Regardless, a federal judge need not consider the laws of any state when making a ruling on something like this.

Edit: read via archive link. So yeah:

> ... US District Judge Ada Brown in the Northern District of Texas wrote in the decision on Tuesday, concluding that the regulator “lacks statutory authority” to issue the rule.

And:

> Brown [...] was appointed by then-president Donald Trump

So she's a conservative-leaning judge who's skeptical of the executive branch's regulatory powers. Not news.

Why not digitize them, and then offer to give them to some sort of private/non-profit entity that's dedicated to historical document preservation, or something like that? Only snag I can think of is that maybe these documents are not supposed to be public? (Especially for the wills of the more recently-deceased people.)

It seems a bit much to ask taxpayers to spend that money because some of those wills (ultimately probably a very tiny, sub-1% fraction of them) might become historically significant someday.

We've plainly seen over the past several decades that the War on Drugs is an abject failure. All it's done is increase incarceration rates (without solving the problems of drug use and addiction), and many people caught in the system are just drug users, not distributors/traffickers. This really doesn't help much of anything.

> State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures.

And there you go, right there in the second paragraph.

> As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”

And clearly they didn't do that well enough, or at least didn't follow through well enough on what needed to be done.

It's good to see reporting on this, because clearly "just decriminalizing" doesn't help, and can make things worse on some dimensions. And some measures to replace prison sentences likely work better than others, and it's good to see the ones that don't work so we can refine policies like this.

But let's not take this as failure of the idea of decriminalization.

I could understand why a Twitter alternative might not want you to be able to import a ton of old posts at once. But this is why we need open standards and open source. Some random large Mastodon instance might not want to allow imports, but you should at the very least have the option to spin up your own instance, import all your old Twitter posts, and still participate in the ecosystem.

As others have pointed out, an @tag can still be useful by linking back to the original service. Or the importer can support a username mapping so it can rewrite names from the old service to names to the new service. Sure, all of this requires extra work, but it can be possible if people care enough.

Regardless, export functionality at the old service is the first necessary step. Even if there's no import on the other side now, someone might build one eventually. And even if that never happens, being able to archive your old data is useful by itself.

1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS), and 9.9.9.9 (Quad9) all resolve archive.ph to the same IP address for me, 89.253.237.217.

If I get on a VPN (Mullvad, exit in Los Angeles, CA, USA), I get a different address for archive.ph (41.77.143.21), which works fine. If I get off the VPN, but put that address in /etc/hosts, it still works.

Reverse DNS on 89.253.237.217 (no VPN) gives me "example.spb.ru", while for 41.77.143.21 (with VPN) it's "host.41.77.143.21.binaryracks.net".

If I get back on the VPN, and put the Russian IP in /etc/hosts, it works as well. So I wonder if my ISP (Comcast) is interfering with TLS negotiation when attempting to access some hosts, and perhaps this is related to Russian sanctions, or just some other Russia-related blocking?

Anyhow, try putting:

    41.77.143.21 archive.ph

Whereas if the Internet Archive suspected what they were being accused of wasn't legal, summary judgement wouldn't be appropriate, and they might want to go to trial to try to prove their case that they aren't actually doing what they're being accused of?

If lending had exceeded the number of available purchased/physical copies, then it wouldn't be "working around", it would be "violating" copyright law. I agree with you that copyright law is horribly broken as-is, but I think it's irresponsible of the Internet Archive to play so fast and loose with it. A monetary judgment against them could be devastating to their effort to preserve history.

He doesn't post super often -- a quick perusal of his archive shows at most 3x per month, often less, and often not even once during a random month. So while each post might take a lot of time and effort, it's often spread out over weeks or more.

(Not trying to criticize your lack of knowledge here, just aiming to fill a knowledge gap.)

A forum is great for getting technical support, and is ok-ish for technical discussion and planning, but I don't think it's a good replacement for real-time chat, which is great for developing more nuanced, personal relationships (for distributed developers and users that aren't going to do things like regular video chats). Certainly real-time chat isn't going to give you as rich an experience as a video or in-person chat, but it's much better than the asynchronous back-and-forth of a forum (or email).

So I would say "Use IRC/Matrix rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community" would be a better position to take (and set up a bot to automatically archive conversations to somewhere searchable on the web), as well as "Supplement your real-time chat with a forum or email list" (which can also be searchable). On top of that, know where to capture information for the longer term: for example, if discussion on IRC or the forum leads to an understanding that the project's documentation is confusing in some areas, write up a ticket on GH Issues or Jira or whatever you're using. That way you (or someone else) will remember it needs to be done.

Given it's all personal data that I can stand to be without for days if needed, I could probably use Glacier (or even Glacier Deep Archive) and pay less than a third of the cost (or less than a twelfth!), but the absolute dollar amount isn't high enough for me to go through the trouble of changing up my backup scripts.

Sure, if you're running a business and are constantly generating lots of new data that needs to be backed up, that gets more expensive, but I also would expect a business with that much data could easily afford to spend several orders of magnitude more than I do on backups.

On the other hand, if I'm reading an aggregator like Google News, the interesting thing is that the top article for a particular sub-topic might be from the NYT or another site with a paywall, but if you look down the list you can get a similar article from a non-paywalled site. The cool thing about this is I get exposed to a bunch of random sources, and often they are local news sites.

I've looked into subscribing to some sites, but most want north of $10 per month, some in the $20-$30 per month range, and I just don't get that much value out of them to justify paying, especially when I'd end up having to pay for several of them, which would add up to several hundred dollars a month. It's still a real shame that micropayments isn't a thing; I wouldn't have an issue reading the first paragraph or two of an article, and then having to spend something like 5c to 25c to read more. I fully understand why micropayments haven't taken off, but it's a shame nonetheless.

While I'll occasionally click on an archive.is link, ethically (and legally) it's not great to mirror someone else's paid content for free.

Clarification, though: I was talking about you-the-adult, not some hypothetical video of you from when you were 3. Maybe you would be ok with that. That's fine. You're an adult and can decide for yourself what you want to post online about yourself. (I personally do not want videos of my 37-year-old self in my underwear on the internet, but that's just me.)

Anyway, as I initially said, I'm not even talking about creeps here. I, personally, as an adult, would not want photos/videos of me as a child floating around on the internet. It's not a matter of embarrassment or safety, it's just that I don't want my life to be public to that degree.

But hey, you can always argue that I'm an adult, and I didn't grow up with always-on internet connectivity (or, really, much in the way of internet connectivity at all until I was in high school), so maybe my opinion doesn't count, because culture and social expectations are different now.

But... they're not, really, at least not universally so. There are people who are children right now who are uncomfortable with this[0]. The linked article also mentions, for balance's sake, some kids who enjoy having a ton of information about them online. But that's the thing: you can always put more information about yourself online, but once it's there, it's very hard (sometimes impossible) to take it back. Parents who share things about their kids online rob them of the agency to decide for themselves how private they want to be. That's just fact, regardless of what you've decided.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/when-...