Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic I think of "felony contempt of business model" every time I install the CSS library (to read copy-protected DVDs) along with apps such as VLC to play DVDs on Linux :-)
Apparently, doing that to watch DVDs (which I bought new) on the wrong sort of player is naughty. Oh well.
Homo naledi is the most interesting new human like primate. They are from South Africa, little people. walked upright, but primates walking upright goes way back.
They had hands just like modern humans but longish arms and powerful shoulders ... so they could probably zip up a tree.
They have small brains half modern size. This has made people astonished that they may have had fire.
I'm glad I'll never meet one, a smart little firebug with powerful arms sounds terrifying. 1/
@vikxin@futurebird That particular paper, by Berger if memory serves, regarding burial and cave paintings never made it past peer review. I'm fact 10 of the people that looked at it for peer review straight out said the information supplied did not meet the minimum requirements of scientific evidence and that the conclusions cannot be drawn from the evidence supplied. I think one other person looked at it and they said there were issues with the paper and it needed some reviews.
What is amazing is that whoever used fire first didn't land up suffocating themselves with smoke inhalation. Apparently the fires were made in the middle of the cave not at the mouth which would cause the smoke to just fill up the cave.
@futurebird there are 3 species of birds, the black kite (Milvus migrans), whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and the brown falcon (Falco berigora), which are known to deliberately pick up burning branches, fly some distance, and spread them about to start new fires:
@rahmstorf wie kann man sich emotional/psychologisch auf diese Katastrophe vorbereiten, es beherrscht meine Gedanken. Ich habe Angst zum prepper zu werden zudem ich glaube, dass das auch keinen Sinn macht. Aber ich habe das Gefühl ich muss mich irgendwie wappnen, weiß aber nicht wie...
I'm debating reviving my official pixelfed hosting service idea, it's not a regular host service though!
Rather you'd bring a S3, Hetzner, Linode, DigitalOcean API key to our service
We would provision or otherwise manage (1-click updates, automated backups) your instance while allowing you to maintain total control over ownership of the underlying server and data
I'm thinking $5-20 a month for this, and it would allow admins a new level of peace of mind while maintaining total control
@dansup I really like this idea. I've been a longtime Flickr user and have invested a lot of time pushing my photos to there, but it hasn't kept up with the times and has gone through a whole series of corporate acquisitions and pricing changes such that I no long upload photos there. It's a dead archive for me.
I love the idea of small "sovereign" hosting where I'm not going to get jerked around by the whims of the corporate world.
I’ve informed my wife that I’ll be going all in on unemployment. I’m buying an old Firebird to put up on blocks in the driveway and working to develop a taste for natty light.
I think I'm the only person who didn't know anything about the aurora last night. Anyway, I was far too tired and asleep not long after sunset. Sometimes, though, I wonder how everyone knows about these things except me.
As part of his inauguration, president Putin has published a report presenting his goals for Russia in his coming 6-year term.
In this report — and this is golden — Putin expects to raise the life expectancy of Russians from 73 to 78 years… while his soldiers are being killed faster than the printer ink can dry.
This man is completely detached from reality.
(Via Claus Mathiesen of The Royal Danish Defence College)
We need to pass a law that says cats can't vote in US elections. Why won't they pass a law? Why? We all feel like cats are voting! (just look at them! You can feel it too, right???)
yeah yeah ... it's already illegal for cats to vote... and I can't show any evidence of cats voting...
but that's just because of UM uh because of..cancel culture.
I can't even talk about this without everyone going nuts.
Why wouldn't someone want such a law? hm? Unless they too are a CAT! Makes u think!