CTCP messages still go through the server. DCC (direct client connection) are the p2p connections you are thinking of, but they of course don’t work behind nat.
I was behind NAT when I first got on IRC in ‘98. I set it up with ipfwadm.
Ah you are right, I mixed CTCP and DCC up. The former was also used to set up the latter I think? (Among other things.)
I joined IRC in the early 90s, there was no NAT then, packet filtering was uncommon, and practically nothing on the Internet was encrypted. It was a very different time.
I wish HN had a wiki, and that articles like this could have a list associated with them, with links to the companies that tried and failed under each tarpit idea.
This is simply because police don’t do their jobs. It would be trivial to simply wait outside bars at 2AM and give out tons of DUIs but a significant percentage of the population are alcoholics and this would result in massive blowback against the police.
Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.
The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
I’d have picked the Manhattan Project, ARPANET/Wikipedia, and aerospace development in the wake of the Wright brothers.
Many of the ones you’ve listed would likely have happened whether or not the USA-qua-USA existed. The Manhattan project and the current internet and the rush to build airplanes (first as weapons of war, of course) would probably not have happened the way they did without the USA.
Revolutionaries tend to suffer from extreme naivete or arrogance. They don't understand that idealists like them usually get pushed aside or killed by the real crazies during the power vacuum stage, then the country becomes significantly worse. It's happened so many times in history. Until the US starts killing half of its population like Pol Pot did it can always get worse.
Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The US recently put the world on notice that everyone needs a larger military and should develop their own nukes if they can. I fail to see how that will continue to decrease violence.
There have been no large scale wars since the development of nuclear weapons. The data available thus far suggests that mutually assured destruction prevents total war.
I live in a county in which most people are armed. There are very few attempts at carjacking.
I’m not sure talking about guns in the US is proving what you want. The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.
When everyone has weapons, more people get shot. That’s a fact. When countries arm up there is a much higher chance of a conflict happening that can’t be rolled back.
> The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.
This is markedly untrue in most parts of the USA, including the most heavily armed ones. Almost all
of the gun murders in the USA are in 3 or 4 extremely high crime (and high poverty) counties.
Dozens of other counties that have gun ownership rates 2-10x higher per capita have much much much less violence. It isn’t the guns unless you generalize entire USA to a single socioeconomic bucket.
The “more guns = more violence” narrative is simple and easy to understand. It’s also false. “more poverty = more violence” is actually correlated. Guns and violence are, if anything, loosely inversely correlated.
More people shoot themselves willingly and deliberately each year in the USA than are murdered by guns, to put it in perspective.
Regardless of all the nasty things US has done, if it goes down, it will get much worse for everyone else as well. Quite possibly worse than it will for Americans themselves. For one thing, it's such a big actor economically that its downfall will hurt everyone a great deal just from that alone. But secondly, when empires go down, they usually do so flailing at any real or perceived enemies around them - and given the sheer military strength of this country, it's not going to be pretty.
> What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
No one is claiming that US been or will ever be perfect, but what are you smoking? Everything that's happened in the current administration has gone the opposite direction of transparent, fair, and integrated.
It is bothersome to see people who obviously don’t believe in free software ideology and software freedoms (otherwise you would never produce nonfree software) (ab)using the open source community in this way.
Software freedoms exist as a concept for a reason, not just a bullet point to get people to click a download link that doesn’t even include source anyway.
I call such projects “open source cosplay”. It’s an outfit you put on for conferences, then take off when back at the office working on the nonfree valuable parts.
Atuin's CLI for shell history is open source, has been free for years, and is a very useful tool. If the author now wants to build a product on top so she can make a living, that's a win for everyone: the author, the open source users (since the project will keep being maintained), and people who get value out of the new product she's building.
The irony of this purist mindset is that it's actually very corporatist, big-tech, and proprietary in its implications. If open source devs are discouraged by the culture from building products and making a living independently, it means that the only people who can devote significant time to open source are employees of established companies (who themselves often sell closed source proprietary products) and people who are wealthy enough to work for free. Is that the world you want?
This kind of attitude is why less and less people are open sourcing software
Why would I waste my time releasing any of my projects for free when people will attack me and call me a poser anyway
Might as well charge people money, who by the way will actually be grateful to do so, that try to keep up with the open source community's purity treadmill
There’s no treadmill. Belief in software freedoms has always been belief in software freedoms.
It’s ok if you don’t believe in software freedoms, but you shouldn’t pretend to be someone who does by releasing some software that respects users’ software freedoms. It’s deceptive.
Either you care about software freedoms, or you don’t. If you don’t, why are you releasing any software under free software licenses? If you do, why are you releasing any nonfree software?
Also, do you have a single bit of backing data to suggest that your first sentence is true? I don’t believe that it is. It seems to me there is more free software than ever before.
> It’s ok if you don’t believe in software freedoms, but you shouldn’t pretend to be someone who does by releasing some software that respects users’ software freedoms. It’s deceptive.
As long as the different parts are clearly marked/indicated as such, why would you impose such a ridiculous standard? In your world, if a company makes 99% of their software GPL, and then releases some proprietary tool, they're suddenly being deceptive? Would you prefer to just lose the 99%?
I agree GP's attitude is ridiculous, but if a very small number of purists on the internet is the reason less people are open sourcing software, then those people are just as guilty of bad reasoning/judgment as the purists.
IMHO the real reason is that the threat of hostile/competing forks has gone up. It used to be gauche at best, evil at worst, to take somebody's open source code and compete with them, but increasingly the landscape is changing. I think that's the real problem, and IMHO the answer to that is the AGPL, not to go proprietary.
After a heavy snowfall, there is an increase in the rate of heart attacks owing to the exertion[1]. Easter is the busy season in Christian church, so it may be along the same lines.
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