I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen

People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.

Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.

Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.

My neighbors, friends, family, all of us

That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.

We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]

That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.

Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.

If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.

The problem is that they’re not doing anything illegal.

The bigger problem is that they have the power to keep anybody from passing new laws that would make what they’re doing illegal.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.

I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth

Even if it is just a scam?

He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.

His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.

You sound like someone who frequently accidentally brings up the emoji keyboard when you’re trying to go to the end of the line here on Lemmy.

Meanwhile authors, who you might imagine might be most upset at their books being “given away” by libraries, actually love libraries and are delighted to hear stories of people checking their books out.

Asimov’s mysteries always hinged on the laws of robotics. It always seemed like a robot did something, but if the laws of robotics were in force that couldn’t have happened. But, it was always explained in a way that left the three laws intact.

The “I, Robot” movie abandoned the 3 laws of robotics when convenient to the plot. That takes away the entire tension that made Asimov’s stories interesting.

They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

A lot of managers are pretty useless. Some degree of management is needed because you can’t just have 10,000 individual contributors all reporting directly to the CEO. But, a lot of managers get where they are by schmoozing, claiming credit, shifting blame, avoiding responsibility, etc.

Yes, it’s also a pile of shit!

Eh, I was around in that time.

So was I.

Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.

Netscape Communicator came out in mid 1997. By that time, Netscape was already doomed because of Microsoft’s illegal bundling.

Netscape’s IPO was in early August of 1995. It opened at $28 per share, and closed at $75 per share on that first day. The browser they were selling at that point was Netscape Navigator, and it was by far the best one available. 2 weeks later Microsoft introduced the first version of Internet Explorer. It was terrible, but it was free. Microsoft kept shoving IE in people’s faces for years, making it the default, bundling it with Windows, and doing everything it could to sabotage Netscape’s business.

Microsoft was able to do this because they were able to subsidize the massive losses for R&D on Internet Explorer and IIS by taking money from their monopoly on operating systems. Netscape didn’t have another business, and it’s very difficult to compete with “free”, so they were doomed.

If you look at a graph of Netscape’s share price, it peaked in late 1995 and by 1997 when it released Communicator it was already dying because of Microsoft’s illegal tactics. 6 months after Communicator was released Netscape had to undergo a big round of layoffs. 1 year after that it was bought by AOL.

There’s no way that this is a story of Netscape failing. It’s quite obviously a story of Microsoft using its monopoly illegally to force a competitor in another area out of business. That was proven in the trial.

After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0

Netscape Communicator was the 4.0 version of the company’s browser. 1.0 came out in December 1994. 2.0 came out in March 1996. 3.0 Came out in August 1996. This supposedly bloated version you’re talking about was the 4.0 release and came out in June 1997. As evidence they were dying by the time they released communicator, they only managed one more release before they were acquired by AOL.

It wasn’t until Phoenix Firebird Firefox project

You do understand the purpose of the Mozilla Corporation and the Firefox project right? They knew that the company was doomed because of what Microsoft had done, and created the Mozilla non-profit as a kind of life-raft so that the browser didn’t simply die when the company was crushed.

In fact those names you crossed out just support what I’m saying: “Firefox was originally named “Phoenix”, a name which implied that it would rise like a Phoenix after Netscape was killed off by Microsoft.”

that IE had real competition.

You have that completely backwards. At first Netscape was the dominant browser, but as Microsoft used its illegal tactics the usage of Netscape declined until it disappeared. But, as they hoped, Firefox did rise from the ashes of the Netscape company and come to compete with Microsoft. But it was really Chrome that killed off Internet Explorer years after Netscape was driven out of business.

But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator

The Mozilla organization was created before the release of Communicator. They already knew their company was doomed by the time Communicator was released.

and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier?

A decade earlier? In the 1980s? Tim Berners-Lee didn’t even describe the web until 1990, so I don’t think selling a web browser was a viable business before that.

Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover

Yes, because they were driven out of business by Microsoft. We covered that already. Most of the talented people just left. jwz bought a bar and left the technology business entirely.

Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator

Why are you so focused on Communicator instead of Navigator?

Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time

The problems with IE were never that it “wasn’t improved over time”, it was that it trampled all over standards and intentionally broke things as part of Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.

people tend to do revisionist history

You seem to be a revisionist historian who doesn’t know the basics of what they’re talking about.

P.S. As an experiment, take a look at that graph of browser share and see if you can spot when the US government sued Microsoft for abusing its monopoly.