Try being frustrated by a really basic USB stack with no hot-plug USB support. Or by no unicode support, no vector fonts, or a multi-user security model. Is that frustrating enough for you? Okay, how about no process isolation or memory protection? Does that sound like macOS to you?
The XP era security was a joke. I used to open notepad, bring up the dialog to open a file, right click on an executable that was "blocked" and run it from there.
I was once using a public library computer that was loaded full of malware despite all of the "security" software, and I asked the library staff if they were okay with me working around it, to could uninstall the malware. I was expecting that they'd defer to some policy only allowing the county IT department to mess with the computers, but instead they were excited that I new how to do so and had no complaints.
NIMBYists concentrate their efforts on national forests and parks, so everything is illegal there. Cross the boarder outside of Yosemite, and you're in unregulated forestry land where you can camp for weeks without a permit and walk wherever you want.
It's legal by default on US federal land, (e.g. BLM or USFS) which covers about a fifth of the country, and is especially concentrated in areas with mountainous and other earthen terrain that is favorable to BASE jumpers. We just take a very small portion of that land, designate it national parks or forests, make everything illegal there, dump all of our tourists there, and charge them to park.
There's far more to see outside of those national parks and forests than there is inside. Look up any paragliders or bush pilots on YouTube that live near federal land, and they pretty much go wherever they want to go.
If you're an avid hiker or camper and are visiting the US, find local documentation on where to visit or befriend someone in the area who can make recommendations, and you'll get to see our natural landscape without all of the tourists or regulations. You can legally BASE jump off a cliff, hike in the nude, mine for gold, set up an impromptu gun range, and camp there for a couple of weeks, or indefinitely if you hike two miles each day.
Which makes it even more tragic that the few good streaming shows produced recently are all on a network no one watches.
I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
I'm not sure how causality works on that one. Netflix made great stuff, back when streaming was still a small market, then they got big and started making trash.
It's not like they weren't trying to attract everyone when they were releasing content worth watching. Maybe it's because they didn't have any feedback yet on what works, so they couldn't even try to make safe bets, instead creating a little of everything, with most of it being bland, but a surprising portion being top-tier.
Hmm, your comment resonates in principle [caring about quality production of worthwhile narratives], but your specific examples show how much YMMV when it comes to subjective preferences. I was so grateful that Amazon Prime somehow did justice to The Expanse [I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen] and could never get into the Wheel of Time book series [tho I guess that was Jordan, not Sanderson, shrug].
Amazon didn't start The Expanse as a TV show, though. They bought it after Sci-Fi ran it then cancelled it. They didn't screw it up after that, but that's a very different sequence from creating it themselves.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
I will never forgive them buying the rights to Utopia (UK) - probably the greatest show ever made - and remaking it into absolute shit. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. Fuck Amazon (even if The Expanse was pretty good)
To that end, there's no logical reason entertainment exists at all. There's a biological advantage to finding community members entertaining, but anything that broadcasts that entertainment to another community is just exploiting human nature.
By the logic of the court decision, anything that is entertaining should be banned, from movies to TV shows to any news that makes any analysis whatsoever.
Makes me wish more apps followed the UNIX model of separating every feature into separate applications with well documented interfaces that only change when new features absolutely require it and otherwise are only updated for security patches.
One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.
There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.
Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.
I'm not sure you understood what I mean. I'm talking about applications like Krita using FFMPEG to export their data as video. Sometimes they include their own FFMPEG instead of using FFMPEG installed in the system. Each of them has its own dialog. The only way to input custom settings for FFMPEG would be to export in a lossless video format and then reencode using FFMPEG, when you should be able to just "connect" a data stream to an FFMPEG frontend as the input and the frontend has all the options you might want to customize how that data is turned into a .mp4 file or .mov file.
It's a common tactic to gain state enforcement of gate keeping and protectionism. It's extremely useful at both preventing individuals from acting for themselves but also limiting individuals from recourse against the misdeeds of those who are licensed. See also, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217564698-the-licensing-...
I agree that local communities are best at determining their own line when disputes arise between protecting the freedoms of one party versus another, which is a stance also held by the supreme court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_standards
In this case though, it's not someone going to a non-local city council or school board meeting and arguing for or against some policy that is up to that local board, but it is someone pointing out a policy that has been set at the state level. Any arguments for or against that policy need to take place at the state level, because that is the only place where it can be changed.
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