Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?

Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.

For the unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck

(CW: gore, subtitles)

In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class.

Strictly speaking this is incorrect, although the situation is somewhat complicated. There are laws that can be and were used to limit its redistribution (mainly the rule against anti-constitutional propaganda), but there are dissenting judgements saying original prints from before the end of WW2 cannot fall under this, since they are pre-constitutional. One particular reprint from 2018 has been classified as “liable to corrupt the young”, but to my knowledge this only means it cannot be publicly advertised.

What is interesting though is how distribution and reprinting was prevented historically, which is copyright. As Hitlers legal heir the state of Bavaria held the copyright until it expired in 2015 and simply didn’t grant license to anything except versions with scholarly commentary. But technically since then anybody can print and distribute new copies of the book. If this violates any law will then be determined on a case-by-case basis after the fact.

pet open source projects that no one else ever seems to contribute to, not […] software that holds up civilization

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It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.

I’d prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.

Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.

Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.

Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.

Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.

And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.

Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.

If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.

Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don’t think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.

All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.

Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.

I don’t think you could ever change my mind.

Fair enough, I still think you’d get used to it if it were to happen.

And when it does happen it’s usually clarified. In more automated contexts (e.g. a scheduled YouTube premiere) the software converts it automatically - the author inputs the date and time in their own timezone, and viewer sees the converted date and time in their own timezone.

My point exactly though, this is a whole lot of complexity we could just get rid of by using a single timezone, with the added benefit of that working without any automation or clarification. Next Tuesday 14:00? Same time for everybody, regardless of locality. Everyone will know what part of the solar day that is for them by habit.

When it does happen it reminds us that the date and time falls on a different time of day for different participants.

The complexity of coordinating different solar cycles is there either way and unavoidable. So why not use the simpler system?

Meet me here tomorrow at 01:00

Yes, semantic drift in these terms would be unavoidable, but I still see the long-term benefits to clarity outweighing the short-term costs in it.

We already have that for technology to use - the unix timestamp.

A unix timestamp is an offset to a UTC date, not a timezone. But fair enough, there is UTC. It’s not used by default however, except by scientists and programmers maybe.

Maybe I’m missing something. What do you think the benefits would be?

Removing ambiguity from casual language. Currently when you state a time you are almost always implying your local timezone applies, which might be unknown information to the recipient, especially with written sources like these comments here. With everybody using the same timezone instead you would always make an unambiguous statement about the specific time by default.

What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)?

Given how +12 is at the front of the “date wave” currently they would probably take it to mean the Monday/Tuesday noon.

People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.

Yeah fair. To me the benefit is clear, there is no good rhyme or reason to timezones as a totality, we should come up with a better system. A straightforward approach like using UTC offsets seems best.

They just gave an example though of people who made up their own timezone because the official one was bad.

Yeah, and in reply I argued that they did this out of not wanting to change their habit of associating 12 o’clock with noon. Which is in my opinion an understandable impulse but not a good reason to preserve the status quo.

These systems exist for people

Yeah fair, I’m aware I’m toeing unpopular opinion territory here.

and if no one other than programmers wants to do the internal calculus of “The sun is setting and they’re a quarter of the earths rotation Eastward, so that means they’re probably in bed” every time you want to call someone, then we shouldn’t make the standard that way.

But the standard is like that right now, worse even with DST and other complexities.

Right now you just look up the timezone in their profile and send it at 9:00, but without timezones, you need a “database of regional conventions for coordinating business hours”, which is just a worse way of having timezones.

Well no you need an offset. Like the user has set +8:30 as their offset, so send the notification at 00:30 UTC. That’s not worse than having timezones, that’s having timezones but simpler.

Timezones exist because they have a purpose.

Yeah, and some of those purposes are bonkers.

It’s like abolishing everything except latin1 because Unicode is a pain.

More like getting everyone to use Unicode, but whatever. Like I said I see why it would be unpopular to the point of being unenforceable, but that doesn’t mean an unambiguous way of communicating time as the default would be entirely undesirable.

Well the essay has a lot to discuss, part of which is already (or will be) addressed up and down thread, so towards your TL;DR:

Yes of course, I’m not suggesting to disrupt circadian rhythms. And yes, lookup tables for solar days will always be required, but I would argue this is an inherent complexity to how we measure time in relation to our behavioural patterns and environment. However doing that by using variously large timezones that do not quite match solar days at their edges anyway, with a lot of them changing their offsets by an hour for half the year, and some of them using half-hour offsets throughout the year, that is complexity added for administrative reasons which are partly obsolete and largely irrelevant to the question off what would benefit humanity as a whole the most.

