Uriel238 [all pronouns]

He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!

1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.

2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.

2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.

Not our first rodeo.

It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations

Fixed It For You.

Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.

Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.

Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking

Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck’s swimming coffers.

And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)

Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.

Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States

(Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)

Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.

And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.

When you pirate, you’re not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You’re stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.

So fuck intellectual property rights.

Wierd that God, the creator is a guy who looks like white Jesus. Jesus didn’t create the universe (nor did Adonai) even in the Christian Cinematic Universe. (Adonai was the god of Israel, and was promoted to custodian of the earth – the firmament.)

In the 20th century we developed an understanding of the scope of the universe (its breadth and rate of expansion) that renders silly (and pretentious) the notion God is a hominid ape, or male, or white. In fact everything other than the local group is out of our reach (assuming humans survive the imminent great filters and some epoch reach to other stars).

So even within this universe we are microbes on a speck of dust imagining we are central to God’s plan.

In the 1990s, we considered the possibilities that our universe may itself be caused by natural events, that ours is one bubble in a sea of foam, and any creator is multiple event horizons away, and we are as important to God as microbes beneath the earth’s crust (12+ miles down through solid rock) are to us.

In c/196 we had the conversation about the devil being a patron of the arts.

Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.

More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.

Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).

Pirate it all or don’t watch it.

I was going to guess Battlecars art.

Battlecars was GWs competitor to Steve Jackson’s Car Wars

Note that with rare exceptions, creators are not supported by your purchases. Rather the studios, labels and publishers wh cheat creators are.

If you want to support the creators, pay them directly, or go to one of their performances / signings / functions. But still pirate their work.

Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.

And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.

According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.

It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.

There are some Deep Rock Galactic gun builds (color and framework) that look like this.

But at least he won.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Belloq on his way to meet Dr. Jones and procure a fertility idol.

Unhiding extensions is one of the first things I do when setting up windows, but it will still hide the .lnk extension on shortcuts, so it’s still a vector for phishing attacks (specifically, tricking the user to do something that runs malicious code).

Experienced pirates will get into the habit of taking precautions against malware attacks and will distrust downloads until they are sufficiently vetted,

If you’re good at it you can teach a course.

Yeah, the investigation writes itself. Have a few people with widely verying demographics come in and buy the same things, compare prices and see who gets overcharged for what. If you work for a news agency publish the findings. If you don’t, post a blog and make memes.

Ideally, this would eventually lead to state micromanagement of price regulation the way some food staples are, but on everything. Or a new wave of anonymous shopping.

When I was creating a Star Trek expy, this was how the Federation worked: there were a lot of universal basic services, and one of the governmental departments looked to expanding what services qualified as UBS and looking maintain and improve state offerings so they are competitive to commercial offerings.

UBS would still be prone to corruption and exploitation, but its absolutely a viable bridge towards post-scarcity communism.

As a note, clothes, laundry and hygiene would need to be included in a starter set of UBS. I suppose if UBS and UBI came together, and the program would seek to add common UBI purchases into th3 UBS category.

Racoon is what I came to after Liftoff died.

Take this object, [new Lemmy client app] but beware it carries a terrible curse…

…But it comes with a free Frogurt!