SwingingTheLamp

joined 2 years ago

Only one of the interviewees said location. That would be key for me. If the theater was close by and integrated integrated into daily life, I'd probably go a lot more often. Instead, all of the theaters are way out on the edge of town, often in some grotty commercial area where the land is cheap enough for the obligatory huge parking lot. It's a commitment to get there, as in, you intend to go to a movie and only to a movie, because there's nothing else to do nearby. No dinner and a movie, no random matinee as a break from the office grind, no movie followed by hanging out with friends at the bar across the street. I might as well watch at home.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 5 points 6 days ago (5 children)

This doesn't make any sense. So we should ignore the cues that they're not interested and take our shot anyway, even though men ignoring signs of disinterest is annoying, and they love getting attention from men who pay heed to their boundaries when the boundary is not wanting our attention? Or should we take no for an answer and handle rejection gracefully by not hitting on them when they're not interested, because that's the proper way to hit on women?

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 12 points 6 days ago (10 children)

Or is it because we've been told that women are sick of being hit on all the time?

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

As others have said, it's important to distinguish different types of intellectual property laws. A patent is protection for a process or mechanism, which doesn't apply to the shape of the bar. I doubt that there would have been a patent, because mold-making is an ancient art, and pretty straightforward. It wouldn't be an innovation to make an oval mold.

A copyright is protection for a tangible recording of an expressive work; writing, music, film, et cetera. It doesn't apply to goods. It would apply to a designer's drawing of the shape of the bar, but not the shape, nor the bar itself.

What might apply is a trademark, which is protection for the use of some distinguishing feature to identify a product or brand in the marketplace. Trademarks are supposedly about preventing consumer confusion about whom they are buying from. They arise from customary use, meaning that a product or service has to be sold with that mark for them to exist. Courts have recognized all sorts of things as trademarks: in addition to logos and names, also color schemes, shapes, even scents.

Thing is, a trademark doesn't have to be registered with the USPTO to offer protection. Registration just means that the Office has accepted it as a trademark, so that use of it by others is presumptively an infringement. Without registering it, an entity would have to sue to get a court to issue a finding of infringement.

So hypothetically, the shape of a Dove beauty bar could be a trademark, even if it's not currently registered with the USPTO. However, the prospects aren't that great, IMO, because oval is a pretty common shape, and Dove distinguishes itself with the prominent bird-shaped logo more than the shape of the bar.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 57 points 1 week ago (2 children)

One that Linux should've had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they're backwards-compatible with, so new versions don't necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren't present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn't need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah, but that's the issue highlighted in the article: Most of the United States is not a functional community.

This doesn't seem like a good-faith argument, because this is a pre-schooler's take on transportation issues. Anybody with a passing familiarity with roads can see the holes in it.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

One of the tests that Strong Towns offers to determine whether your town is a strong one is this: If there was some emergency (say, a fascist takeover) that required the community to gather together, would people know instinctively where to meet? In lots of low-density, car-oriented landscapes, there's no there there, no community/symbolic spaces where people would go.

Obviously, this is an analytical tool, not guide as to what would happen in any real-world scenario. It does highlight the decline of community, and the fraying of the weak social ties that hold a community together. How do we as Americans organize ourselves to resist when so many of us don't know even our close neighbors? How do we work to reduce political polarization, which is done by daily, face-to-face interaction with people who are not like us, when we have so little community interaction that's not through a windshield?

It's a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether the destruction of community is a cause or effect of car-dependency, but what's clear is that the fascists are here and taking advantage of the fact that we've fucked ourselves over with a car-dependent landscape for too many decades.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

20% of Americans are children under the age of 18 and so don’t need to drive…

Your childhood must've been very different from mine! I needed to get places as a kid, like school, friends' houses, stores, parks, the library, and more.

Believe as you wish, but if a person works for a boss that they know to be a sex trafficker, doing things sex-trafficking-adjacent, or at least illegal, for him, that's good enough for me to declare that person a sex-trafficking POS.

Also, I don't think for a microsecond that goons given this kind of power and impunity over detainees are going to refrain from sexual assault. We just haven't heard about it yet (this time).

But, well, pick your lane.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I would much rather see ex-Redditors leave the word "you" at the door, as in, telling other Lemmings who they are, what they believe, or what they're doing. Like, "you clearly think...", "you don't know...", or "you believe..."

Even if those things may be true, that kind of phrasing leads to arguments and vitriol about 100% of the time, even if the initial difference of opinion was a misunderstanding. If somebody is really a nasty troll, or bot, or shill, or tankie, or whatever, block and move on.

Right, that's exactly the problem I have with most people who call themselves libertarian. In a nutshell, they truly believe that we all should get to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn't affect others. Except, everything we do affects other people. Some of the ways are profound, and some are trivial. The libertarian-type people are so selfish, or solipsistic, they think that only their own judgement applies whether the effect infringes freedom it not.

We see that with vaccines: The government shouldn't mandate what they put in their bodies. That's infringes freedom. But they're more than happy to spread virus into other people's bodies, and if immuno-compromised people think that it's hurting them, too bad. Or the libertarian types think that they should be allowed to drive the biggest brodozer available, because it doesn't affect anybody else, and the freedom of other people who get hit and crushed under the wheels, the other drivers blinded by eye-level headlights, or the taxpayers who have to subsidize more free parking space and street maintenance, doesn't matter.

It's always the same pattern: Anything that stops me from doing what I want is an unreasonable infringement of freedom, and any effects I have on other people are just the reality of living in society and they should suck it up.

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