Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.

So - ignoring the time he sent a mob to try and overthrow the US government, how about we use the fact that he literally said he’d be a dictator?

Or maybe the fact that his legal defense against trying to overthrow the government was that the President is immune from all crimes. His lawyers even literally said he could have his political opponents murdered, and so long as the surviving politicians don’t impeach and convict him he can’t be held liable for it.

They’re arguing a legal framework under which he can murder the opposition, and then kill anyone that tries to remove him from office.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

I’ve had way too many Windows updates fuck my shit up, so I wait as long as possible to update so they have a chance to fix what they broke by the time it gets rolled out to my machine.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

We actually bombed the moon on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement!

Seriously though, it was a middle finger to Bush more than anything.

I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.

If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.

And installing Linux and axe-murdering anyone with a car.

The home-user PC market has been hit HARD by smartphones and tablets. Suburban families no longer have a desktop in a home office plus a laptop for each member of the family. They may have a laptop, and it’s probably a Mac.

This decision is too make people buy new devices or upgrade to an OS that has a lot more tracking built in.

Microsoft is pressing AI and other data-scraping tech hard, but they’re necessarily going to have to have enterprise and government licenses that allow admins to block those features for legal and security reasons.

So they desperately need new home users they can data-mine.

Autocorrect’s version of “having fun”

It’s an advertising display. They’re just having fun with it.

It costs 4 grand and has a resolution of like 3480x600, making its pixel density pretty much useless for a monitor.

I mean… Saying that it doesn’t result in lost sales at all is disingenuous.

They aren’t losing 70 dollars for every download, but they also aren’t losing zero.

Oh, I’m not a programmer. I’m just bitching about how many of us have to go to an office for no reason.

I work almost 100% on a computer for a municipality using software that’s already 100% web-based.

But I have to drive 90+ minutes each way every day because a citizen might want to have an in-person meeting once every few weeks instead of an email or Teams meeting.

I still use bat h files and the system scheduler to automate a shocking amount of my job.

Data-mine the information you intentionally did not put on the cloud.

I work in an enclave city for the ultra-rich. We have lots of celebrities and billionaires. There are fewer than 1000 homes and the taxable value of residences in town is nearly 4 billion.

Anyway: it’s hard to know who owns what because most of them put their property under an LLC named after the address to protect their privacy.

Ending pesticides and deforestation wouls absolutely require billions dying. Also dying would be billions of animals.

That being said, there’s a ton of issues with the meat industry, and the treatment of the animals in many cases is barbaric. And the danger of antibiotic use, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions are huge.

However, all the small ranches in my area give the livestock idyllic lives up until the end though, and that’s not such a bad gig for the animals.

Animals that otherwise would either not exist or die at a younger average age from predation or starvation are cared for in comfort for years before being slaughtered humanely without even knowing it’s happening. All with less pollution and harmful working conditions in the factory slaughterhouse.

And the meat isn’t any more expensive than the more harmful megacorps these days since the megacorps used “supply shortages” to double the cost of meat.

The conversation was about a guy torturing an animal to get his jollies.

Yes, animals die for meat. But the suffering of animals isn’t the goal of eating meat.

And dying kid yourself about veganism. It doesn’t really exist.

Dead animal parts that aren’t directly consumed don’t just pile up or cease to exist. They’re used to make the fertilizer to grow the plants you eat.

Agribusiness levels habitats to make room for crops.

Water waste from factory farms kills countless animals.

Don’t even get me started on pesticides.

Can all of that be solved? Sure. Tell me which 2-3 billion people deserve to die so you can feel better about your food?