Either Thomas Jefferson had two first names, or Jefferson Davis had two last names.

Blahblahrians!

Anyone with even one level in monk automatically counters this with an Ānāpānasati save.

Trade is ancient. Consider: People have been ordering products from abroad, relying on promises and reputations, since the days of Ea-nāṣir. It’s always depended on trust, which is why we still know the name Ea-nāṣir.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog … until you tell them.

Yep. This is why online recipe sites put a whole goddamn personal essay before the actual recipe: if someone scrapes the page and copies it, they’ll scrape the (copyrightable) essay as well as the (non-copyrightable) recipe.

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Try text.

Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.

(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)

In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.

Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that’s not how most traders behave, and it’s not how most traders’ payoffs work.

If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment.

In one of my better workplaces, the expression was “you can cuss the hardware, you can cuss the software, but don’t cuss your teammate.”

As the article mentions, Red Hat is IBM.

For what it’s worth, getting in the habit of making excuses for one’s use is part of alcoholism.

And yet a dump rump is still worse.

SLS and Yggdrasil came out in '92; Slackware in '93; Red Hat in '95.

The Debian project started in '93, but the first stable release wasn’t until '96, along with Linux kernel version 2.0.

Ubuntu didn’t come along until 2004.

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So you’re into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?

I dunno man, that’s still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won’t try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.

I know folks with autism-related sensory sensitivities who really can’t stand celery and have trouble with a lot of canned soups and broths because of it.

I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.

I’m just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.

(Also, I think you’ll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone’s reading matter.)