You were supposed to have an antenna.

That would make it plagiarism, which ethically is a whole different matter than merelly copying that which is free to copy.

For starters, bulk copying a person’s documents without their approval sounds like mass copyright violation.

Since the user did not approve it, it sounds like mass copyright violation to me.

Not in the EU it doesn’t, unless they got the user to review that Agreement and agree before the sale took place.

After the implicit contract which is the sale has been agreed to by both parties (the buyer gave the money, the seller took it), one of the parties can’t force the other party to agree to a new contract before they’re allowed to get the contractual benefits of the original contract (i.e. the buyer getting to use the product they bought, the seller getting to use the money they got).

It doesn’t matter if the seller has such power de facto - legally they most definitelly can’t blackmail the buyer by denying them their side of the contractual rights they got in the Act of Sale by blocking their use of the product they bought until they agree to a new Agreement from the seller.

Well, if you tip because you care enough about the person on the other side, you might want to try and come up with a way to leave them a tip somehow so that there is no risk it’s taken away from them, assuming that you can. Put $5 under the rug and let them know, or something.

If you can’t, you can’t, and I’m hardly going to criticize you for not wanting to catch an airborne infectious disease.

I was pretty miffed in the UK (years ago) when it came out that lots of companies (there it was mainly restaurants) were just keeping the tip money when people payed by card and filled-in a tip amount, so I very much made an effort to as much as possible make sure the actual people got the tip directly - even if I stood out from the crowd by doing it - as I don’t see the point in tipping the company.

When I tip the driver in a delivery I literally just give them cash when they deliver (and only if they actually arrive with some promptness, not if they come half an hour late with a cold pizza).

It’s a habit I got into when living in the UK because there, like in the US, lots of companies just take the “tip” money and keep it if you tip whilst paying with card.

Granted, I like to pay stuff with cash, both for privacy reasons and because it has actually been shown that people in average spend less if they pay in cash (something to do with the feeling of giving something physical away), so I almost always have some cash to pay and tip.

Indeed.

Error!

You must wear your User Attention Validation Goggles ^TM during the device initialization period.

Last time I checked, it was way easier in Windows to have a VM running Linux just for Python, than to get Python to reliably work nativelly in Windows.

It really depends on whether that SQL is the standard one (such as SQL92) or with the database specific extensions (such as PL/SQL).

The latter often adds up to a “real” programming language (were you can define your own functions and everything), depending on the database.

But yeah, the rest not so much.

An this was back in the 80s where there were only 8 programming languages…

Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.

Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.

Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.

Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.

Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.

Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.

Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid “for Google” ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don’t really have to use the air-mouse stuff).

Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don’t want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.

The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.

It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for “personal” media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.

The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.

If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)

The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.

/s (because this one really needs it)

Yeah.

“Blackberry” both felt wrong at the time and my brain kept telling me it was familiar hence it must be right.

Showing my years here ;)

Generally no, probably because many males when they end up in physicality make it some kind of dominance thing (playfully violence that’s just a little too much, “higher position” touches like hand on top of shoulder or physically leading other people and even the good old “measuring somebody one the firmeness of their handshake”). It’s not casual and friendly when there’s measuring and testing of others involved.

Outside close family, the only environment I’ve been in were things like hugs were normal was the Theatre world.

The work is almost all done by integrated circuits, so what they did was basically supply the necessary crystal and caps to get the integrated circuits to work, add what looks like a voltage regulator to regulate supply and route the whole thing on what’s almost certainly a 4 layer board.

Also at the speeds we’re talking about we’re not yet in the domain of having to worry about stuff like the impedance of lines and the signals in absolutelly normal circuit board lines bouncing or getting distorted due to things like impedance mistmatch.

What’s impressive here is not the size of the thing (you would be surprised at how stupidly small even very complex functionality is nowadays - stuff like the Blackberry Raspberry Pi-Zero is only as big as it is because of making available so many pins to connect to not because of the actual hardware), it’s that this is pretty advanced electronics for high-schoolers even with good teachers, as figuring this stuff out generally involves a lot of datasheet reading unless you’re starting from somebody else’s design.