I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

And maybe a dramatically simpler tax code?

I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.

I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.

This is a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of anything related to monopoly or anti-trust law. Maybe, maybe the iPhone, and even then it’s a stretch. edit: at least in the US.

I tend to reply more often than is probably good for me not because I care about changing that person’s mind, but instead the others that are reading.

Indeed. Gun control is actually extremely popular if you just look at polling.

I don’t disagree, but y’all don’t own nearly as many guns as Americans. I think you already highlighted why - in most civilized countries you have actually do some work to get a gun and have more legal responsibility than just “oops little Timmy got my gun again, that’s not your pacifier big guy I don’t know why he likes this thing so much let’s put that back over here on the nightstand.”

“There is simply nothing we can do! Far too busy stopping women getting a dead fetus removed from their body before it kills them! Oh hang on I have to take a call, someone is trying to make sure that kids get food. Not on my watch!”

• Republicans, shortly before explaining how they’re “pro-life.”

The only thing that I think is a little complicated these days is make sure that you’re not reliant on a particular Windows-only app. For the vast majority of common apps, you’re going to be fine, and it’s sounding more and more like even gaming on Linux is not only fine, but getting to the point of being the best way to do it. If you do have a particular app you rely on, I’d look into the various ways that you can get Windows apps running on Linux (which can be a little tricky, but usually not too bad.) But even like 10 years ago, I built a machine for an elderly family member, put probably some flavor of ubuntu on it, and I never had to troubleshoot that machine.

This tracks. I have recently gone back to running a Windows desktop machine for gaming, and now I have to actually shut it off because:

a) that fucking thing never stays asleep. Clean install with nothing other than Steam and a couple of games, sleep settings mean nothing. Just wakes up, stays awake forever.
b) Fortunately I have an enterprise license key so I don’t get as much random bullshit, but every update there is some new fucking thing I don’t want.

My machine is a desktop, but I can’t image how this works well on laptops.

Copilot is their AI thing (which I think is just a wrapper for ChatGPT.) As for why you need it, fuck if I know. Love MS just adding another key that’s going to piss me off when I’m in a game.

That’s because people are generally disgusting. I’d have to guess that if you talked to basically edit: anyone any scientist about the best way to reduce illness of any sort, they’d say “just wash your hands properly.”

For point 1, that’s absolutely not getting past the 1st amendment, and it really doesn’t matter that it’s called news. People treat their crazy uncle’s conspiracy Facebook posts as “news” and labeling doesn’t really do much if anything to discourage this behavior.

For the idea of critical thinking and education, this is something that democrats should be campaigning on and promising, although obliquely. It should probably come in the form of increasing funding for schools (MASSIVELY) and then add in media literacy courses and such to the curriculum. Although, that said, there are already schools that do this in some form or fashion, but the problem is that far too many school boards are overrun with nuts, and this ties into point 3…

Religion being tied to governance is a real, real problem. Teaching kids critical thinking is going to teach a lot of them, especially Republicans and Evangelicals, that they are being fed a steady stream of bullshit. We still have enough religious association that even getting this across to Democrats and left leaning in a major way is going to be tricky.

On a hopeful note, the most zealous of this population is dying out. Levels of religion have been steadily dropping for a while now. I think as more of this magical thinking dies out, we’re more likely to see positive improvement. Of course, we have to not become a fascist state in the meantime.

God. We already have to deal with them idolizing fucking Reagan. And yeah, as long as he is alive and not in office, the chances he goes to jail go up every day.

I think this is getting less true, and especially with Game Pass and now Sony putting a lot of first party titles on PC, I’m hard pressed to think of a AAA game that isn’t available, or won’t be if I don’t mind waiting a 6 months.

WoW actually runs servers that cost money and that’s a core part of how the game works. While I’m sure XBL does in some small fashion as well, it doesn’t seem to be wholly necessary to the experience, hence I can play online games from my PC for free just fine. There is no reason why merely to use any game online, I should have to pay.

Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it.

Bold added for emphasis, Apple claims privacy as a feature and OS control of the mic to prevent this exact sort of thing. Not only would someone have found it, it would be a news cycle on the mainstream news, and basically just the wallpaper for any tech-centric website.

I mean, fucks sake, iFixIt alone would find mics in places they shouldn’t be and this would be a story.

Unfortunately, the truth is more boring, and basically pretty much every app/website most of us use are tracking us in some way unless you really seek prevention. They don’t need the mic.

“if I were a corporate shitbag, how would I implement my shitbaggery?”

In this case, it would be pretty hard. We have wiretap laws, which would mean you have to tell the user you’re doing this. Even though no one reads the ToS, someone does, and it would be news if someone was doing this.

Even then, it would be a hard enough problem that companies would think twice about it for a few reasons. Number one, processing 24/7 of all audio in your home is going to be rather difficult/expensive, so you’d have to go with something like keyword-triggers-processing the way that your phone listens for “hey google/siri” or Amazon listens for “Alexa.” It works kinda like game video sharing - they are always listening and recording for a short time frame* but they only send the data somewhere if they hear the trigger phrase. That’s not easy in itself, they’ve spent a ton of time getting the right algorithm so that it correctly hears the right trigger phrase and you don’t get a ton of false positives to varying degrees of success. And keeping in mind these are companies that are best suited to it, they still struggle sometimes with even that. The ad companies would have to listen for dozens/hundreds/thousands of triggers…

And then you get to the data retention policies. Google is an ad company, Apple is not. One of the reasons that Apple can tout privacy as a feature is simply that they don’t need the data, so they don’t collect nearly as much, and they save even less. They get the bonus of not dealing with law enforcement and all that.

So, assuming they solve that, solve some big issues with the laws of the land and physics, now we’re to the point where they have to think about network traffic. Which is going to be trivially easy for nerds to figure out and circumvent, so they would have to have their own ad-hoc network which comes with another 137 or so difficulties.

If it were, it would be pretty common knowledge and there would be several news cycles about it. I don’t doubt that they could bury it in the terms of service, but we have wiretap laws in enough places that are two-party consent that it would have had to come out by now. Not to mention nerds like me running pi-hole and monitoring their traffic, repair people who could easily regonize a mic in the device, etc.