Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

Parallel universes imply the existence of perpendicular universes.

One policy I've considered for telemarketing / robocalls is bonding. Turns out that California has implemented this (though not quite as I'd envisioned it), and it seems to work. "California Telemarketing Bond" All California telephonic sellers must get licensed with the Attorney General's Office. One of the main requirements to get this license is obtaining a $100,0000 California telemarketing surety bond. This license bond is also sometimes called a solicitor bond. https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/states/california/telemarketing-bond My own proposal is a bit different: Carriers are bonded.Recipients can demand a (stiff) per-call fee.That cost is charged to their carrier, who can then collect it from whatever carrier peered the call. (One variant: the amount increases with upstream, giving carriers an incentive to pursue the penalty against others.)Possibly: a clearinghouse and periodic settlements basis. The clearinghouse could be the bond issuer, and obv., large rates of claims would increase the risk basis on which a bond is issued, increasing costs. Ideally that would drive abusive carriers out of business. Combine with the obligation of downstream carriers to monitor and progressively block upstreams based on total spam volume, and there should be a pretty strong counter-signal to unrestrained telemarketing. #PhoneSpam

@eliasp@mastodon.social Y'know, if Musk buying FB would be the most effective way to kill it, I might be interested in seeing that happen.... @wooble@mastodon.social @whynothugo@fosstodon.org @pfadintegral@ohai.social

@whynothugo@fosstodon.org Piker! Clearly, we should be advertising Twitter to him again, and again, and again, since he obviously liked it enough to buy it once. @pfadintegral@ohai.social

@ifixcoinops@mstdn.social I boost similarly, even (or especially) if I'm not part of that culture. Finding your peeps is hard. I encourage hashtags, as others have noted. AND: I strongly encourage people to Be The Content They'd Like to See. If you're looking for gerbil enthusiasts and aren't finding any, start posting gerbil enthusiast content, and hashtag it. Eventually if others come, they'll find you, and you will be their answer to the question you first asked.

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social There's also #Pandoc, a document-manipulation Swiss-Army Knife on steroids. https://pandoc.org/ This is a command-line tool, and can convert between many document formats. It's available on MacOS, Linux, Windows, and probably other platforms. My general preference is to start with #Markdown or #LaTeX (both are far less intimidating than they seem, though Markdown would be easier), and generate HTML, PDF, ePub, and the like from those. There are other document markup languages which can be used, or if you're more comfortable with them, word-processing formats (DocX, used by MS Word and many others is probably the lowest-hanging fruit). I've used Pandoc to create multiple book-length works, both my own and transcribed / converted from elsewhere. You need little more than paragraph breaks, chapter headings, and a title, author, and publication date block for the basics. @TimWeber@c.im

@joshbressers It has happened, and I endorse the notion. Even Wikipedia offers the term in its introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem HN search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=epochalypse Turns up: Epochalypse countdown timer in binary: https://www.epochalypse.today/ "Preventing the “Epochalypse” by changing every instance of 32-bit time in Linux" https://www.linaro.org/blog/the-end-of-an-era/ "Today is y2k38 (epochalypse) commemoration day" https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/10fqx1t/today_is_y2k38_commemoration_day/ #epochalypse

@Montanareddog@toot.community Ceasing existence entirely. @eliasp@mastodon.social @wooble@mastodon.social @whynothugo@fosstodon.org @pfadintegral@ohai.social

@drwho@hackers.town The telcos know they're on thin ice: [S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to do [stop phone-number spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-robocalls-with-stir-shaken.html #DeathOfTelephony

Addenda to my earlier: one of the quiet joys of watching the present Mastodon influx has been a steady stream of people boosting and faving older toots of mine. Some of those are threaded under my pinned "Administrivia" post (or other pins), but many are not. I won't claim it's common that people will do this, but some do, and those are probably the peeps you're looking for in the first place. It reinforces the "be the change" concept. @ifixcoinops@mstdn.social

@ZevEisenberg@mastodon.social {YOURSELF}

@drwho@hackers.town I am very far past seriously questioning the utility of any direct-dialable telephony service: landline, VOIP, or mobile, for pretty much just this reason. The telcos know this, and yet do nothing. I think they want to kill the service entirely themselves. #DeathOfTelephony

@xhr@mastodon.social I discovered this myself a few years ago after getting frustrated that there was no way to filter content within less ... ... and then discovering that, of course, there was. Another fascinating bit I realised was that less has been developed by Mark Nudelman for decades.

@jond@mastodon.social Very occasionally, long complex URLs proove difficult to parse (Google Books and Ngram links have done this for me). That's a case wherre a URL shortener may prove useful, not to shorten the URL but to make it parsable. Mind, I don't have that excuse, as #GlitchSocial supports #Markdown and straight-up #HTML, enabling me to created @dredmorbius@toot.cat of pretty much unlimited complexity. Plus no 500 character limits 😺

@titociuro@mstdn.social That's been attempted: "Texas Bill Could Send People to Jail for Driving a Woman to an Abortion, Lawmaker Says" (2017) https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-bill-could-send-people-to-jail-for-driving-a-woman-to-an-abortion/ WaPo looked at the question a ways back, need to dig through the transcript for their conclusion: "Can a Texas resident be sued for getting an abortion out of state? The Post answers questions about the ban." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/08/questions-texas-abortion-law/ My understanding is that Federal preemption under commerce and full faith and credit clauses would apply and render any such attempt by Texas (or any other state) void. Though it could be a long and expensive ordeal to establish this. @QasimRashid@mastodon.social

@Montanareddog@toot.community His rationale for the present action was less than robust. Reasons aren't really the point, outcomes are. @eliasp@mastodon.social @wooble@mastodon.social @whynothugo@fosstodon.org @pfadintegral@ohai.social