How ironic that you posted this and thus caused people to talk about the technology you want to give no attention to.

Revenue so far: $0

and let us hope it stays that way

because these politicians know extremely little about the Internet

I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The “social media” we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn’t be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.

I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is “only” an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn’t accept this.

But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, “social media” became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)

If they don’t know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it’s unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.

apparently you cared enough to write a comment about it

Agreed on that. Amount of parking spaces shouldn’t be regulated by the government, that is almost a perfect example of something best determined through market forces.

Paywall, but I was able to read enough to know this is about the Saxony-Anhalt state legislative elections, which happened today; preliminary results are online here https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anhalt/landtagswahl/news-aktuelles-wahltag-wahlbeteiligung-112,ergebnisse-wahlkreise-gemeinden-100.html for anyone who cares.

Or you to comment…?

That is not specific to the US at all, I live in Austria and restrictions like that are a thing here too.

The thing is that if landowners build at too high densities, this will cause traffic to increase in that area, which may force taxpayers to expand infrastructure. It makes some sense that the government maintains some control over this so that no one builds, for example, a skyscraper with a mall at the end of a narrow residential cul de sac.

Hopefully. I am already on both sites (though on reddit I hardly ever start new threads and only use it on desktop) and would love getting opportunities to talk about all the topics here that I currently talk about only on reddit.

It is so incredible. I used to think the main threat to a free and open Internet was copyright. Then in the mid-2010s the talking points against it shifted to misinformation and hate speech.

Now it’s age verification? How did we get here?

You wouldn’t know anyone named Biff Tannen, would you

Maybe, idk, I rarely use anything not based on OpenStreetMap. 😛

People use digital maps for all kinds of purposes, not just navigating while driving.

For example I often look at digital maps as a pedestrian in order to know which direction to walk (even without actually entering navigation mode), or in order to find out where places of interest are around me, and there it definitely helps that the angles are the same in reality as on the map.

Most navigation software doesn’t show the map from the top, but from behind looking forward

only when navigating, not when looking at the map

Mercator is bad as a world map, but the reason why it’s used on most online maps is that those online maps are usually used as local maps, where Mercator is a very good projection. It would be good if online maps switched projections if you zoomed out beyond a certain level.

On a local level (City or State/Province level), where most navigation for non-experts is taking place, the chosen map projection doesn’t matter that much.

Yes, it does, because on a local level you want real-world right angles to be right angles on the map, which Mercator does, but other projections might not…

Yes, and that is mentioned very early in the article in the OP…

No, not at all.

After your edit, it is slightly clearer what you are asking. But this is still a matter of desktop environment more than distro.

??????

They corrected it in Windows 98, though, and extended the invisible, active target zone of the Start button to the outer 1-pixel boundary of the screen.

Is this actually true? I seem to remember once trying it on Windows 2000 and there it didn’t extend all the way to the edge.