qengho

"There's no such thing as objective reality".

We did an experiment to prove it, so it must be objectively true!

In other news:

"This sentence is false".

You're screwed. Same thing happened to me. And it was because Stripe wasn't able to fraud-check orders at the time (don't know if they fraud-check orders now) and so some scammers were able to push my chargeback rate higher than Stripe liked by placing fraudulent orders and then issuing chargebacks on them.

I reached out to Stripe, explained the situation, they said they understand and they re-instated my account. Two weeks later they suspended it again for the same reason and this time didn't respond to messages.

Given that they suspended my account for something that was caused by Stripe's own shortcomings, and the terribly unprofessional manner in which it was handled, I decided to give up on Stripe and not risk my business to such an unreliable payment provider.

Stripe sucks, stay away!

Emacs, org-mode.

This is great!

Yes, for the sake of precision I should probably have used the term “PC” rather than “computer”. I thought the meaning was pretty clear from the phrase “handheld computer”.

AsteroidOS looks very cool, thanks for the link. But a watch "running a tiny QT GUI on the touchscreen”, and which you can only really use as a computer by SSHing in via another computer, is not a PC, by any reasonable definition.

I'm aware of many little devices that can run Linux, but they're not full-fledged PCs unless they have reasonably sized screens and enough processing power to run regular PC apps in a usable manner.

Neither is a phone, which is neither marketed as a PC (or a “computer”), nor able to run any apps that aren't written specifically for Android / iOS, without all sorts of complicated shenanigans to jailbreak its lock-down, which is designed precisely to prevent it from being used as a general purpose computer.

Some people can “skate” on a bicycle while standing up on the seat and handlebar. That doesn’t mean a bicycle is a skateboard. Especially if they had to first break built-in protections in the bicycle specifically designed to prevent them from doing that.

Also sideloading APKs is a far cry from “run any code you want”. Can I run a GTK app written in Perl on an Android phone by sideloading an APK?

Phones aren't PCs. They are crippled and locked-down devices. Of the ones that are capable of running a full Linux distro, I don't believe any are even close to the size of Noodle Pi.

I'm not aware of any Linux wristwatch or any other computer that's in production and available to buy that is smaller than Noodle Pi. If you know of a Linux wristwatch that's for sale commercially I'd love to know about it.

The only Linux wristwatches I see in a quick online search are two prototype devices, one made by Steve Mann and the other by IBM. Neither of those devices were actually usable as a PC, or available commercially. Mann's actually relied on a second hidden wearable computer to provide the actual processing power.

Taxation is theft.

There were no "net neutrality" regulations in the US till 2015. Nevertheless none of the horror scenarios net neutrslity proponents like to cook up came to pass, and in fact the 'Net grew to "the Internet as we know it" precisely in an era of no net neutrality regulations. That's ample proof (if any were needed) that all the net neutrality FUD is just that.

In a free market, if an ISP was to mess with the traffic going through its pipes, that would just encourage anyone who cared about this to switch to a competitor.

The real problem is the lack of a free market, which is the direct result of over-proliferation of laws and regulations, which discourage and stifle innovative businesses. Net neutrality regulations are just another layer of these, and will further cripple innovative competition and lead to increased monopolization of Internet infrastructure by big crony-statist corporations.

More fundamentally, it is a violation of basic individual rights and property rights for the government to tell any private enterprise how to operate its business. That's the economics of fascism.

Riiight.. because when there was no net neutrality there was no Internet as we know it.

Oh wait.