UnspecificGravity

If they could have fined or arrested people for recording cassettes off the radio they would have.

We have learned that a pretty significant number of the liberties that we enjoy only exist because it would be too much work to take them away.

We are seeing that will facial recognition and free speech and public assembly now.

Not anywhere in America.

12 4tb drives in mirrored pairs in a zfs pool on a headless server supporting our local media server and various other data storage needs. The only stuff on the desktop is game installs and software.

Most of us who survived desktop gaming and media piracy in the early 2000 learned not to keep anything important locally cause your gonna have to wipe your os every now and then.

I think the real thing you have learned is that PC upgrades are largely unnecessary. They are only selling new hardware that is better on paper and they need to create compatibility traps to make you upgrade a bunch of other shit to get that incremental upgrade.

I think a lot of people really just fail to analyze if the thing they are going to get is worth the cost. Like if you have a perfectly good DDR4 system is it really worth a thousand dollars to upgrade every component in order to get what, an extra 5 FPS? People are spending a lot of money doing upgrades and expecting to get the kind of improvements you got ten years ago, and its just not going to happen because hardware hasn’t been improving at that rate for a long time.

Even still, there are a lot of components that are not cheap that you can reuse regardless of CPU socket and memory compatibility changes. I’ve used the same PSU and case and drives and network card for a decade. That’s all shit I would have had to pay for over and over again with a different type of system.

Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.

The real lesson here is that if you are a company that was founded on stupid imaginary bullshit your investors are comfortable with investing in stupid imaginary bullshit and it isn’t going to hurt your price.

When you are a legacy tech company whose investors expect you to actually make products that you sell for money, they don’t like to hear that blew every penny you had on fucking magic beans.

Wait.

You mean that dedicating the majority of their business to buying things from themselves has not proven to be a sound strategy in the eyes of investors?

It doesn’t help that pretty much every single thing that has ever been done in the name of “safety” in America has eventually been used to rip us off or harm us in some way, and that isn’t even counting the fake shit that was a fraud from the get-go (like the patriot act and the like).

As usual, the Trump admin is using tools that have been available to the feds for years but they use them so ineptly that it has become obvious that they exist. I guess that is better than competent administrations doing to the same thing for less trivial and obvious shit.

A LOT of people have completely failed to grasp how much technology has stagnated in the last 20 years.

This shit doesn’t stop until the people that actually do this are subject to actual criminal penalties.

Sure, but you don’t need a license for mesh.

I want to know what economic forces are making it so that having AI, which costs money and very few users actually want, such a forgone conclusion. Who is paying them?

Guarantee that your data still gets used to feed you ads with the “premium” subscription.

How much maintenance does a word processor need? The fact that its free IS the financial incentive. You could install mint and libre office on every computer in a school and it would basically be a seamless transition and most people would barely even notice.

Kind of hilarious that the comments in this post are doing exactly what the linked post points out as the big pitfall of studies like this.

It’s not stealing when corpos do it.

Meta torrented their training data from the pirate bay. Hell, Spotify initially built their catalog from pirated music. They all do this shit. Corporations are built to steal our shit and sell it back to us. This isn’t any different from pumping oil out of pubic lands and selling it back to us.

Are you suggesting that there is a use case for piracy that has less to do with saving money than it does with convenience and easy access to media in one place?

Yeah, cause its totally not end-stage capitalism to invest a trillion dollars into something and THEN figure out what its for.

If people don’t keeping buying our fake perpetual motion machine we aren’t going to make back the money we invested in building it!