rhino369

Joined 13 years ago

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7,152
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3,326
Member since
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
You do know the seeders on BitTorrent don’t have a license though.

Just admit you don’t care about pirating from a major company. You don’t have to lie to yourself to concoct a moral justification.

Comment · 3 years ago
I bet the amount of pirating of Netflix content is up since password sharing is being clamped down on—not that Netflix cares. If an unpaid user falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?

But I can’t help but feel that 90% of the “back to the high seas” comments on Reddit or social media discussions of streaming is just pirates justifying the piracy they were already committing.

Pirates love having some moral justification. Shit, they should just admit they prefer getting something without paying for it.

Comment · 3 years ago
>>I doubt that it's very often not the case

In my UMC area that was formerly MC there are a lot of tear-down rebuilds that trade one single family home for another. They barely increase stock ( though the houses probably have more bedrooms).

Comment · 3 years ago
>I have not heard any arguments in favor of this system that hold water in my entire life

One defense is that the old AT&T system was really expensive and slowed progress. Deregulation was a big win for consumers.

I agree that well regulated monopoly ISPs could deliver better service. But I'm deeply skeptical that, in practice, we'd manage to actually regulate the ISPs properly.

Our regulated power companies have shitty, underfunded grids that create massive forest fires.

I would half expect really cheap nationwide DSL.

Comment · 3 years ago
I'm skeptical too.
Comment · 3 years ago
When were you in high school? Blockbuster cut prices near the end as it was dying to try to compete with Netflix and Redbox.
Comment · 3 years ago
There really isn’t any reasonable defense for these examples or the lack of the speedy hearing.

But I’m not against civil forfeiture if practiced better with better safe guards.

Every year the government takes 30%+ of the money I make via taxation. Unelected administrative functionaries lay down laws that can massively change the value of your property.

I’m not going to cry if the government keeps money whose origin you can’t explain. By law, I have to file tax returns that explains my income. There isn’t a huge difference. These kind of seizures makes organized crime much easier to fight.

But again, a lot of these examples look more like straight theft.

Also, law enforcement shouldn’t get to keep the money it seizes. It’s a perverse incentive. Should just go into the general treasury.

Comment · 3 years ago
What evidence exists that Tesla FSD is actually safer than an average driver?
Comment · 3 years ago
I find menus on phones harder to read. And it just feels annoying to have everyone’s face in their phones at a meal.

I have no issue with it being default, but since covid ended, the places that still use qr menus seem not to have paper menus on hand.

It’s not the end of the world but it makes your restaurant feel cheap.

Still 100 times better than places that make you order on your phone.

Comment · 3 years ago
Apple TV, google play, Amazon, and all the other video stores are no harder to use than Spotify.

You don’t use them because it costs 6 bucks a pop.

That’s a price motive not a service issue.

Comment · 3 years ago
That was never sustainable. Netflix got that content for cheap because streaming was the last stop on the value chain. All cost of production was paid by the tv network that commissioned the content. And if you couldn’t sell it for re-runs, streaming was a way to get something out of a dead asset. It was free money.

Now streaming is putting the TV networks out of business. Nobody is going to make content to dump on streaming for nearly free.

People also forget that in the glory days, Netflix’s steaming movie selection was always bad. Like discount bin at Walmart bad.

Comment · 3 years ago
Most states have a maximum dollar value for verbal agreements for sale of goods.
Comment · 3 years ago
Not complying with DMCA doesn’t directly get into legal trouble. It’s not a crime and doesn’t create (itself) any civil liability.

What it does do is forfeit a safe harbor defense against copyright infringement liability. Basically, as long as you comply with take down requests, you can’t be sued for copyright infringement unless you knew about it.

It’s part of a quid pro quo with online services that publish user content.

Other publishers are liable for what they publish even if they didn’t know about it.

Without the DMCA, Google would be liable for all the piracy that happens on the site.

Comment · 3 years ago
The person you are replying to used it in the classic sense.

It was commonly mis-used to mean “eh that just a minor exception that you should ignore.” But it’s been mis-used so much that now it has both meaning.

Comment · 3 years ago
Maybe I’m out of touch in the UMC bubble, but aren’t AirPods pretty so common they they are no longer really a status symbol?

iPhones aren’t anymore either. You seen poor people with them all the time.

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