Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 83

'It Sure Looks Like Trolls Are Weaponizing Call-Out Culture to Weaken Democrats'
https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/trolls-internet-democrats-racist-trump-harris-warren-bernie-sanders-trump.html

Some on the left desperately need to learn to reserve judgement, and do some careful fact-checking, before believing or passing on accusations. Otherwise we can be easily weaponized against each other by political PR campaigns and organized trolls.

Besides, whenever people say it's wrong to do something fundamentally just, because it's currently against the law, I like to remind them that helping people escape slavery used to be against the law. When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

I find it absurd when people accuse #SciHub of "stealing" from journal publishers. It is the publishers who are stealing, from the scholars who write, peer review and edit the journals without pay, from universities and their libraries who have to pay to so their researchers can publish papers *and* to get access to them, and from the public who fund all this, through public funding, tuition fees and so on.

For anyone a bit confused by why this is happening, a reminder about the documentary #Paywall that explains the background to this:
https://paywallthemovie.com/

@fitheach definitely have to keep that one in mind ;)

'University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and #OpenAccess'
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

@mirek On a similar note, I'd *really* like to see a federation of ride-sharing sites, each based on a fairly small geographical community. The idea of the federation would be to allow drivers/ riders with good reputations, on sites with good reputations, to offer/ request rides on other sites when they're travelling outside their home area. The cost of running each local site would be low, but a network of respectful drivers/ riders could be built across whole countries, or even continents.

@mirek I take your point, and I think it would need to be an opt-in situation where each hospitality exchange decides which others to federate with.

@musicman @lnxw48a1 I wasn't arguing that releasing all code under #copyleft licenses is a guarantee of business success. Clearly, it isn't. My point was that the experience of GH debunks Preston's claim (that keeping the key bits of your software non-free is a better business strategy than freeing all the code). Ergo, given all the other reasons for liberating code, and one less reason for keeping it (or some of it) non-free, why not liberate?

@craigmaloney #Allura is under the #Apache2 license, not a #copyleft license. #SourceForge ended up getting acquired, just like GH. All consistent with my theory AFAICT.

#JulieBindel advocates making it illegal to buy sex, an approach taken by a number of European countries, including France. While I think this could be a step forward for countries like the US, where they still criminalizing sex workers and others involved in the business, I think it would be a step backwards for countries like #NZ where sex work has been fully decriminalized. What's the difference between criminalizing buying sex and criminalizing sex outside marriage?
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018683804/julie-bindel-come-on-feminists-ditch-the-makeup-bag

I can now see some images while playing a video using #PeerTube on my ancient 32-bit laptop, but it appears as a series of stills, not a proper video stream. I wonder if there is some way to provide a range of file size / quality levels, so people with older PCs or slower net connections can still watch properly? I've resorted to downloading using #BitTorrent, but can I help others watch on the web by seeding that torrent, or only seed to other downloaders?

@dredmorbius it doesn't help that he uses terminology in ways that obscure his meaning. I suspect he would have been interpreted very differently if he'd called his essay 'The Tragedy of Laissez-faire'. Using "commons" to mean an unregulated free-for-all is an ahistorical usage at best;
> Meaning "provisions for a community or company" is from mid-14c.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/commons

@clacke As Hardin uses the term in the 'Tragedy ...' essay, a "commons" is an unregulated resource that anyone can pull from or pour outputs into, things like Earth's atmosphere, or the #PublicDomain. Imagine #OpenSource without #VersionControl or #TradeMarks, where anyone could dump any code they want into any project or release any code under any name. Ostrom's "commons" is a shared resource, regulated by a community of users, like open source as it actually works.
http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

@josef No idea. I've been hearing about Hardt/Negri since they published #Empire, but I've never got around to reading anything they've written. Can you suggest any short essays as entry points to their work?

In fact, if the default behaviour was to make anything a user posts self-destructing, unless they mark it otherwise (with the user able to opt-out), that would massively reduce the long-term storage burden on instances. With the bonus of being compatible with the #RightToBeForgotten in the #GDPR
@Gargron @mayel @mike @bob @lain @lightone @bhaugen

@cstanhope the problem as I see it is that Democrats like Feinstein (and her counterparts in centrist parties across the world) are locked into a self-defeating belief that they have to work within the limits of (corporatist) political "reality", when what's required is to radically change political "reality" to conform to actual reality, not vice-versa. The 1% didn't shift the #OvertonWindow so far to the right by conforming to the political "reality" of the 1960s/70s.

@icedquinn seems not:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xqnpe/inside-canadas-first-ever-flat-earth-conference