Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

Yeah I’m not paying for something and it still be illegal. I’d rather stick to piracy. I get your point and if it works for you that’s cool. But it’s not for me.

A good usenet setup with the Arr stack can automatically download basically anything you want and costs tens of dollars per year to run with very little, if any risk. (have there been any prosecutions for people downloading from usenet?)

With a little bit of work and an old computer for a server you can basically run your own automated piracy streaming service.

Disagree. In order to keep those keys secure they can’t publish them, so they’ll have to license some sort of decryption chip. That just pushes the price up as some manufacturer ends up taking a cut from every player sale.

Also means you can’t do what you want with it. You probably can’t play it on an open source device. Etc etc.

I won’t. “Copy protection” is much more about restricting and potentially even removing your access to something you’ve paid for than it is about preventing copying. I am not willing to buy something that can be revoked when alternatives are available.

I know, I modified it to make more sense for video.

I know. I changed the terms. Pray I don’t change them further.

Someone go make Steam for videos and I’ll pay for media again. My stipulations are:

• Once I buy it, it’s mine forever (otherwise piracy is better)
• The file is high quality, DRM free, and in a selection of standard formats (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can redownload it from the service at any time (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can get everything I want to watch (otherwise piracy is better)

It’s pretty common for corporate stuff (legal or otherwise) to start with no payment changing hands, just a contract. Then an invoice lands either monthly or on completion afterwards.

That makes it easier for the work to actually start (otherwise you need to engage the finance dept up front and they’re often slow), and once the contract is signed and the work started that’s the sales process complete.

Ooh so it’s mainly a way to dodge regulations so you can use land designated for farming to make money by generating electricity.

That makes sense, because a much more practical way to install solar is above open air car parking…

One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.

Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?

If you’re making a mil a year in revenue there’s a good chance your profit margin is tiny and licensing fees could obliterate it.

Hotmail was 2mb.

Yet more evidence that aggressive adblocking is cyber security.

Surely those broadcasters will pull their streams (it’s not like they’re not already hurting), FireTV will get a reputation of having restricted access to broadcast TV, some people will live with it and some will buy a smart TV and not worry about Amazon any more…

I mean yeah basically. Same as if you have anything illegal.

I mean. The short term solution is to ban them.

I get the concept but the downside of banning sales without banning ownership is it will have zero immediate effect, risks creating a black market in the short term. It may even increase the demand for those dogs (see the increase in gun sales in the US when there’s a threat of legislation).

So I can’t imagine any reasonable government supporting that approach.

The way it works is that there’s a symbol table entry for “foo” which has a slot for a hash, scalar, array, glob, etc.

That leads to some super weird behaviour like, for example, if I declare a scalar, hash and array as “x”:

$x = "sy";
%x = (foo => "mb");
@x = ("ol", "s!");

You can access them all independently as you’re aware:

say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; # Outputs:  x: symbols!

But what’s really going to bake your noodle is I can assign the “x” symbol to something else like this:

*z = *x;

…and then the same thing works with z:

say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z; # Outputs:  z: symbols!

Oneliner if you want to try it:

perl -E '$x = "sy"; %x = (foo => "mb"); @x = ("ol", "s!"); say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; *z = *x; say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z;'

Congratulations! You now know more about one of Perl’s really weird internals than I’d wager most Perl programmers (I have literally never used any of the above for anything actually productive!)

The issue with pugs is not that they’re evil or bad creatures, it’s that humans have selectively bred them for their looks, but that’s lead to the animals suffering because their breeding means they have massive problems with breathing, their knees, spine, eyes, etc. That’s unfair on the animal.

It’s like saying we want to eliminate genetic diseases like Down’s syndrome or Haemophilia. Nobody’s saying individuals with those conditions are bad, it’s that we don’t think people should be born with conditions that give them a worse life.

Now for dogs it’s a bit more complicated because those conditions are afflicted upon them by us purely for aesthetics, and if dogs are banned that inevitably leads to some being killed which isn’t very fair on those animals, but if we can’t find a way to reverse the worst aspects of their breeding is the only way we can prevent further suffering.