Not today Justin
Mike Driver
i don't do bad sauce passes
titsay
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
ellievsbear
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Andulka
Discoholic 🪩
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art blog(derogatory)
Cosmic Funnies
tumblr dot com
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hello vonnie
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@someanon126
Pick the right one Be careful when using script typefaces, and always make sure that the capital letters can’t be confused with others. Photographed by Laura Vlahovich in the US Virgin Islands.
Took me a minute to figure out what it was actually supposed to be.
Why can I download this royalty-free music for free but I have to pay for this royalty-free stock photo?
There are a lot of terms related to copyright licenses that let people use work "for free," and I want to clarify some of them.
Some of these definitions are debatable, especially the ones for "public" and "open." But I think they're useful in discussing the various types of licenses out there, and I'll use them when talking about stuff like this.
Royalty-free is the broadest category. A royalty is an ongoing payment for use of a copyrighted work, so anything that does not require ongoing payment to use is royalty-free. Notice the word "ongoing." This means that a one-time charge is still royalty-free, which explains why a stock-photo company can charge you for a royalty-free photo.
Public means that the license is granted to everyone automatically, without charge. This means no one-time charges, so it's more specific than royalty-free. A lot of "royalty-free" work is public, but some is not.
Open has a subtle difference from "public." Not only is an open license granted to everyone automatically, it also doesn't restrict the medium of the work. For example, some licenses only let you use the work on a particular website (such as YouTube), not on another site or a different medium (such as a DVD).
Creative Commons is an organization that promotes sharing creative work. It has a set of licenses that let people choose the conditions for the use of the work. They are all open because they don't restrict the medium of use.
Free refers to a particular definition of "freedom" for creative works, the Definition of Free Cultural Works, which is inspired by the Free Software Definition. Some major requirements are allowing modification and commercial use, in addition to being "open." The Creative Commons category is partially in this category because some of CC's licenses are free, while others are not.
PD-like is the most specific category and the one that has the least restrictions on use. "PD" stands for public domain. I say "PD-like" instead of just "PD" because technically public domain isn't a license but rather a status. A work that is in the public domain has no copyright, so people can use it however they want without being subject to copyright laws. A PD-like license lets people use a work however they want as if it was in the public domain, but the work is still copyrighted. A prominent example of a PD-like license is CC0. (Note: CC0 comes from Creative Commons, but I didn't extend the category here because it's not part of its regular licenses, and it's only partially a license anyway.)
Oversight If you need to typeset something in a language that uses macrons, it pays to ensure that the font you choose has macronized glyphs in the character set.
Do atheists need churches?
I admit that I find the idea of an atheist church to be funny. When I was a kid, I hated my parents dragging me to church every Sunday. And when I was a Christian adult, I went because that’s what Christians did.
However, the idea of going to church now – even an atheist one – seems odd and out of place, but then these churches aren’t for me because I’m blessed to be anti-social. And much in the way I dreaded going to church every Sunday when I was a kid, I now dread interacting with other members of the human species.
I’ve come to find out this is one of the many things that makes me abnormal.
For the rest of humanity, though, being social with other members of the species is integral to mental wellbeing and social standing. Back in the day, towns were often built around the church. The church was the focal point of social life. If you weren’t working on the farm, you were participating in some church activity. Church life is integral to many communities that I suspect that a lot of people attend services and events more for the social aspect than for the act of “worship.”
Losing your faith can have a severe impact on your social life, especially if you before relied on church for social interactions. You might find that your church friends no longer want anything to do with you, and you might find yourself isolated. And believe it or not, some who lose faith miss the rituals associated with church services.
An article coming out of Salt Lake City talks about a church for non-believers dubbed the Sunday Assembly, which offers nonbelievers a “churchlike service that offers music, readings and community for those who don’t belong to the state’s dominant religion, Mormonism or other faith groups.” The church’s motto is: Live better, help often, wonder more.
I’m pretty cynical and dislike most things, which I’ve come to learn is another one of the many things that makes me abnormal. But I think it’s important for atheists, secularists and “nones” to get together and socialize. If you’re in an area with few unbelievers, it’s easy to get lonely and isolated. There are online communities, but those are increasingly becoming more toxic and fractured. I suspect that much of that has to do with people not interacting face-to-face.
While I have no plans to attend any service with events like “[a] band playing the 1980s hit song “Walking on Sunshine” while attendees sang along and batted beach balls around the room,” because that sounds dreadful.
However, I believe It’s important that non-believers who want that church experience have a place where they can go to socialize, share baby recipes, and figure out how best to destroy Christmas once and for all.