If everybody were to use one single timezone you would memorise your relative offset to noon/midnight pretty fast. Like it’s one number to remember, e.g. where you are 4:40am is noon, 4:40pm is midnight, your offset is -7:20. Having those times be (roughly) 12 (for half the year) is just tradition and something we have every child learn. We could teach them about solar offsets just as well. It’s not even really more complex, arguably much less so since you remove the need to confuse them with the chaos that global timezones have grown to be historically.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I see how it makes sense. I’m just saying that 1) it is arbitrary nonetheless and 2) it doesn’t outweigh the benefits that could be gained by using a single global timezone. Incidence angle of solar radiation is hardly something most people need or even want to track beyond a certain degree (dawn, noon, dusk, midnight), and the times that would coincide with at your latitude and longitude can be easily learned.

people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight

Yeah but that is exactly what I mean with habitual. It’s a learned association of questionable utility. It can be unlearned and replaced with 0400 is noon or 1600 is noon based on your longitude just as well. Dawn and dusk are dependent on latitude and have to be learned for anything not smack-dab on the equator anyway.

I can see why that would be inconvenient to people, but I would maintain that is only so due to them clinging to a habit.

The fact that you give a preference to change something here which you give as an example for something that shouldn’t be changed because it would be problematic is deeply ironic to me.

Also, again, I don’t really see the problem with changing the date in the middle of the day. It’s virtually the same as changing it at 00:00 or 04:00, you change the date once every 24 hours. Right now you have a situation where one persons 3rd of the month could be another persons 2nd or 4th, depending on where on the globe they are. That’s not really ideal either, especially for that call scheduling example by the GP.

Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now.

And the problem with that is… ?

Or maybe there’s just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can’t be scheduled between them.

If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no? If you want to schedule a call you just say the time and save the timzone offset fiddling.

The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time.

Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.

So WINE was just imagined into existence? Or maybe it was a wizard with a magic spell?

GP is simply wrong on this one. While it is an open source project with a lot of volunteer involvement, there are companies like CodeWeavers and Valve which directly or indirectly contribute to development. You can get support from CodeWeavers AFAIK, but that means paying them.

Why do people get so uppity when I simply ask questions? I never claimed that anyone owed me anything. I never asked for anything.

Well you did ask for something, which is replies to your questions. And your reaction to those replies, whether intended or not, comes off as “uppity” as well. Hence the downvotes and hostility (not to say that I support that from either side of the conversation).

I am unwilling to learn.

Then why are you wasting peoples time with asking questions?

I’ve wasted hundreds of hours trying to learn to use Linux for basic tasks after everyone assured me it was “so easy” and not gotten anywhere. I’m done trying to learn.

Running software on an OS it wasn’t made for is anything but a basic task. Try running various Linux software on Windows and you will see. If you want to run software made for Windows easily the way to do that is using the version of Windows it was created for.

What people mean by “basic tasks” is usually browsing and office, and there is Linux-native software for that.

Someone posted Zorin OS elsewhere, which appears to be exactly that.

Not really. It has deeper integration of Wine into the system by default, but it is still a Linux OS running a compatibility layer for Windows software. This will not save you if you are unwilling to learn, there will still be various problems. Some software will simply not work, or only partially work, or require additional configuration to work.

In summary, if your definition of “basic tasks” is running arbitrary Windows software then doing it on Windows is the way to go.

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If you have a mouse wheel try pressing it down while hovering over a link. Should open in new tab.

Minors can and have used more or less most of the internet safely. What is most of the internet? Services like Omegle or Chaturbate or Stripchat surely are not on it.

Well that claim is a bit arbitrary IMHO. For one I don’t see a reason to exclude those services you mentioned from being part of “most of the internet”. On the contrary, from what I see all of them are clearnet services, accessible to the public, so this extraordinary claim would need some evidence toward it I would say. Secondly the latter two are explicitly pornographic in nature, so I don’t really see the relevance towards the point of children being harmed by accessing them; They shouldn’t be there in the first place. There is of course a valid discussion about moderation to be had if they are used to distribute CSAM, but that seems orthogonal to the question of parental oversight of minors internet use.

Minors have used social media all this while, and other than what Facebook/Instagram on behest of US capitalist machinery has done to minors, […] most services do not abuse human psychology to this degree.

Again, only according to your arbitrary definition of what “most services” are. Basically all of social media is doing attention hacking, large swaths of of the gaming industry intentionally abuse dopamine cycles to sell worthless “digital goods”, the www is full of dark patterns in large part fuelled by advertisement delivery. I mean Meta is indubitably a front runner in the race of surveillance capitalism, but isn’t that an argument in favour of Omegle in the context of this discussion? Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp are much more certainly than Omegle a part of “most of the internet” after all, however you define that, and they are a clear and present danger to children.

However, children’s minds are highly neuroplastic until adulthood, and a lot of the internet is damaging to the psyche of children, which is an entirely different discussion. If that seems like flipflopping, it is because internet safety has various degrees to it and the definition of safety varies from healthy usage to consumerism to addiction to gray area to developing deviant persona and even illegal uses.

