The caption you mention continues:

> The maser observed is almost directly opposite the Sun from the center in the S-C arm, 65,000 light years away.

...which makes no sense (there's no maser visible in the image or mentioned in the article) until you realise that this image was uploaded for another article and is being reused here.

Evidently the website's content management system asks for caption text when uploading the image, rather than when selecting it for use in the article. The latter is the right way to do it.

For example, using the Scuttlebutt network (SSB), you can deliver messages from your contacts, using Bluetooth or just by being on the same wifi. They can be public messages, or encrypted private messages so only certain recipients can decode them. Manyverse (https://manyver.se) is a decent Android app for SSB.

There are other tools like Briar, which I don't know much about, but other people here may be able to help...

> If Stallman's past behavior was unacceptable, then he should have been fired for that.

Indeed!

The fact that he wasn't fired for his past behaviour doesn't necessarily mean that his past behaviour was acceptable.

Not firing him for his past behaviour may just have been an error of judgement.

If I get away with (say) stealing once, that shouldn't mean I now have carte blanche to steal anything without consequence.

Scuttlebutt is exactly this: https://scuttlebutt.nz

cough Mozilla cough Slack cough

So I assume that eventually these performances of consent-gathering will be legally judged meaningless.

The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.

[dat]: https://dat.foundation/

[scuttlebutt]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.

As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.

2. Is there an open source implementation of compatible server software, that you could use to run your own server?

The answers to these questions will tell you whether Pocket is open source.

I'm less forgiving. The Pocket service is proprietary - this technology couldn't fall into the right hands - and it directly competes against open web standards like RSS/Atom. I honestly don't know how they justify it against the Mozilla Manifesto.

This would be slightly more legible if there was a clearer distinction between the tags introducing each item and the text of the item itself.

Also, it would be more usable if the dates in the URLs were numeric and international-style (ISO-8601 / xkcd-1179).

But nice!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

The way capitalism is supposed to work is that consumers (the capitalist synonym for “people”) avoid companies they don't like for whatever reason. The problem is this assumes consumers are reasonable.

The sponsor has little to gain by doing the ethically correct but publicly outrageous thing and standing by the innocent person, because there are more people in the angry mob than there are who would reward the sponsor for their sound ethics.

> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.

As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram

We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!

But the sort of people who use whatever's put in front of them because they don't know or care are exactly the sort of people who need a browser that isn't actively hostile to their privacy and autonomy.

Greedy businesses are preying on vulnerable technophobes, and we who grok should make sure those vulnerable people have their best interests looked after by organisations whose motives genuinely align — not by big tech firms behaving like ambulance-chasing quack doctors, who'll sell you any number of appendectomies.

And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twitter, and WhatsApp, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, and nobody ever seems to learn that if you don't insist on an open ecosystem, even if it's “just for now”, then eventually we all lose that option altogether.

This is probably just me, but whenever I see an advert for a web service on TV or on a billboard (especially for stalwarts like Google or Ebay), I always apply the same logic: their product must be crap if they're having to advertise it the old-fashioned way — it feels desperate and demeaning to the product.