On second thought, if plotting to get rid of Christmas is involved, I might be on board.
The Atheist Pig Read more at http://ift.tt/2hJXefi Twitter: http://twitter.com/AtheistAssess Facebook: http://ift.tt/1VMOHGR Atheism merchandise: http://ift.tt/12PrbzT
“VerizonMath” Original Recording
One of my favorite Internet relics is VerizonMath. If you aren't familiar with it, it's about a guy who called Verizon asking about roaming-data charges on his cell phone and got multiple responses that confused 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. He posted a recording of one of his calls online.
The blog is still up as of 5 August 2016 with a repost of the original phone-call recording. However, the first post has the real original recording, which was hosted on Putfile, which is now dead.
Fortunately, the file was mirrored on VerizonMath.com, but after digging through the Wayback Machine, I found this archived copy (which you can access from the source code of this archived Web page; it's in the embed element). For added robustness, I've also published it on IPFS as QmZ8u641rStq4ND9AftRBJdoaf4bs9F2rhpRpnqVh9k8ad. (For a brief introduction to IPFS, read "HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the distributed, permanent web".)
Many thanks to the Internet Archive for preserving all sorts of digital information.
In Search of a Good GnuPG Frontend
I'm fine with managing my GnuPG/PGP keys from the command line, but I'm sure a lot of people aren't. And if more people are going to start using GnuPG and other privacy-protecting technologies, there has to be a GUI.
The core assumption I'm making here is that regular users should be able to use GnuPG effectively without ever opening a command line. Here is my reasoning for that: Users should not have to use a command line to perform everyday tasks on a personal computer. If using these technologies is to become an everyday task, then they shouldn't require a command line.
While there are a lot of GUI frontends for GnuPG, I haven't found one that performs all the basic (in my opinion) key-management tasks. As a result, people will still have to use the command line, and I will have a hard time recommending GnuPG to non-technical people.
Here is my list of basic key-management tasks:
Create new keys: Obviously nobody starts off with a key, so there has to be a way to make one.
Publish keys to and refresh keys from the keyserver network: Publishing keys makes key signing much easier (all you need to do is check fingerprints), and it's the main way revocations are communicated.
Sign other people's keys: Establishing a web of trust is crucial to GnuPG.
Create subkeys: When you create a new key, GnuPG will create only one subkey, which is used for encryption. Signing of regular messages will be done with the primary key in this case. It's a good idea to have subkeys for both signing and encryption, so this means creating a signing subkey.
Set key and subkey expirations: Keys should expire, and if a key is still secure, the expiration should be extended.
Revoke keys and subkeys: Bad things happen, and revoking keys is sometimes necessary. This is one reason it's good to have subkeys (refer to previous item).
The only frontend I've found that does all these things is Seahorse. Unfortunately, Seahorse is currently only available on Linux, which means I can't recommend it to a majority of poeple (who use Windows or Mac). Plus, I have a problem with Seahorse: It doesn't have any visible indication that it's in the process of generating a new key. Because generating a new key takes a while, it looks as if the key generation just failed silently. The only way you can tell it's working is examining the process table.
A lot of the other frontends I tried fail on task #4, creating subkeys, and I'm not entirely sure why. Then again, I'm not a security expert, so maybe this is because creating subkeys isn't as important as I said.
In alphabetical order, here are the other frontends I tried.
Enigmail
Enigmail is a plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform). Despite being just an e-mail plugin, it has a lot of key-management features. I'm using version 1.9.4.
Create new keys: Yes
Publish keys to and refresh keys from the keyserver network: Yes
Sign other people's keys: Yes
Create subkeys: No
Set key and subkey expirations: Yes
Revoke keys and subkeys: Primary keys only
GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA)
GPA is a GTK+ 2-based frontend for Linux and Windows (it's included in Gpg4win). I'm using version 0.9.9 (0.9.9-4 from Debian Testing, and 0.9.9 from Gpg4win 2.3.2).
Create new keys: Yes
Publish keys to and refresh keys from the keyserver network: Yes
Sign other people's keys: Yes
Create subkeys: No
Set key and subkey expirations: Primary keys only
Revoke keys and subkeys: No
GPGTools (GPG Suite)
This is the primary GnuPG software bundle for OS X. I haven't tried this because I don't have access to a Mac system, although I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't do all of the tasks.
Kgpg
Kgpg is a frontend for KDE (Linux). I'm using version 16.04.2 (4:16.04.2-1 from Debian Testing).
