That would make it plagiarism, which ethically is a whole different matter than merelly copying that which is free to copy.

For starters, bulk copying a person’s documents without their approval sounds like mass copyright violation.

Since the user did not approve it, it sounds like mass copyright violation to me.

Not in the EU it doesn’t, unless they got the user to review that Agreement and agree before the sale took place.

After the implicit contract which is the sale has been agreed to by both parties (the buyer gave the money, the seller took it), one of the parties can’t force the other party to agree to a new contract before they’re allowed to get the contractual benefits of the original contract (i.e. the buyer getting to use the product they bought, the seller getting to use the money they got).

It doesn’t matter if the seller has such power de facto - legally they most definitelly can’t blackmail the buyer by denying them their side of the contractual rights they got in the Act of Sale by blocking their use of the product they bought until they agree to a new Agreement from the seller.

Well, if you tip because you care enough about the person on the other side, you might want to try and come up with a way to leave them a tip somehow so that there is no risk it’s taken away from them, assuming that you can. Put $5 under the rug and let them know, or something.

If you can’t, you can’t, and I’m hardly going to criticize you for not wanting to catch an airborne infectious disease.

I was pretty miffed in the UK (years ago) when it came out that lots of companies (there it was mainly restaurants) were just keeping the tip money when people payed by card and filled-in a tip amount, so I very much made an effort to as much as possible make sure the actual people got the tip directly - even if I stood out from the crowd by doing it - as I don’t see the point in tipping the company.

When I tip the driver in a delivery I literally just give them cash when they deliver (and only if they actually arrive with some promptness, not if they come half an hour late with a cold pizza).

It’s a habit I got into when living in the UK because there, like in the US, lots of companies just take the “tip” money and keep it if you tip whilst paying with card.

Granted, I like to pay stuff with cash, both for privacy reasons and because it has actually been shown that people in average spend less if they pay in cash (something to do with the feeling of giving something physical away), so I almost always have some cash to pay and tip.

Error!

You must wear your User Attention Validation Goggles ^TM during the device initialization period.

Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.

Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.

Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.

Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.

Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.

Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.

Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid “for Google” ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don’t really have to use the air-mouse stuff).

Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don’t want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.

The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.

It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for “personal” media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.

The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.

If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)

The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.

/s (because this one really needs it)

Yeah.

“Blackberry” both felt wrong at the time and my brain kept telling me it was familiar hence it must be right.

Showing my years here ;)

The work is almost all done by integrated circuits, so what they did was basically supply the necessary crystal and caps to get the integrated circuits to work, add what looks like a voltage regulator to regulate supply and route the whole thing on what’s almost certainly a 4 layer board.

Also at the speeds we’re talking about we’re not yet in the domain of having to worry about stuff like the impedance of lines and the signals in absolutelly normal circuit board lines bouncing or getting distorted due to things like impedance mistmatch.

What’s impressive here is not the size of the thing (you would be surprised at how stupidly small even very complex functionality is nowadays - stuff like the Blackberry Raspberry Pi-Zero is only as big as it is because of making available so many pins to connect to not because of the actual hardware), it’s that this is pretty advanced electronics for high-schoolers even with good teachers, as figuring this stuff out generally involves a lot of datasheet reading unless you’re starting from somebody else’s design.

It’s not about debugging tools.

Different, high level software designs (i.e. architectural designs) which are normally imposed by the game engine, have different probabilities of the developers who are making the code for those to produce bugs, because of lots of factors including things like of how they approach error validation and handling in the engine itself and in which domains does the engine leave the most freedom to coders and which ones does it leave less - some things are pretty safe to leave in the hands of even bad developers, others are not.

The example of multi-threading in Unity should’ve been clear: put a game engine that doesn’t impose a single thread pattern in front of somebody with little or no experience in multi-threaded programming and you will have a huge rate of bugs (mainly critical race conditions) and as it so happens most developers out there have little or no experience in multi-threaded programming. Yet multi-threading can yield far more performance in modern CPU since they’re all multi-core. For that specific game engine a software architectural choice was made to go with a structure that is not as performance but significantly less likely to lead to a higher bug rate when used by the average coder, probably because Unity targets less experienced coders.

Good Senior Designers and Technical Architects don’t design the high level structure of the software for themselves as coders, they do it for the kind of coders that are likely to be coding for it.

Of course the developers themselves also have different capabilities and hence different baseline rates of creating bugs, hence why I said “both”.

It’s both.

The architectural decisions are at the engine level and that stuff has a massive influence on the likelihood of bugs in the code running in that engine.

For example, traditional Unity (not ECS) runs all game code (so the code provided by those coding the game) in a single thread, which avoids A TON of multi threading bugs (as that’s one of the hardest parts in programming to master) but is very bad for performance in multi-core CPUs. Game programmers can fire up separate threads using the standard libraries of the programming language itself and manage them, but everything in the development framework that’s part of the engine pushes them to use that single-threaded model, so only advanced devs bother and only for very specific things.

Also the choice of programming language forced by the engine itself has a huge impact in the likelihood of bugs, but since I don’t want to start a Holy War I’m not going to star pointing fingers at specific languages and criticizing them ;)

I supposed that as long as Mozilla just stopped distributing those add-ons rather than block them (i.e. they can still be side-loaded) it’s complying just about as much as they have to.

Even better if they keep the listings in the Mozilla add-on store but for Russian IPs do not allow downloads and instead have some text explaining why they were forced to not distribute those add-ons in Russia.

Depending on the legality of the whole situation they might have held of from doing anything until there was a proper Court Order from a Russian Court but that’s about it.

Ultimatelly Mozilla as a whole being blocked in Russia wouldn’t be any better than Mozila not distributing those add-ons themselves in Russia anymore, since the result when it comes to people being able to use those add-ons would be the same.

Given it’s size in the browser market I don’t think that Mozilla not being available in Russia anymore would trigger the kind of pushback against Roskomnadzor in Russia that we many seem to hope it would and absent that there were really no good options here.

Does the NAZI porn involve blond blue-eyed Frauleins in skimpy leather gear with wipps dominating willing slaves?

Asking for a friend.

I remember when I was a kid, at some point in early highschool we had a colleague who was a bit dumb and had blond hair (in a country were that’s pretty rare) so he was commonly bullied and called “piss head” and I did join on the bullying once or twice.

Still to this day I sometimes think of it and feel guilty of, even as a kid myself, having been an asshole to that kid simply to feel I was part of the group.

Sometimes I have the impression that even here in Lemmy a lot of supposedly adults either were always assholes and will always be so, or didn’t go through that part of maturing were you figure out that pilling up on somebody just to be “one of the crowd” isn’t exactly a mature adult thing to do.

Or maybe I’m just overeading it or projecting.

Yeah, yeah, but the executives that took the various decisions that made Boeing what it is now are even more millionaire than when they started at Boeing and will not see the inside of a jail cell, ever.

So we can all rest easy knowing that those we are constantly told are the most important people who deserve to be paid so much because of being risk takers and wealth creators, will be just fine, as if a few “nobody” whistleblowers had to be taken out, well, that’s a price the trully important risk taking wealth creators were willing to pay.