We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.

I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.

Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.

Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.

Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.

What the heck is database cracking?

Gotta move that fruit up!

“If you open this device, the contained alien immediately escapes, rendering it inert.” There. Problem solved. Case dismissed.

I don’t see any riots. Seems to me that nobody cares—not even the people being made homeless.

Don’t ask for your employer to meet your time off needs. Tell them that your time off needs are going to be met.

Then you get fired, and in this economy, probably end up homeless.

There are very few problems you can’t solve with a large enough explosion.

Now if only Best Buy had a complete selection of computer parts. I miss Fry’s so much.

That thing you’re buying from Amazon? Just go to the manufacturer’s website and buy it directly.

That works if the manufacturer is reputable, but if I want to buy some obscure gadget from a Chinese company whose name looks like the result of somebody mashing their face on a keyboard, no way in hell am I buying it direct.

Or if it’s a no-name thing like a generic charging cable, just buy it from literally any other generic [category] retailer.

Are those guys really any better than Amazon?

Side note: one nice thing about Amazon is I can have items delivered to a locker at a nearby grocery store, instead of having it sent to my apartment building and hoping the courier delivers it to me and not someone else with a vaguely similar name. Couriers keep delivering other people’s packages to me. I even encountered one courier who didn’t speak English and couldn’t read apartment number signs, and had to basically do his job for him. It’s seriously disturbing how bad package delivery is these days. Is there some way to get non-Amazon deliveries sent to some reliable pickup location?

If they’re good enough for Roman legionaries, they’re good enough for you.

When I was a kid, a college degree was a job ticket, so that’s still seriously alarming.

I’ve heard that there’s a hidden monthly data cap, and you get throttled real hard if you reach it, but now that it’s “unlimited” they aren’t telling you what it is.

1 out of every 6 college graduates not getting a job is a full-blown jobs crisis.

Now that’s not a sentence I was ever expecting to hear.

Side note: anybody notice how the icon for this community looks almost exactly like the Marathon logo?

Regardless of the cause of the productivity boost, full time WFH will come at the expense of training young (or new to the field) employees.

Employers these days don’t bother with that any more, so that doesn’t explain it.

It’s not intended to. It’s intended to make the CEO happy.

Small convenience? A lot of goods these days can only be bought online, and buying them from a no-name website is a great way to get your card number stolen. Using Amazon is basically mandatory.

That’s what I want to see. Real choice in smartphones.

Because it’s very easy to offend them without meaning to.