I don’t think it is a different discussion at all, rather it’s exactly the crux of the issue. The psyche of children is vulnerable; How do we best protect it and who is in the best position to effectively do so?

It is fairly known how peer pressure wins over parental control on minor access to internet, so the “parent’s duty” argument is very flaky and invalid. Education on things rest of the society is freely using is not very conducive to children at the age of puberty (12-16), and 18 is supposedly the adult age.

It might not be a definitive argument, but certainly not invalid. A parent is chiefly responsible for the safety, education, and behaviour of their children in basically all other areas of life. This responsibility doesn’t go away because the neighbours kids peer pressured them into throwing stones through a window or drinking alcohol. Why should access to the internet be any different?

So is the argument now going to be letting kids do whatever they want by the time they are 18?

Well yes, but within the confines of legality obviously. That’s literally the status quo in most jurisdictions, isn’t it?!

Or will this be decided upon a combination of evaluation of mental age using tests related to Asperger’s, neurodivergence, ADHD and so on? How frequently will these tests be taken by kids?

Gee I hope not. That sounds like the abyss below the slippery slope. But I don’t think anybody argued for that.

Will there be exposure of the child to concepts like “absolute American freedom” and various forms of consumerism? Because that is what the child will get exposed to, as soon as he/she meets people outside home, or goes to the market with parents.

Again, I don’t see the relevance to the Omegle situation. This is just life, the world is a dangerous place and while society can help by creating laws and such in the end the ones in the best position to safeguard their children according to their own world view will be the parents. Of course that is a duty in which every individual parent will inevitably fail by some metric, but so will society. Case in point, many children will be exposed to “absolute American freedom and various forms of consumerism” inside their own homes already, so if that’s your metric as a parent the only one who could ever protect a child from that is you, by preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with those concepts and hoping they take that lesson to heart.

Their argument comes off as distasteful, even though a whole decade of video streaming exists as proof of Omegle being a key mainstream hub for minor sexual abuse content, with no kinds of methods used by the evasive service owner to combat it. Read the link I supplied in above comments regarding that.

Yeah you claimed variously that it is a key part of Omegle “content”, for which I don’t see much corroborating evidence in the links you provided. Both the BBC story and the NCOSE piece seem to reference the same case of an 11 year old girl using the service unsupervised.

Which leads me to why I’m taking issue with the statement of Omegle having content. It doesn’t in the sense most people would understand that. It revolves around having a conversation with an absolute stranger, and either side of this conversation can record it or publish it. There is no content here unless one participant creates it and distributes it elsewhere than Omegle, or takes other content and distributes it on Omegle. Everything on Omegle is content in the same sense as a phone call is content, to which I would argue it isn’t, at least not inherently. It’s an ephemeral conversation unless a participant records it.

It might be content in the sense argued by the law and the court in the “A.M Vs Omegle” case, but that apparently ended in the motion to dismiss being partly granted and partly denied, which to me as a layperson sounds like a win for Omegle, at least temporarily.

Furthermore you say Omegle and Brooks didn’t do anything against the abuse, but this is in direct contradiction to what Brooks claims in the message in the OP:

Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

And this is all besides the point that giving an 11 year old unsupervised access to Omegle is kind of the same as letting them out into the shady part of town to talk to random strangers (when you ignore the added risk of physical harm there of course). That’s what the website was principally about, meeting random strangers. And if a parent were to let their child do that unsupervised in offline life we would put at least part of the blame for any harm on them.

The internet wasn’t designed with the safety of children in mind, in fact not with anybodies safety in mind. Saying that it should be is an opinion, but in any case not the current reality. That leaves the majority of responsibility for the safety of children on the parents. And there is a bunch of things they can do, like not giving them networked devices in the first place, or restricting network access with whitelists, or educating them before the parents or others do give access. Yes, this parental control breaks down in social settings, but that is the case for a lot of different aspects of life and I don’t see how purging everything dangerous for children from the public internet is either a possible or even a desirable solution to this problem.

Take for example what you and the NCOSE argued for, age verification. The state of the art for that on many explicitly pornographic services is a simple dialogue asking if the user is of legal age in their jurisdiction. The infrastructure to do otherwise, which would require a governmentally issued digital ID of some kind, doesn’t exist in most countries let alone globally. Never mind the implications this would have for user privacy. Some services use a certain identifier so that their service can be automatically filtered, but that again leaves the parents with the responsibility to set up and maintain said filter. And in the end there will not be a way around that at all, unless you purposely rebuild the internet with a level of control it simply is not engineered to provide currently.

You should be able to see clearly that I am quite interested in such discussions without the moderator part.

Well the one who brought that into the discussion was you. Not to diminish your efforts, but I stand by what I said on the matter earlier.

Minors can use most of the internet safely.

I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.

If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer.

Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.