Ok, thanks for the engaging discussion. Goodbye.

Could we stop having this meta-debate about what a person who is not either of us meant, and instead could you comment on the substance of my post?

I don’t know how the original poster meant it, but one possible way to interpret it (which is coincidentally my opinion) is that the concept of intellectual property is a scam, but the underlying actual legal concepts are not. Meaning, the law defines protections for copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and each of those has their uses and are generally not “scams,” but mixing them all together and packaging them up into this thing called intellectual property (which has no actual legal basis for its existence) is the scam. Does that make sense?

For someone who bitches all over this thread about people strawmanning their position, this is a pretty fucking great reply.

Hint: one can be pissed about people throwing around the not-based-in-legal-reality term “intellectual property.” One can be pissed about people using it as part of a strategy to purposely confuse the public into thinking that copyright infringement is the same as theft, a strategy which has apparently worked mightily well on you. One can be all of those things, and yet still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”

What you posted was a textbook definition of a straw man.

My brother/sister in Christ, everyone in this discussion is talking about copyright infringement. That is the actual legal name for what we colloquially refer to as “piracy,” according to, you know, the law, which you previously referenced as something we should look to.

You say “ask the dictionary” — multiple dictionary definitions as well as Wikipedia say that theft requires the intent to deprive the original owner of the property in question, which obviously doesn’t apply to copyright infringement of digital works.

You say “ask the law” — copyright infringement is not stealing, they are literally two completely different statutes, at least in the US.

So, what the hell are you talking about? Copyright infringement is not theft.

Sorry if my post was confusing. The first point was referring to cables for iPhones before the latest iPhone 15 models — previously, you’d get a cable that was standard USB-C on one end, and Lightning (the proprietary connector) on the other. You could use those cables along with any standard USB-C charging brick to charge the phone. My point was that the charging brick does not need to be proprietary, and the proprietary part (the cable) was included with the phone.

All iPhone 15 models use completely standard USB-C and come with a C to C cable in the box.

1. If by “charger” you mean the brick that plugs into the wall, which I hope you do because it’s the only thing that Apple omits from the box, then Apple also uses that same cable type (USB type C). It’s only the other end of the cable that is proprietary. And the cable itself is included with the phone.

2. All of this is moot for the iPhone 15 pro and non-pro which are fully USB type C.

Yeah, email relays are probably better. I wasn’t necessarily considering those in my comment. But there are tradeoffs there too; now all your incoming mail can be read by a 3rd party, and there’s one more server between you and your email that needs to be up and working for you to properly receive mail.

I agree with the tradeoffs stated here, but I’d argue that any email address you hand out can serve as a unique data point, tied to you.

[email protected] for obvious reasons.

[email protected] — easy to filter out the plus and everything after, and it’s very likely more people use this format than [email protected], making more likely that this filtering would actually be automatically applied.