It's in Mint's Software Centre, I just installed it. For sure an older version, mind you.

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Mentioning Pirates of the Caribbean makes me suddenly realize that there should be a pirate mod for Skatebird called "Parrots of the Caribbean".

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Quoting: AnzaI have domesticated Lox also, but back then they were useful only tearing down trees and squashing graydwarves.

Cuz you had no bagels or cream cheese?

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Quoting: EikeReading fan curve, I wondered how they implemented something like this!?!

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Honestly, I was thinking about a Steam Deck fan/supporter forum or the like.

Wow, that's a lot of fans! And some of them are curvy, I'm sure.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyThere was a lot of talk about this when Disney started to (significantly) ramp-up all the 'Mickey' merchandise a few years back... I never realized that a company still operating could lose ownership of their intellectual property, but apparently they can after a set period of time and a certain set of circumstances.

Not too sure how I feel about that, but there you go.

There is this closeness, yet seperation between Copyright, Patents, Trademarks and Intellectual Property.

I of course could be wrong, but the way I understand it, copyright ends 70(?) Years after the author dies, unless the holder of their estate keeps reapplying... which is why you can't just sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant. Patents... I don't think ever expire, they just either get randomly enforced... or not. Trademarks is why Disney has to keep the merchandise and the name Mickey out there. IP I think are like Pokémon cards, corporations want to collect them all.

Patents actually expire a lot faster. Like 20 years or so, in theory. Large companies have various tricks where they add bits and say it's a new patent sort of, so they can functionally keep a patent going for longer. In the US at least.

Trademarks have that particular thing where I'm not sure if they ever expire out of sheer duration, but they have to be actively maintained. You have to keep on using the trademark, and you have to get on people's case if they try to use it. If the courts conclude you haven't given a damn about the trademark for too long, you lose it.

Copyrights just last a really long time. They don't depend on usage or enforcement as far as I've ever heard, although they can require the occasional re-application. But last time it was looking like Mickey Mouse was going to hit the end of the copyright period, Disney bought themselves a law making US copyright last a lot longer, and luckily for them that was just as we were hitting the age of all the big companies deciding "intellectual property" was where it's at so they started getting incredibly long copyright periods written into all the trade agreements. But the Sonny Bono (/Disney) copyright act was quite a few years ago now, it may well be they're staring the end in the face, or need another new law, or at least need to do some kind of special re-applying thing. However, I think the basic mouse-ears image thing isn't copyrightable--too brief and minimal, that would be purely a trademark.
Really, it's been ages since they did much of anything with Mickey Mouse as, like, a character in a narrative, using the actual copyright. Not really something that would work for modern audiences, frankly.

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Quoting: LinuxerUmm what is a .pak file? I see that for a download at itch. Do i just run that? :huh:

A .pak file, huh? I'd avoid that. It's a file for turning someone into a Pak Protector from Ringworld, and they're violent, hyperintelligent, and amazingly strong and fast.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis is taking me back to the old Dune board game. Six players, no more no less--Atreides, Fremen, Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, Guild, Emperor. Not perfectly balanced, but surprisingly well considering, and did a beautiful job conveying the atmosphere and the different powers and strengths of the different groups. For instance, everyone except the Fremen have to pay spice to get troops to the surface. Who do they have to pay? The Guild, which ends up with obscene amounts of money, partly making up for their lousy combat ability.
A friend of mine made up a sort of special edition version, with a wooden board etched using some kind of digital thingie, and "spice" tokens made of actual chunks of cinnamon. Every couple of years we manage to get a group together and have some fun hours with it.

Sounds fun to me. Can we make the spice like a cinnabon or something?

Ohhh, you want to add an extra level of difficulty! One moment of weak will and your faction's treasury is wiped out!
Paul has met the test of the Gom Jabbar--but can he handle the test of the Cinnabon Temptation?

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This is taking me back to the old Dune board game. Six players, no more no less--Atreides, Fremen, Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, Guild, Emperor. Not perfectly balanced, but surprisingly well considering, and did a beautiful job conveying the atmosphere and the different powers and strengths of the different groups. For instance, everyone except the Fremen have to pay spice to get troops to the surface. Who do they have to pay? The Guild, which ends up with obscene amounts of money, partly making up for their lousy combat ability.
A friend of mine made up a sort of special edition version, with a wooden board etched using some kind of digital thingie, and "spice" tokens made of actual chunks of cinnamon. Every couple of years we manage to get a group together and have some fun hours with it.

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As to what Elon Musk himself might or might not do with Twitter . . . well, I think the open sourcing of the algorithms is a good thing on a number of levels. If nothing else, it will allow for some interesting analysis of just what those algorithms really do, what they promote, what they suppress.

And, I think if he genuinely clamps down on bots that will have a bigger impact than practically anything else he might do. People underestimate bots--we know intellectually that half of Twitter is bots and that that probably skews heavily to the more political/culture-war-ish side of things, but I don't think people really dig what that means to how the platform behaves. If he really scraps 'em that could massively change Twitter, both in its sort of "intensity level" and in terms of what floats to the surface--without bots some of the most inflammatory stuff would get far, far less promotion. It might largely return to being the vapid but relatively harmless entertainment we used to know and despise.

Whatever he might mean to do vis-a-vis "freedom of speech", and however politically slanted his intentions might be in trying to do it, I don't think the results are likely to be as important as the bots thing, if he really does it. No matter what country, there are always limits to free speech--would Twitter under Musk be planning to explicitly allow libel? Presumably not.

I don't actually pretend to fully understand Musk's politics anyway. He likes saying outrageous things (partly I think for the free publicity), he's got some alt-right-ish ideas about Covid, he's strongly anti-union, and he favours coups in countries that want to try to control their own resources if he wants those resources cheap for batteries. But lots of Democrats are into those last two things. And on the other hand, he's obviously a strong believer in stopping climate change and ending fossil fuel use, which is a seriously not-Republican position. I wouldn't be surprised if he's too into ad-hoc techno-utopian solutions to one problem at a time, to adhere to any overall political program. So the implications of his actual political slant on Twitter may be pretty limited and random, really. Except there'll probably be a pro-free-market slant, but what else is new? At least maybe we'll be able to see the algorithms do it.

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I find some of the comments about the current political situation of Twitter, with talk of "both sides" and "the left" rather amusing. And very, very American.
That is, they indulge the tendency to see mainstream United States politics as representing all possible political division, with Republicans representing "the right" and Democrats somehow representing "the left", and that "one side" and "other side" being all the sides that can exist. Speaking as an actual leftist, I think it's important to point out that by historical and international standards, the US Democrats are not a left political formation, or a centrist one, or a centre-right one. They are an economically hard right wing party with some progressive-identity-politics window dressing (and a small, ineffectual centrist wing). Modern US mainstream politics takes up a very tiny slice even of what's been considered possible in the US in the past, let alone everywhere else.

Twitter is probably one of the contributing factors to this extreme impoverishment of the modern US political landscape.

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