None of the choices here are good, but clearly bending over and letting Trump fuck everyone is worse than the alternatives. China is also not going to take this lying down and they have a lot of potential for damaging Trump because so much of the USA’s manufacturing is outsourced there and they can more easily compensate with other partners than Canada can. If Canada, China and Mexico stick to their guns, together, long enough for the American people to do something about this idiot, then things can still work out.

If a threat from an unelected foreign Nazi is all it takes to keep you from doing your job, you’re not fit to hold public office.

Rule 1 clearly says “posts have the following requirements”.

These are all valid points but they don’t preclude the existence of an open-source alternative to MBFC, which is what the commenter you replied to was asking.

Untrue. Most don’t engage in actual philantropy at all, but donate only to causes that will directly benefit their bottom line, such as sectors that depend on their products, or for scholarships in fields where their companies hire heavily. That isn’t actually donating. It’s just tax-exempt investing. In this sense, Gates is a cut above other billionaires.

His actions merit a freshly sharpened blade on his guillotine. Musk can have the rusty one that we’ll need to drop thrice to get the job done.

It’s like this with any controversial issue: most people adopt a manicheist stance, regardless of which side they’re on. This is why I think it’s important to always remember that if these issues weren’t nuanced, they wouldn’t be so controversial among so many different sectors of society.

We can agree on that (that this is the legislators’ reasoning). Whether it’s good or even valid reasoning remains to be seen. For one thing, the alternative to an adoption is one more parentless orphan - which is often also the alternative to an abortion. Oversimplifying the issue helps nobody. I’m not accusing you specifically of oversimplifying, as you made it clear that you were pointing out an oversimplification made by others.

That depends on how you define a human, and there’s the entirely separate issue of whether it being human or not should be the deciding factor. For example, a braindead human is still human but killing them is quite different from killing a healthy human. Oversimplifying the issue helps nobody.

That slash you used implies that the things before and after it are somehow equivalent when they absolutely aren’t.

So they only share when you click on an ad. I use an adblocker anyway, so effectively they’re not sharing anything. Or do I misunderstand?

Yes because tariffs that make legal imports more expensive are very effective at suppressing illegal imports, which don’t pay tariffs at all, for reasons. Clearly this is the motivation behind them.

No, that was John McAffee.

If they call it a “sale” rather than a “licensing” then I consider myself entitled to remove the DRM (which I do to all my Kindle ebooks, for example) or to download a cracked copy for archiving (which I do to some games I wish to keep, if I haven’t bought them on GOG or another DRM-free platform). Common sense and ethics dictate that I am in my right to do this.

If companies are relying on a technicality - an obscure one to the general public, even though techies have been aware of this issue for over a decade - to hoodwink people and charge actual-purchase prices for mere licensing, then I am relying on the implicit tenets of morality, good faith and common sense to bypass their malicious and bad faith distortions. Artificial scarcity be fucked, I paid what they claim is a fair price for what they claim is the purchase of a digital good, so I shall treat it with Animus Domini just as I do with any physical purchase. This includes lending to others as per the First Sale doctrine.

The fact that the seller consciously chose to contradict themselves, calling it a purchase out in the open and a licensing deal in the fine print, should it ever work to someone’s disadvantage, should obviously be to the disadvantage of the person who intentionally made the blunder, not to good faith third parties. This is a well-established principle of legal ethics and Civil Law which is adopted by legal scholars the world over. Whether or not they have failed to apply it to these specific cases is wholly irrelevant to its validity, and I apply it to my own dealings with a perfectly clear conscience.

I legally purchase all my media, and I will use any and all means necessary to protect my good faith acquisitions, including those which are incontroversially illegal for those who have not purchased that piece of media, such as downloading cracked software, because this is simply done to remedy an inexcusable omission on the part of those who claim to have sold me a copy of that software but don’t provide me with the possibility to archive my copy locally. So long as these transactions are referred to openly as purchases, sales, etc. I shall continue to act in this way to enforce their overt nature over the malicious mischaracterization contained in their licensing.

In other words, slimeballs, have the guts to call it licensing and renting. Until you do, I and many like me will continue to make your lies come true and there is realistically nothing you can do to stop us.

The problem is that the legal definition of what is or isn’t emulation doesn’t necessarily have to coincide with the technical one. Any EULA can include a statement to the effect of “for the purposes of this Agreement, emulation is defined as such and such”, but even if they don’t, all the company would have to do is convince a judge, practically all of whom are total laymen when it comes to computer technology, that using WINE or virtual machines or whatever other emulation-adjacent technology counts as emulation or, alternatively, that even though they aren’t technically emulation, since they accomplish a similar purpose, they are implied by the use of the word “emulation” in the EULA.

Legalese is largely characterized by vomiting every synonym you can think of to make absolutely sure that they are all included in the text, but that isn’t a requirement. It’s just to avoid having to debate whether something was included or not. Unless it is either explicitly included or explicitly excluded, its implicit inclusion is up for debate in a court of law, and the last word belongs to a judge who can’t tell a smartphone from a network switch.

You’re asking for a blanket statement from me but giving specific examples.

Regarding what you said before the quote block, yes. My generic objection to EULAs would be lifted in this case.

Regarding the obviously objectionable example clauses in the block and after it, I am opposed to those but they are a reason to reject the particular EULAs which contain them, just like any contract which contains similar dispositions (imagine having to agree never to eat at Burger King when you buy a Big Mac).

My previous comment was about things that are generally wrong with the practice of EULAs because they have become a de facto standard, and was not meant to imply that those are the only things that can possibly be wrong with any EULA ever.

EULAs should be completely non-enforceable in a sane world. They are enormous, full of frivolous dispositions just to bloat them and discourage actual reading (like the infamous prohibition against using iTunes to help you build nuclear weapons) and rarely are they ever available before you’ve already purchased the software. Instead, they’re presented to you only as part of a setup program where the font is minuscule, Ctrl+F doesn’t work and which often doesn’t allow copying+pasting the EULA to a non-retarded text window somewhere else which actually allows you to read it comfortably, save it or even print it out. EULAs are a perfect example of contracting in bad faith and if any Law student anywhere ever created a EULA-like document as part of a Civil Law assignment, they would get a failing grade automatically because no professor in their right mind is going to read more than two paragraphs into that obviously malicious bullshit with 50 other papers to grade.

Google can suck the shit directly from my asshole Human Centipede style if they think I’m ever going to pay them for.not using their monopoly to harass me. When I can no longer feasibly block ads on YouTube, I’ll just move to another platform. Thank goodness they’re about to lose Chrome because otherwise they’d soon be injecting ads directly through the browser just like they do in their shitty news app.

Trump will absolutely push for peace talks. If by “push for” you mean “tenderly fellate” and by “peace talks” you mean “Vladimir Putin”.

+1 for Syncthing

It’s not ok to insult anyone. Why do you feel the need to do so, and why are you asking for permission?