• Lawsuit wins
• Lawyers get paid millions
• Customers affected get maybe $9, for lower than their data was sold for
• PayPal walks away with it as the price of doing business, no one involved is jailed.

The fact that most people assume Arch is a broken mess because of a meme is wild. Same people would think Linux is impossible to use if they used Windows still.

None of those are required to be known for any other surgery. “Are you sure you want your shoulder fixed? What if in a few years you find a nice someone and want it broken again? Think of the smiles of your children when you rub this scar line!”

And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.

Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.

Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they’re all guilty of it.

If someone is unaware of piracy: Tell them.

If someone is aware of piracy and doesn’t care: “I don’t really know, I just got it off of a torrent site.”

If someone is aware of piracy and cares too much for a company they don’t work for: You can ignore them.

If the panel van hit and killed them, it would have killed them:

• Walking
• Scootering
• Biking
• Roller Blading
• Anything that isn’t a metal box on wheels

South Park would probably be on the side of Google and other corporations, Matt and Trey are diehard libertarian capitalists.

It’s not inherently bad, it “fails” the Unix Philosophy of “Do one thing and do it well” but since Linux’s kernel is:

• Unix-like, not Unix
• Fails this philosophy, as it does more than one thing but does all of it pretty well
• systemd is just a bundle of tools that do one thing and do it well under one package, like Linux’s kernel

It used to be a mess, but that’s solved. The biggest reason to avoid systemd is mainly user preference, not anything malicious. 90% of current distros use systemd as its easier for the maintainers and package programmers to build for the general than each package and each distro having their own methods of how to do an init system and other tasks.

How Debian and Arch and Gentoo and Slackware and other big distros worked was different, and the maintainers of those packages had to know “Debian’s way” and not a general way that most places accept. Systemd actually solved the Too Many Standards! issue.

I’ve never really seen a big argument against systemd, but maybe I’ve just not heard it.

I meant exchanging the credits for the books, not books for books. Apologies if that came off as unclear.

And a lot of the online ads on podcasts and shows constantly state “it’s all yours to keep as long as you want” so my brother and I, both thought it was to all, not just the books. It’s why we were okay with paying for another month to allow more credits to stack up, as not every book was 1 credit.

I was slightly okay with Audible’s DRM when the credits you got each month stacked with the older ones, so you could have 4 over the months as you still listened to the books you already had, and then exchange them for newer books of the series and what not.

And then my brother and I stopped paying, and the credits were there for a month. Check back later, 0 credits. The books are still there, but the credits we paid money for are gone. So that sucks. Fuck em.

Torrenting stuff that is public domain or intended by its creators to be shared via BitTorrent isn’t illegal. You won’t get busted for sharing a Linux ISO or a copy of Moby Dick.

You would get in trouble for media made in or after 1929 (currently). A VPN would help to protect you from being caught for this, but you would most likely never get arrested for downloading, only being a major player in a scene.

And why cops don’t stop them? They do. There’s laws on books that prohibit them, but in (a lot) of countries, they either don’t have a law that stops VPNs, only piracy sites, or simply don’t have the time to care about media piracy when there’s bigger fish to fry.

I really like this, well done!

I think the idea is that “theft is not political”. Labor itself is not inherently political, but the fact that labor often not in a society that itself has unjust hierarchies is now political. The concept of “working at a task” is not political, but it can be.

That said, there’s one major group that cares about labor, cares about getting paid well, and doesn’t like people that steal money. And it’s sure as shit not the right wing.

John Cena is not a random American. You and I are closer to random than John Cena, a man who is internationally famous and a professional actor. That’s like saying Tom Cruise is a random American, when you know exactly who I’m talking about without googling.

That said, yes, China censors American media and actors, and it’s horrid. The fact that films get made in America and edited for China and America, is a crime to any artful visions the writers, actors, directors, editors and more may have had. But China itself doesn’t have the time and energy to stop you or I online all the time, it barely can do it within the Great Firewall, due to the sheer scope of the population and area the country covers.

Probably, but iPhones and Android have them for the Five Eyes and anyone else who is willing to pay/push for laws to make it happen. All you do with a phone is pick your poison, do you want China to spy on you, or America, the UK, or some other government or company who then sells it to the highest bidder.

Any cell phone, dumb or smart, is a tracking device. The smarter it is, the better it is as snooping on you. Doesn’t matter how or where the phone’s hardware is made, it’s going to track you without consent. You just need to ask “Am I worried about China or am I worried about another government?” to even “If the backdoor is big enough, can third parties get me too as I walk by on the street?”

Raccoons go though what others would see as trash, and make it their treasure!

Libby often had any popular books often taken up by other users, so I couldn’t read until someone else “turned in their copy”.

I get libraries in real life that have limited stock of books, but it’s a epub file hosted somewhere. The only limit is the server space and bandwidth costs.

Also the app was so laggy on even my (at the time) midrange device, that it felt like I was browsing books on molasses.

If they’ve fixed that, that’s incredible. I haven’t used it since, it left such a horrible impression. Trying to limit an endless digital supply, like making ebooks into early NFTs.

Yeah I probably just had the wrong tone or read it wrong. I am a fucking mess lately so that’s probably why.

It does and I agree, but maybe its since I just woke up and I’m short on sleep, I read:

well known method for putting a business card on paper that doesn’t require electronics: QR codes.

as:

We don’t need any electronics at all for any of this

RFID is silly to put in a card that 99% will forget about and leave behind. QR codes are better as they are just the same ink that goes on it anyways.

QR codes require something electronic to read them.

Business cards with plain text and maybe an image require as much tech to put on them as a QR code, a printing press of some kind. Making a nice looking card or generating a QR code requires more tech however.