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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I wrote one of my representatives once to tell him I disagreed with his stance on some tech-related bill or another several years ago, and urged him to reconsider. I got a canned response from his office thanking me for “my support” and basically “agreeing” with me that the rep’s original stance is correct and good and just, with a little sprinkle of obviously not understanding the bill at all dusted throughout. He is still my representative like 12 years later. I still get his newsletter in my e-mail regularly because his “unsubscribe” link doesn’t work (never mind that I never subscribed to a newsletter, I e-mailed my representative…).

    Our system is far more broken than anyone wants to admit.











  • I mean, I sort of get what you are saying but it also feels a little like Grimes’s boots thing from Terry Pratchet. Like, I can spend $200- $300 and get a phone that will stop getting security updates in 2-3 years… Or I can spend $700-$1000 to get a phone that comes with 7-10 years of security updates. Money per year, you are the same or better off if you can afford the up-front cost of the more expensive product, and we are generating a lot less techno-garbage clogging up the planet.

    Generally, I hate the hard limit of use of these things. Coming from desktop computers, if you spend more money the machine is faster, but if you don’t need the speed you can use the cheap machine just as long (or longer if you really don’t need performance). All phones feel like they are just a subscription model.



  • You keep saying that, but nothing about it is carved out specifically one way or the other for FOSS. As it is worded, any network sysadmin is considered the “OS Provider” exactly the same under Windows or Linux as they “control the operating system software on a computer”. They don’t “develop” or “license” the software in either case, windows or Linux. They control the OS the same amount under either windows or Linux.

    Maybe it could be argued they are more likely to choose windows since the people developing and licensing the software are a big corporation and is therefore more likely to be compliant? But it isn’t like Canonical and RedHat are just some guy in a basement - these are commercial entities developing and licensing software just like Microsoft.

    I agree the definitions in this bill are absolutely insane - the idea that the developer, licensor, and administrator of a computer’s OS would ever be the same person is astronomically unlikely. Maybe they mean something different by “control”, but it isn’t defined so that makes it up to the courts to decide with no direction.