Why do we force them to do that? How does that help? The condo could be just as easily bought by a single family. The only point I am making is that there are a few legitimate situations where a corporation would want to buy property and we should let them. Houses should be for people to live in. Not for giant corporations to invest in.

Saying that whatever Trump does is political suicide misses the biggest issue with this election-

Nobody cares what either of them say because an awful lot of the electorate simply isn’t listening.

The Trump voters would keep voting for Trump even if he joined the Nazi party. The rest of voters have either tuned out or are pushing Kamala simply because she’s not Trump so she must be better.
An awful lot of people have just made up their minds and aren’t listening for anything new.

So having a headline that Trump says something offensive is news to nobody. What would have been political suicide a decade or two ago is business as usual today. Whatever standards we once have politicians to, we no longer hold them to.

How about, corporations can own single-family homes, but can only provide them for use by their employees or contractors, not rent them out on the open market and if they sit vacant for more than a couple of months there is some huge tax or fine?

There are a few, limited, cases where they should be able to. For example, if they have operations in an area that has frequent medium term employees coming in and out. It’s valid for them to say we will offer you a house for the time you are here. But I would generally agree there is no reason for an investment company to be investing in single-family homes. It’s good for the investment company, bad for society.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.

Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

Complicating that however, is the fact that if it’s a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of ‘authors’ and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.

Here’s the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That’s it.

The ‘Winamp source license’ was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn’t actually own the rights to.

This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can’t be legally used or distributed.

Actually I’m not sure we agree on that.

What sort of guns do you feel would be appropriate for pest control in rural areas?

I agree.

I think the filibuster is vitally important as a last-ditch way to stop really bad laws. But there SHOULD be a high cost to using it. It SHOULD gum up the works. Because if it doesn’t, then it becomes status quo that getting something through the Senate takes 60 votes instead of 50 because the losing party will always filibuster. That’s not a good way to run things.

Ever consider where your food comes from?

With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the ‘ivory tower elite’ attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don’t.

You think there’s no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour… where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn’t come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.

the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.

And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.

Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

I’ll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.

But there’s other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So ‘nobody needs a gun’ is a common urban liberal position.
Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it’s too late.
The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That’s a good way to go.

And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there’s now over 700k citizens per representative. That’s far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.

I am not trying to invalidate anyone’s ideas.

But rural voters and urban voters have different needs. Neither is ‘wrong’.

For example- the urban voter might have a lot of gangland gun violence, so they push for strong gun control.
The rural voter OTOH has a police response time of 20+ minutes or more, and real threats to life and property from four-legged predators so they want real useful guns to defend themselves.

Neither is wrong for pushing their particular needs. They just don’t acknowledge the other exists.

Quite frankly if you’re going to say urban people are ‘normal people’ and rural people are ‘backward and insane’, then I’m quite in favor of reducing your own influence (and I say that as a liberal voter and registered Democrat). Good government recognizes that one size doesn’t fit all.

And what of the House? It’s largely based on population. If the White House and the House of Representatives are both population heavy then the Senate is entirely outnumbered.

The point is supposed to be that the House is population based, the Senate is state based, and the Presidency is somewhere in the middle.

Then how do you stop urban concerns from completely trouncing rural concerns? Voters from rural areas have valid concerns which are largely opposite of urban voters. If you get rid of electoral college, candidates will campaign in major cities and that’s it. Nobody else will matter.

For anyone downvoting me- you should know I’m a liberal-libertarian registered Democrat from Connecticut, who’s very much against Trump and most of the BS today’s GOP is peddling. I just don’t think disenfranchising anyone who doesn’t live in a city is the answer.

I don’t always side with either Republicans or Democrats. I just want good government. And I am 100% in favor of repealing the procedural filibuster. I think the filibuster is a valuable tool that is important for defeating certain bad legislation, but it should not exist as a way to make sure any and every contentious legislation requires 60 votes.

If someone feels that strongly about something, let them get up there and read the phone book into the record for six hours.

The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.

with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.

Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
Have these issues been fixed?

It’s all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There’s no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it’s one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn’t some continued use for it.