As a pirate, I refuse to read.

Just wanted to say arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, though.

Shiver me timbers!

You’d think after 30+ years of this shit, they’d realize they are fighting a losing battle. Actually, you’d think they’d also figure out that they should stop being rapey and molesting everyone too, but alas here we are…

I use Dynamics365 as my accounting software to keep track of my own personal stuff, which is tied in pretty tightly with excel, I wouldn’t be able to export anything without it. Actually I’m not even sure I’d be able to use it at all really. I also use Word more often than one would think, just for general around the house things. My investments too, like I use excel exports to do analysis on tables of data, stuff like regression and 50 day/200 day plotting, and general chart analysis. Probably could maybe get away with that on the free stuff, I’m not sure.

You don’t need pro to do any of this. The normal Office Home license is sufficient. And for personal use, it would be a real son of a gun if you accidentally downloaded them off the office website and then went to https://massgrave.dev/ and by grave mistake typed in a few of those commands

You probably don’t for personal budgeting and tracking of items for tax purposes. Any run of the mill spreadsheet will work just fine for that purpose.

I’m a chartered accountant though, like think of me as a free agent if you will, I’m not tethered to anything or anyone. I do professional work or give professional advice in exchange for currencies of various origins. My work as such, is a bit more complicated, and I need Excel. Sometimes I have to shared access to files for instance, or I need to share a file with someone, who won’t have libre because they are using Excel locked behind a corporate environment they don’t control. Libre Calc does have some unique functions that I’d argue Excel doesn’t have, but on the flip side Excel has more advanced functions, and xlookup, which I pretty much use every day. Google Sheets isn’t even in this conversation, and I personally have a hard dislike for Google Workspace apps in every form.

It would be nice if there was an actual alternative, and I think Libre would probably be the closest viable one. The gap is narrowing. Microsoft Office is atrocious in price, but thankfully easily hackable though, although in a professional environment you have to be more careful with this, than you personally would care to be. It’s also a memory pig for absolutely no reason, and so full of historical bugs they haven’t cared to fix for 30+ years. Plus some new ones that are infuriating. And you could set Microsoft Word on fire with no complaints from me.

Yes. I’m a self employed professional. I mean I have different computers, I have my laptop for instance which is for work only. But it’s still my laptop.

That new UX for outlook is infuriating though. I had to switch back to old outlook.

I’m an accountant. My life would be plenty hard without Excel. Google or LibreOffice are nowhere near sufficient. As much as I hate to admit that, because I’m definitely no fan of Microsoft, but for me there’s also no alternative.

I’m also old enough to wish that LotusNotes and Lotus123 won the race. LotusNotes especially, it was the shit.

I also think they are a bad idea, just for the general scale issue if not anything else. If person X from GeneralScammyHack country wants to steal my plate to sell on the darknet, they have to get on a plane, find my house in suburbia, break into my garage and even then find a proprietary screwdriver or hit the snap on truck before they come. Point is, they can’t hack it. Same with my license, like they need to come take my wallet or I need to lose it. Basically all I have to worry about is Methany peeling my plate off at the 7-11 and committing some super low level impropriety, maybe a local murder or two. I’m not going to find Jason Bourne using my plate in New Jersey or anything like that, and if I do, it’s just odds and quite an involved level of forgery.

It’s a numbers game for me. I think it really does depend where you live, and what you are downloading. 30+ years for me for the record, but I’m generally pretty low on the arrrrrr scale. Basically I’m guilty for like suburban house wife levels of pirating, downloading albums not yet released, the odd movie and maybe one to two PC games a year. Actually I’m a pretty big book pirate too, and I guess I do have IPTV, but my point is it’s all for super-micro levels of personal consumption, I’m not wholesale uploading, I’m not resharing it, nor am I dealing in anything weird or gross. So wasting your time on me isn’t going to be very fruitful, zero impact to the greater world and economy. Hence I don’t waste much time with VPNs and all of that, I just don’t think there’s much reason to. Plus I don’t fully trust that the NSA or whatever bureaucrat-org doesn’t have a way to front run your traffic out of the ISP even before it hits the VPN.

Monetary policy makes the world go round, unfortunately.

I believe the ICC does have a dispute forum. But when you get to these IGOs, it’s unbelievable how many there are. Could probably bring the complaint forward in multiple other forums too.

Ah I get you, sorry, I stand corrected. Surely such a claim would come forward through the WTO though, would it not? Would the ICC (the Chamber of Commerce) have enough teeth as the forum for what’s surely a monumental case?

The ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction over civil matters. The ICC only has jurisdiction over the most egregious of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, on a voluntary transnational basis (you have to be a signatory country, which I believe Argentina is).

Which PS was a damn good lawn mower

Look at buddy over here with the 1960s lawn boy

That’s happened to me with a couple of phone apps too. Its infuriating.

I’m peak subscription overload. I’m looking for ways to turf a bunch of ours, I’m currently trying to prove to my wife that our IPTV sub has everything that she needs and the Netflix/Disney/Amazon/Paramount subs can all fuck off and die. Almost there.

Next up is the bike trainer, roadside assistance, fitness and music subs. I’ll keep Spotify because I like how it integrates with our car, but that’s the ONLY reason.

Honestly I don’t really know, and don’t really care. I enjoy sporadically using it, and I’ve enjoyed making both useful, and some useless things.

Trust me, I’ve spent far more on dumber shit that I use half as often.

Canada here. Fuck off US Copyright Groups.

Canada out.

I know if I was an ISP, I’d be like, Oh shit, we lost those logs again.

Fast forward 24 hours

Awww shit, it happened again

And so on…

Grab a Chromecast or almost any cheap streaming device of your choice, Tivimate and IPTV. Find a really good reliable IPTV provider for your area and you won’t really have issues.