Create new keys: Yes
Publish keys to and refresh keys from the keyserver network: Yes
Sign other people's keys: Yes
Create subkeys: No
Set key and subkey expirations: Primary keys only
Revoke keys and subkeys: Technically yes. What you have to do is create a revocation certificate on disk and then import it. There is an option to import the certificate immediately after creating it, but it always fails with an error message.
Kleopatra
Kleopatra is another frontend for KDE (Linux), and it's also included in Gpg4win (Windows). I'm using version 4.14.10 (4:4.14.10-2 from Debian Testing) on Linux and version 2.2.0-gitfb4ae3d (from Gpg4win 2.3.2).
Create new keys: Yes
Publish keys to and refresh keys from the keyserver network: Yes
Sign other people's keys: Yes
Create subkeys: No
Set key and subkey expirations: Primary keys only
Revoke keys and subkeys: No
If I got any of the features wrong, please let me know. (Maybe it was hidden in a menu somewhere and I couldn't find it.) And, like I said, I'm not a security expert, so I'm anticipating some disagreement about the list of tasks.
If "privilege" is being used as a prelude to explaining someone has a blind spot, why don't they just say that person has a blind spot? I find the phrase "a male blind spot" much less objectionable than "male privilege". For the same reason, I would feel much less bad accusing [a beggar] of having a "poor person blind spot" rather than "benefitting from poor privilege", and I would expect I could convince a female that she has a "female blind spot" with less offense taken than if I tried to claim she had "female privilege".
squid314, comment on "The Second Meditation on Privilege"
(By the way, the whole series of "meditations" is worth a read.)
On Linux? Don’t Miss Out on Comic Sans!
April Fools' Day: The day for Comic Sans to shine.
I just happened to be using Windows today, and I noticed something strange about Pastebin:
Everything was in Comic Sans!
If I had been using Linux, however, all I would've gotten was this:
Comic Sans seems to be a common theme on April Fools' Day, so make sure you're ready.
The easiest way to do this is to just install Comic Sans. While Comic Sans is proprietary, they are legally available for free. On Debian and derived systems (such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint), it's as simple as installing the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package.
But if you don't want to do that, you can install Comic Neue, which is available under the Open Font License. The ZIP file provides the fonts in a few different formats; you can just pick out the TrueType fonts (.ttf). Copy them to a sibdirectory of /usr/local/share/fonts (system-wide installation) or ~/.local/share/fonts (user installation).
The next step is to get the system to use Comic Neue when Comic Sans is called for. We can do this with Fontconfig.
Note: This will not work in Chromium, because of sandboxing.
Download this configuration file and save it to /etc/fonts/fonts.d/30-comic-sans-aliases.conf (system-wide configuration) or ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/30-comic-sans-aliases.conf (user configuration).
The result:
Enjoy!
The OpenOffice 100M-downloads banner was first recorded in the Wayback Machine on 25 April 2014, and it was replaced with the 160M-downloads banner on 6 January 2016.
The UNIX 40-years banner was first recorded in the Wayback Machine on 29 June 2009, and it is still there as of 14 February 2016.
React World Original YouTube Links
The Fine Brothers took down their videos about React World, so here are the original URLs, just for reference.
REACT AROUND THE WORLD?!?! (Special Announcement): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2UqT6SZ7CU
Update. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t-vuI9vKfg
Write Git Commits, Not GitHub Commits
What's a GitHub commit? Well, it's like a Git commit, but it has a message like this:
Fix #123
Or maybe:
Fix #456 (Cannot process Foo when Bar is disabled)
GitHub commits require additional information that's found only on Github. In the case of the two commits above, there's information missing.
The first one is clearly lacking information:
Fix #123
#123? What issue is that? What was fixed here? Without reading the issue, this number is meaningless. The commit message might as well read Fix stuff.
The second one is better, but still leaves out some important information:
Fix #456 (Cannot process Foo when Bar is enabled)
Why couldn't you process Foo when Bar was enabled? Does this happen in all cases? How does this commit fix the problem?
People get in the habit of writing commits like this because GitHub lets you close issues with phrases like fix #123 and automatically links those numbers to the corresponding issue pages.
This is bad. Why? It's because GitHub hosts Git repositories, not GitHub repositories. Git repositories are not tied to GitHub, and there are lots of places where your project could end up:
Contributors have their own local repositories. No, not their GitHub forks, the repositories on their computers that they push from.
If the license permits, the repository may be mirrored or forked on other sites.
In the future, you may decide to move your project away from GitHub entirely.
In all of these cases, the issue numbers are not linked, so contributors need to put in extra work to understand the code.
