These apps aren’t SaaS, but their alternatives are in at least some cases. LibreOffice competes with Microsoft Office, for example, and Microsoft wants people to pay a subscription for it, although I think you can still buy it outright. Pretty sure I’ve heard similar for Adobe products. Not super familiar with all the options, so can’t say if it’s true for all of them.
QuakeWorld and old school Doom for FPS, Beyond All Reason for RTS, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup for roguelikes, Hedgewars for a Worms-like.
Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.
Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.
Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.
It does limit choice, but so long as you aren’t retaining the generation list somewhere an attacker can find it, how are they to know your list? As long as your list is incorporating less common words, your attacker can’t even simplify the problem by focusing on the most common words. Just one rare word can expand the list they need to use by tens of thousands of words.
As you’ve phrased it, this seems to me to be a question of how to balance the rights of the developer versus those of the end user. The developer wants to monopolize commercial usage while the end user wants full control and authority on their machine.
Some would argue that the developer’s goals are unethical, but I think it’s an unfortunate consequence of a societal system that would see them starve on the streets if they didn’t earn with their work. In an ideal world, end users would prevail unquestionably, but so long as developers must operate under capitalism where ownership is critical, concessions will have to be made.
In the case of libraries, the users of the libraries are not the end users of the program. The users of the library are the developers.
Except the end user does inevitably become the user of the library when they use the software the developer made with it. They run that library’s code on their machine.
It claims that it’s freedom for the users, but that’s not true.
In light of the above, this is incorrect. By using GPL, you preserve the end user’s freedom to understand, control, and modify the operation of their hardware. In no way does the end user suffer or lose any freedoms.
When I see a GPL license I don’t see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can’t statically link to it.
One of the arguments in favor of GPL and other “forced openness” licenses is that users should have the right to understand what their own device is doing. You paid for your computer. You own it. You should dictate how it operates. You should at least have the option of understanding what is being done with your machine and modifying it to fit your needs. Closed source software may provide utility, but it doesn’t really further collective knowledge since you’re explicitly refusing to publicly release the code, and it provides obscurity for developers to hide undesirable functionality like data collection or more directly malicious activity.
I’m not personally sure how I feel about that argument myself, but I can at least readily acknowledge it as a valid one whether I agree with the decision to force openness or not.
It’s wild that everything you ascribe to NATO is clearly some Russian shit. As if you’re steeped in the Russian view and trying to project it on the west. You think NATO is going to punish Ukraine for effectively losing a war they didn’t even start with a former global superpower? Western countries may have their own problems, but the geopolitics are too coldly pragmatic. Until Ukraine fully sides with Russia, they’d want to do what they can to prevent that.
the Ukrainian people, especially the ones being forcibly conscripted to go die on the front in a war they don’t want to even be involved in.
Another clear example. Ukraine largely wants to remain free. Russia is having to trick people into enlisting, including foreigners, and forcing them to fight. But no, it’s the Ukrainians that should give up because they’re the ones that don’t want to be fighting? For their own freedom?
Aw poor corporate behemoth doesn’t want to spend the pennies (compared to profits) to do things right. If we’re being fair, fuck them for cheaping out at our expense.
Yeah, the core plot idea was pretty much the same, but the way it played out was pretty different. The whole thing stays way more low key, and I wanna say the whole jail thing never happened. It’s been a long time since I read either version, so I’m fuzzy on the details, but it definitely got a significant rework for publication.
I’ve tried to find a copy of the original before, and I think I found a poorly cloned website with the original links a few years ago, not updated to point at the new clone so I had to tweak it every time to continue. I’d love to get it converted to an ebook so I could archive it, but I haven’t tried in years now.
Tangentially, John Dies at the End is fucking great, easily one of my top book series. Kinda prefer the original online version of the sequel, but that’s hard to find these days, and the print version is still good. The movie’s pretty good, although it’s a shame they cut so much. I get why, movies can only be so long, but would have been cool to see all the stories from the book get told.
I’m still disappointed we never got the Dr. Horrible sequel…
You can get yay for an AUR package manager, but it’s generally not recommended because it means blindly trusting the build scripts for community packages that have no real oversight. You’re typically advised to check the build script for every AUR package you install.
Maybe not legally punished, but this very article we’re discussing is about how insurance companies are, in fact, punishing you financially for it. As for the false accusation, sure, but how likely is anyone to even figure it out? You’re not being dragged into court, and people don’t even know this is happening yet. It’s only illegal if you get caught. I don’t expect them to report it to anyone. I just expect data collectors to sell data and other businesses to buy it for the express purposes of financially screwing you. You may stay out of court, but that extra 21% charge is gonna cost you a couple hundred per year at least.
That assumes the outdated map software manages to somehow make an accurate report. Most likely, if it makes one, it’ll be “Going X over a Y MPH area” even though Y is wrong, or it’ll be just “speeding by X MPH for Y seconds/minutes”. Either way, nobody is likely to verify and correct the data, so you could be punished for perfectly safe and legal driving.
So it seems like if you’re using Office on desktop, not SaaS, but they do offer it in a browser, so would that count? Technically, if it’s in JavaScript or something like that, computing is handled locally, but it still feels close enough to count.