I have no idea who that is.

Copyright is law which is used to prevent free copying of media, while “intellectual property” is a term cooked up by corporate suits to generalize copyright, trademarks, and patents and equate them with property law. Richard Stallman wrote about this.

It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property.” The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.

Humans are not a threat to the Earth. Do you mean that humans are a threat to the environment? That would mean that we’re a threat to ourselves. It wouldn’t make sense to destroy us to save us from ourselves.

There’s something seriously wrong with our communication infrastructure if some rich nutjob can just buy up an important piece of it and run it into the ground like this. This could’ve never happened if Twitter were a worker-owned collective. Chalk another one up for capitalism.

I remember when it was considered a mark of professionalism for a web developer to have an email on their own domain. At some point that changed. I think after GMail came out it was so good that everybody switched to that.

I haven’t. What happens?

I think the employees that are anti-Sam are the ones this letter is addressed to.

I wish I could block Elon Musk from reality.

If we were selfish, we wouldn’t be sharing our files in the first place, and the system would fall apart.

It’s the fact that we aren’t selfish that filesharing works at all.

This post feels like elitism and gatekeeping to me, as someone who thinks Windows sucks and prefers Linux.

I think it’s the opposite. There are, of course, Linux elitists, but they don’t want normies using Linux. They love to talk about how Linux isn’t ready for mainstream usage, and it’s so difficult and only super-smart people like them can use it. They’re like those hipsters that don’t want their favorite band to become popular because then they wouldn’t be underground and cool to listen to anymore. If ordinary folks were using Linux, then they wouldn’t feel so smart and special.

It is gatekeeping and elitist to say that Linux is hard to use, you wouldn’t understand it, and you should stay on Windows.

People don’t want to learn more because for most people not knowing more doesn’t impact their fucking life. Just like me not knowing more about my car doesn’t generally impact my fucking life. Because I’ve never had trouble finding someone to pay to fix it for me.

Surprise, we’re the people who are paid to fix computers for the people who are just using them as simple tools. Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about that.

It isn’t about every computer user becoming a computer engineer. It’s about learned helplessness. It’s about being afraid to try anything new, even something that’s only slightly different.

To use the car analogy, it’s like somebody who will only drive Fords, and is terrified of the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a car made by any other manufacturer.

Well, yeah, but we were talking about going to the library.

The thing that sucks is that a lot of new stuff isn’t on physical media at all.

You can’t get a virus from a video or music file. Viruses have to be executable.

I have to be able to download it, and it has to be in an open format.

There are exceptions to this. You can download MP3s of the music you buy from Amazon, last time I checked. Although it’s been awhile, so they might’ve gotten rid of that and gone to 100% streaming like so many others have.

This is why if they don’t let me download it, then I don’t pay for it.

There aren’t. The first company is an ad agency that specializes in social media.

Because they advertise on social media.

I used to think that wobbly windows were silly, but Garuda has then as default, and now I love them. I don’t usually drag windows, though, because I just full-screen everything and then alt-Tab between them.

Yeah, if that’s the only reason, changing your shell is overkill.