Not when you have a huge lead over your competitors and it’s almost impossible for a new entrant to catch up without excessive funding. Even with that, if you have products that need lots of approval with long duration tests (this materials leeching into food and water over a long time), it can be years before even good products will replace you.
Probably the movie that made me want to get into computers. Dated tech but modern ideas like a computer using its own “supervised learning” to learn a lesson about tic-toe-toe and nuclear war.
My Nextcloud constantly needs updated. One day I started getting some odd random error about the database. The advice I got was do all this convoluted stuff to maybe get it working again. I uninstalled, and haven’t gone back. It’s just not in the same league as paid alternatives.
People buy illegal stuff and dark markets all the time. Even a decade ago I knew a guy who was buying dope and having it mailed to him from the dark web and he was minimally technical. They know there is a risk but they are willing to take it. This isn’t like buying a lawn motor - people will take some fraud as “acceptable losses”.
We are not talking about one person. Yes everyone "knows a guy" who will find ways of doing stuff regardless of the laws or availability. We don't need to care about that person. However if half of America is becoming that person then we absolutely need to care.
You're fighting anecdote with anecdote. Earlier you say back in the gray market days you knew nobody gambling in your circle. Now you're saying the other commenter's "one person" isn't representative. You can't have it both ways. Either both anecdotes need more data to support them or neither do.
I think the difference is that, with gambling, the "buying" part IS the addiction. It's money centered. But with dope, the "buying" part is nothing - you do it for the dope.
If I give out free dope, I'll get a lot of people hooked. If I give out free sports betting, but you get nothing, then nobody is hooked.
How many people can use a Meta Quest 3 at the same time? Since you're positing this as an alternative.
Or what about getting a desktop PC instead for that same price? Or a snowboard? Obviously neither of these things are alternatives to a table-top device meant for playing table games together with other humans...
Not sure if this question will get removed but a tangent nonetheless - I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?
I remember being a high school student and having an amazing physics conversation on IRC that included a description of Flatworld that really fascinated me.
> I’d like to use this but I don’t know what to do with it since the advent of Discord. What do people do with IRC now and where do you find content?
IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)
I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.
Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.
If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.
It's a very common term now, and no fault of anyone for using it.
But it was introduced in its current sense (not in the protocol sense) by cynical and greedy exploiters, who spoiled much of the goodness of the Internet.
So when a random person casually says something like "consume content", unironically, it's like saying, "it's got what plants crave...".
#freenode was generally the main IRC node I used with all the good dev rooms.
Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.
Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).
I had the same question. I briefly joined the Slackware IRC a long, long time ago when I had questions, but now I wouldn't even know what to do with this client.
I had a similar problem with Twinkly Xmas tree lights. It was even more frustrating than this because instead of just having me send the lights back, they just kept me trying all these different power plugs/checking with a voltmeter, etc. I should have asked myself “why in the f$&@ am I doing this” when clearly the lights were just dead. After the last correspondence I was busy and waited a month to respond and when I wrote them back they basically said it’s out of warranty, good luck. I pushed back and they couldn’t have cared less. All you can do is tell your friends and write a bad review. Good luck making it slip past all the positive fake reviews!
But almost no 14 year olds get murdered. When you take it as a percent of all 14 year olds, it’s almost nothing. Certainly not an excuse to pull guns from millions of legal owners who have a right to protect themselves no matter how much the media and the left sensationalize it.
You have the right to own guns so that they can be used to defend against a tyrant attempting to take over the country. You have guns so that you can defend the fundamental principles and rights on which your country was founded.
Now that you have elected a tyrant, who wants to destroy everything that made America special, I don’t think you should really be allowed to own guns. The premise for that right has been invalidated. We are living through a demonstration of its failure.
Why should you be allowed to own a gun? What is the rationale for that right? Because as far as I can tell Americans have proven that they never deserved it.
The constitution does not talk about self-defence. The constitution does not talk about hunting. The constitution does not talk about sports shooting. The constitution talks about protecting freedom, and instead you have voluntarily surrendered it. You don’t deserve guns and you don’t deserve freedom. You deserve nothing.
I had a huge music collection of everything from thrash and death metal to new age and 80s. I don’t miss those days at all. I can’t tell you how many times I bought cds for one song and the rest of thing was garbage. When you’re a teen without a job or working to pay things like car insurance, gas etc, that 17 bucks was precious. No record store would let you return shit albums where I live.
Now I have all the music I’ll ever want for a low monthly fee, and I’ve discovered genres I would have never splurged for because of the limited resources I had at the time. My son does tons of music discovery through Spotify that I could have never done and doesn’t have to plop down 17 bucks for only 12-13 songs, 11-12 of which might be utter garbage.
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