kid visits, this law lets the site know it is a kid. The site can now show them kid-targeted content, like how to get in contact with the nearest candy-giving stranger.

Perhaps we don’t actually want a website to be able to determine whether there is a kid on the other side of the screen.

The UK uses single phase to the house. This is provided via one 240v hot and a neutral. Their final distribution transformer bonds one side of the output coil to ground and use it as a neutral, which makes the other side of the coil 240v relative to that ground.

The US uses split phase to the house. This is 240v provided via two opposing 120v hots and a common neutral. Their final distribution transformer is almost identical to the UK version: end to end, they have a 240v output. The difference is that instead of bonding one end of the output coil to ground and using it as a neutral for the other end, they instead bond the center of the output coil to ground and use that as a common neutral for both ends.

Not just solar - most grid-scale generators have this problem. “Black start” is the search term you want to look for, and Practical Engineering has a good video on the subject.

Basically, only a relative few grid generators are actually capable of black starts. The rest need the grid to be already functioning before they can tie in and start producing.

Ohio does something like that. We have separate contracts with a heavily regulated grid operator for distributing power, and our choice of generation companies for providing power.

The grid operator does our metering and billing, but forwards our generation charge to the provider we select.

Are you saying that electrical power should only be provided by government entities?

Should you be allowed to plug in a solar panel and provide power back to the grid?

Are you a government entity?

If you think you should be allowed to backfeed your own meter, you are calling for the grid to be operated as some sort of market. A regulated market, sure. But a market nonetheless.

The “natural monopoly” of electrical power is only on the distribution, not the generation of that power. It is reasonable for various generators to compete against each other to meet grid demand.

You should be able to push power back onto the grid. You should not be limited only to taking it off the grid. If you can put more on than you remove, you should be compensated for your generation at the market rate.

There is a difference between providing the capability, and requiring that capability.

Under this law, something as simple as sharing a Google Drive could make you an “app store” and potentially liable for penalties.

These laws are specifically designed to be broadly interpreted. We have no idea just how widely the nets will be cast, either tomorrow, or 10 years from now. It is prudent to assume the absolute worst case.

The designated subject for your personal protest is the richest person within 20 miles of you.

If you’re getting sunlight at 10PM, you live on the western end of your time zone. In your location during winter, the sun is overhead closer to 1pm than noon.

Your particular jurisdiction might be better served by joining the timezone to your west.

That the boomers hated it is all the more reason to try again.

So we issue Little Johnny a retroreflective PT belt, and/or start the school day 30 minutes later on the west end of each time zone. Problem solved.

It’s not the 1970’s anymore. The fact that a bunch of idiot boomers hated change is no reason to keep this idiot system.

Worse, they’ve grown up on a steady diet of media telling them that “if you say the wrong thing” to a girl, “she’s going to accuse you of something,”

There’s a big problem with the premise of this argument.

The article accepts this “steady diet of media” as fact, but implies that it only affects “guys”.

If there is, indeed, a “steady diet of media” saying this to a guy, then that same “steady diet of media” is saying the same thing to a girl: “If a guy says something wrong, it is reasonable and/or expected for a girl to accuse him of something”. Girls are hearing the exact same message that guys are hearing.

If that “steady diet” actually exists, then the guy’s concerns of accusations are valid, and he should be praised for ensuring he doesn’t “say the wrong thing”.

Suppose Microsoft adds this capability to Windows, and you edit the registry to disable it. How is that any different?

By allowing the end user to change it instead of locking it down, they are not making a good faith effort to comply, and they lose their liability protection. To maintain their immunity, at the very least they will need to prohibit Californians from disabling the feature.

Canonical is prohibited from adding comparable terms.

I can see the argument for something like iOS.

How is iOS any different from Windows here?

Let’s say you own a computer store in California, you sell Windows laptops, and you setup your preinstalled Windows image with the registry edit made, because customers don’t like the silly age prompt. How are you not the OS Provider?

Again, to maintain their immunity under this law, they would have to prohibit me from doing this in their licensing agreement. My violation is what protects Microsoft. I would, indeed, be the OS provider in that scenario.

But in the scenario you describe, I’m not the end user.

Neither Canonical nor I can include the same restrictive terms in our OS offerings. We can simply inform our users that the OS is not California compliant. Our users become their own OS Providers as soon as they decide to use them in California.