Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically "piracy" but it's amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.

The Windows Store limits the number of machines that you can install paid software on to 10. If you are managing a lot of computers you’d be better off with some actual management software or at least a package manager like Chocolatey. Then you can push software to your machines, run updates, or uninstall stuff whenever you like.

This is like the people who repackage and rebrand LibreOffice and then resell it for $10 on the Windows Store to gullible users.

And the worst part about that is that it doesn’t even break the law.

I looked it up and it turns out, he’s the president! The organisation is the Parking Reform Network. It seems they’re specifically against car parks but listening to him talk I though it was against all sorts of car infrastructure.

Over the school year I live in Corvallis, OR (attending Oregon State Univ) where it’s extremely walkable and likeable. Free public transit but only on weekdays, unfortunately. Regional buses connect with the train station in Albany.

Sadly, over the summer, I’m back at my parents’ place and they live on a very steep hill 20 minutes by foot from the nearest bus stop, and the bus only comes every 45 minutes so there’s really no option but to drive :(

In my city (Portland, Oregon, USA), consistent nagging finally got us improved bus service and frequency, road diets, and “express” buses that have signalling priority over cars. One of my friends’ father works for a local organisation that advocates against car infrastructure in favour of better public transportation and biking infrastructure. In the past ten years, we have had:

• Entirely new light rail line extending south into the suburbs
• Scrapped motorway expansion in exchange for improvements to a commuter rail line that runs parallel to it
• “Frequent service” bus routes that run every 15 minutes or better during peak hours
• Free public transportation for students during the school year and over the summer
• Tolls on a major motorway to offset maintenance and improvement costs
• “FX” express bus routes with nice bus shelters, signalling priority, and those long accordion busses
• Big pay rise for bus drivers, up to $25/hr now I think
• Road diet on a large arterial street in the southeast, adding bike lanes and a median
• Lowered speed limits across the city
• Designated “neighbourhood greenway” bike routes
• Major downtown arterial shrank to 2 lanes, with a segregated bike path installed in the freed space
• Improvements to the Springwater Corridor bike trail (use for commuting also)

I used Thunderbird for a year but I don’t recommend it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a competent email client, but I’ve found that the lack of tray notifications is unbelievably annoying. That means you can’t really have it running headless in the background checking for emails. Birdtray is kind of a janky solution that I don’t recommend either.

Mailspring I’ve found has most of the features I’d need from a mail client. It also does have a real background process that can check for mail and notify you when you receive some.

The application with the best integration to your (GNOME) desktop is going to be GNOME Geary. It looks like a native GNOME app (because it is) and it fits in perfectly with your system. But it’s very light on features. If you only need a client to read and write simple messages, Geary will work wonderfully.

I think courts in the US are slowly coming to the consensus that AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright. My opinion is that this solves the problem rather perfectly; companies now have an incentive to use humans, because if they use AI to make content then anyone is free to rip off that content, and I think that’s the way it should be.

AI should benefit humanity, and its products should be open and available for everyone, rather than being something for corporations to exploit for their own sole benefit.

This should just be something that mobile clients can turn off by default.