This problem gets worse if GitHub ever shuts down. Most likely, GitHub will give you an opportunity to export all the issues, pull requests, and such for your repositories, but then what? How will you pass this information onto other contributors? You could post it on a different website, but, again, this is extra work, for you and for them.
You can avoid this extra work by writing Git commit messages, not GitHub commit messages. Git commit messages don't rely on information that's only on GitHub.
Here's how those two examples might look when turned into Git commit messages:
Fix output from empty Foo If Foo is empty, the output should be empty.
Fix Foo processing with no Qux when Bar is enabled Bar was originally written for Baz processing and assumes that Qux is present. However, Foo usually has no Qux. Have Bar fall back to a default when no Qux is present.
You can still get the benefit of GitHub's automatic linking and closing by adding the fixes phrase to the message. You should also put the URL in as well so contributors on other sites don't have to wonder which issue tracker the number refers to:
Fix output from empty Foo If Foo is empty, the output should be empty. Fixes #123: https://github.com/example/fooproc/issues/123
Notice that the fixes phrase is not on the first line. The first line is supposed to be a quick summary of the commit, and going to GitHub's issue tracker is not quick when the repository isn't on GitHub (or even if it is, I'd say). So the issue number is just noise when someone's skimming the log. Move it to the extended description.
For similar reasons, don't neglect commit messages in a pull request. The conversation of a pull request is not a substitute for proper commit messages. Zach Holman's blog post "Utter Disregard for Git Commit History" argues that this is just a different way of organizing code changes, and I agree it works. But organizing changes around pull requests means that your repository is tied to GitHub, which causes the same problems as relying on issues does.
When people criticise meritocracy, they're not criticising the concept of treating contributions based on their merit. They're criticising the idea that humans...will be able to identify and reject every subconscious prejudice that will affect their treatment of others. ... The "cult of meritocracy" isn't the belief that meritocracy is a good thing, it's the belief that a project founded on meritocracy will automatically be free of bias.
Matthew Garret, "What is hacker culture?"
On FOSS Codes of Conduct
A: Women are harassed more online.
B: No, they aren't.
Me: Who cares? Policies to deal with harassment benefit everyone!
Kevin Sorbo, the Atheist Professor in God’s Not Dead, Did a Reddit AMA… What Did We Learn From It?
In order to promote his latest project, Kevin Sorbo went on Reddit yesterday to do an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A session.That’s the same Kevin Sorbo known for playing a straw man atheist professor in God’s Not Dead.
That guy went on Reddit. Take a wild guess how that played out…I’ll save you the time and despair of reading through all of his answers, but here’s what we learned about Sorbo: Full Story: http://ift.tt/1DuI3P8 Follow us on Twitter: http://ift.tt/1t3x3hO Atheism Merchandise: http://ift.tt/12PrbzT
Cancer Survivors in Texas Warn That “Pro-Life” Efforts to Defund Planned Parenthood Could Threaten Lives
Anti-abortion legislators across the country have been very busy these past few years targeting abortion by limiting the procedure’s legality as well as availability. But since abortion is a legal procedure, they’ve cooked up a number of strategies to impose de facto bans on it, by regulating providers to the point where they go out of business, banning coverage even through privately purchased health insurance plans, etc. Planned Parenthood is, of course, one of the most frequent targets of anti-abortion moralists, to the extent where finding new ways to cut and block funding for Planned Parenthood is practically a sport among Republicans these days.
But this comes with real life consequences far beyond the piecemeal dismantling of abortion rights and access, as Planned Parenthood offers many other important services. In order to demonstrate just how “pro-life” they are, anti-abortion legislators are often willing to cut off funding for services that have nothing to do with abortion – including life saving and critical preventative health care, like cancer screenings.One group of Texans is aiming to bring awareness to that fact – by featuring the stories of Texans whose lives were saved due to early cancer detection from Planned Parenthood.
Full Story: http://ift.tt/1EEVsWk Follow us on Twitter: http://ift.tt/1t3x3hO Atheism Merchandise: http://ift.tt/12PrbzT
Project handover
by uaiHebert
Conservative Columnist Seriously Wonders Why Christians Are Turning Into Atheists
Sometimes, Christian journalists miss the elephant in the room with their stories. Like this one in Charisma Magazine asking “Why Are So Many Christians Turning Into Atheists?”
Speaking of
pastor-turned-atheist
Ryan Bell, editor Jennifer LeClaire (above) writes: Full Story: http://ift.tt/1xrdKW5 Follow us on Twitter: http://ift.tt/1t3x3hO Atheism Merchandise: http://ift.tt/12PrbzT
An interesting take on it.
