Different pieces of legislation. This was about the French legislature voting against a national anti-encryption bill. Chat control is an EU-level bill and the French legislature isn’t really involved in that, only the French government and France’s EU representatives.

“minus nine” definitely has 9 letters, not -9.

I know you didn’t mean this seriously, but it’s easy to see:

• zero has 4 letters
• one has 3 letters
• two has 3 letters
• three has 5 letters
• four has 4 letters
• five has 4 letters
• six has 3 letters
• seven has 5 letters
• eight has 5 letters
• nine has 4 letters
• ten has 3 letters
• eleven has 6 letters
• twelve has 6 letters
• after this, there are no possible candidates anymore: the next numbers are all just 3-9 (with slight spelling variations) followed by 4-letter “teen”, giving us at most 9 letters, too few to have equal value to the numbers they name
• after that there is no possible way to get to the high values of the numbers they name by combining words like “twenty” or “thirty” or “hundred” or “thousand” or “million” with the previous ones

I once heard the word “purrito” (purr + burrito) in a video, meaning a cat wrapped in a towel like a burrito. My username is the German translation of that: “schnurren” means “to purr” in German. I’m no longer sure why I chose this as a username specifically here… that just crossed my mind when registering here.

in fact it is the only number in English that has as many letters as its value

That was the fault of the people who were in power after Gorbachev…

Their authoritarian form of government which is definitely making me not want to ever visit China.

I am sure China is otherwise a wonderful country, I don’t have a negative opinion of Taiwan at all, but the PRC needs their Gorbachev to come to power and liberate them.

I remember reading (though I can’t find the source anymore) that Mastodon “favorites” and Lemmy upvotes are the same thing, but that it is not possible to downvote from Mastodon.

Very little. I know it’s a military dictatorship and that there’s been some sort of genocide going on there in recent years that people have alleged was fueled by information on Facebook. I know it used to be, and sometimes still is, called Burma, which is really just a different variation of the same name.

My understanding of the ruling you mean is that it decided that freedom of speech includes the right to spend money in order to speak, which is not an extremely far-fetched idea. You may still think the consequences are bad, of course… but let’s focus on what actually happened.

There already are some differences in government structures between countries.

Why are many of them similar? I think it’s a combination of these:

• countries that became newly independent or rewrote their constitution looked at other countries for inspiration
• Many (older) countries followed a somewhat similar path from being absolute monarchies to aristocracies (with nobles represented in a parliament which then became increasingly more powerful than the monarch) to the parliament becoming elected by all of the people to, in some countries, the monarchy being abolished and replaced by a president (essentially an elected monarch).

I think you may enjoy reading this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/

Not a new phenomenon in human nature or on the Internet, by itself. On some wikis (e.g. en.wikipedia.org) there used to be extensive lists of “notorious vandals”, then people realized that this only encouraged them further, now this is more limited, but there still is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse

ffs stop feeding trolls and spammers

!superbowl@lemmy.world is already a thing, but I’ve said before and am repeating here that this is a lot less funny on a platform where “superbowl” on other instances can still be communities about the Super Bowl than on reddit where there could be only one “superbowl” subreddit

That is basically OpenID which has been around for a long time. In principle there is nothing stopping fediverse instances from being OpenID providers or allowing login with an OpenID, not sure anyone has done this yet though.

If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copying_Is_Not_Theft.webm

I’ve said before and I’ll repeat here again that we really ought to be denying recognition to the person behind those messages, whoever they are.

That said, I remember not long ago reading a comment that somebody had actually seen the person in those images livestream, which wouldn’t be possible if these were just photos of a person who had nothing to do with it.

In my country only the head is really visible on driver’s licenses. I think that was a light-gray polo shirt, but I am no longer 100% sure.

This blogger has previously had some interesting thoughts on the matter. For example https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/Paternalistic_Laws_Make_Very_Little_Sense but I remember some others too, though can’t easily find them now.

Not so in Austria. Only Haftpflichtversicherung is required which only covers the car owner’s liability.