Narf!

Ah yes, in the year 2000…

(a gag that’s already a quarter-century old!)

[OT: watch “Shadow of the Vampire” after watching the OG Nosferatu.]

Hurd?

A meme is a great way to avoid their fury; Lynx doesn’t show images.

I believe using a CDN would defeat the author’s goal of not being reliant on third-party service providers.

A problem with this approach was that many readers use VPN’s and other proxies that change IP addresses virtually every time they use them. For that reason and because I believe in protecting every Internet user’s privacy as much as possible, I wanted a way of immediately unblocking visitors to my website without them having to reveal personal information like names and email addresses.

I recently spent a few weeks on a new idea for solving this problem. With some help from two knowledgeable users on Blue Dwarf, I came up with a workable approach two weeks ago. So far, it looks like it works well enough. To summarize this method, when a blocked visitor reaches my custom 403 error page, he is asked whether he would like to be unblocked by having his IP address added to the website’s white list. If he follows that hypertext link, he is sent to the robot test page. If he answers the robot test question correctly, his IP address is automatically added to the white list. He doesn’t need to enter it or even know what it is. If he fails the test, he is told to click on the back button in his browser and try again. After he has passed the robot test, Nginx is commanded to reload its configuration file (PHP command: shell_exec(“sudo nginx -s reload”);), which causes it to immediately accept the new whitelist entry, and he is granted immediate access. He is then allowed to visit cheapskatesguide as often as he likes for as long as he continues to use the same IP address. If he switches IP addresses in the future, he has about a one in twenty chance of needing to pass the robot test again each time he switches IP addresses. My hope is that visitors who use proxies will only have to pass the test a few times a year. As the whitelist grows, I suppose that frequency may decrease. Of course, it will reach a non-zero equilibrium point that depends on the churn in the IP addresses being used by commercial web-hosting companies. In a few years, I may have a better idea of where that equilibrium point is.

You’re welcome.

I believe I found it originally via the “distribuverse”… specifically, ZeroNet.

Another solution: install a Linux distro in kiosk mode and make the browser home page https://www.windows93.net/

I don’t know but my speculation:

• Europe’s economy (from which the Church’s income was largely derived) didn’t go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
• That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
• The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autonomous archbishoprics.
• Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.

The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope’s temporal power over the city, Rome’s population growth went stratospheric.

Source: https://www.jetpunk.com/users/quizmaster/charts/population-of-rome-over-time

Lots of things happen there! It’s party time all the time!

Looks like Robert Reich is in the Fediverse

• https://masto.ai/@rbreich
• https://masto.ai/@rbreich/114216565157603145

I wonder if his dad was Robert Reich Jr…

g

In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.

Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.

The city’s population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Middle_Ages

Thanks to multiple sackings, power struggles, plagues etc.

It only surpassed a million again in 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics

Musk probably has his own Night of the Long Knives coming sooner or later.

As in, he will be the target, not the perpetrator.

• Röhm = Musk
• Hitler = Trump
• Himmler = Vance? Patel? Other?

• “Westminster” specifically for Parliament.
• “Downing Street” for the prime minister and the cabinet.
• “Whitehall” for central government as a whole, ministries and departments.

Charles Bronson grew up in a coal mining town. Even though everyone worked their asses off, still so poor he sometimes had to wear his sister’s dress to school!

MAGA would have him arrested for that!

The Cena who grovelled to the CCP and little pinks when he called Taiwan a country?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/john-cena-very-sorry-for-saying-taiwan-is-a-country