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.

Error!

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

Well, the language is generally different, which is a big barrier to moving (though you can get away with just English in a most countries, but some stuff - often public services - is only in the local language). There is also a cultural element in that people behave and expect slightly different things in different countries, which can be a bit of an adjustment.

Even bigger than that is that most people aren’t comfortable with big changes and tend to stick to their own country - at the very least the first big move takes a significant amount of courage.

Then if you have your own house with lots of stuff you have to arrange for the move, which will probably cost you maybe €1500 - €3000 depending on the distance and how much stuff you have.

And finally, in my experience no country is all good or all shit - they generally have some good things and some bad things. Also, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence until you move there, were after a while it’s the grass on the other side of the fence that starts looking greener.

That said, some people - mainly the so-called Digital Nomads - do spend their life moving from country to country whilst working remotelly, which works especially well if you spend different Seasons in different places in Europe (some places are much better in the Summer and others in Winter). This is not new: I’ve met people whose life was working as Scuba Diver instructors in Summer in a country and as Ski Instructors in Winter in a different country.

EU countries are allowed to, by Treaty, expel EU citizens who moved there without the means to live there or a job.

However it’s incredibly rare and there really isn’t any general procedure to do it: each country does it (or not) it’s own way. This tends to be used for people caught sleeping or begging on the streets.

Further, for countries in the Schengen Area, they don’t even know you’re there unless you register, since you haven’t passed any border controls and thus aren’t in any database as having arrived but not departed.

I’ve literally done that inside the EU, though to the UK (back before Brexit) rather than Germany - I flew to London and stayed about a month in a hotel whilst looking for a contract there (I’m a freelancer) and more permanent accommodation.

Years later I did the same to Germany, though I only stayed 3 months.

The only requirement is that you either have a job or have the money to pay for the costs of living there (so you can still go without a job, as long as you have the money to pay for a place to stay, food and so on). The reason for the requirement that you can pay your way (either from a job or savings) is because people can’t just move to another EU country to do things like living on the street and begging or living of the local Social Security.

Some countries also have a requirement that you register after 3 months there (for example, Germany), though it’s not any kind of applying to stay, it’s simply registering as living there. This is usually because there are associated obligations for residents in that country, not just in terms were do you pay tax, but in some countries (for example, Germany and The Netherlands) there are things like mandatory health insurance.

In practice as an EU citizen, if you have the savings or the kind of job which you can do in 3 month stints or remotely, you absolutely can hop from country to country every 3 months without having to register with anybody (though I’m not sure how taxes would work - I suppose you would pay them in the last country you registered as a Resident).

If you know the language, if it weren’t for taxes being per country and the rights and duties of Residents being different in different countries (such as the Mandatory Health Insurance for Residents in some countries but not others) hence the requirement to register after 3 months in some countries, the whole thing would be as easy as moving within your own country.

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)

The difference between a sociopath and a murdering sociopath is the belief that they will lose nothing and even stand to gain from murder.

Absolutelly, evil people are to blame from doing evil shit because they chose to do it.

Other people who protect and support the evil people when they do the evil shit are also to blame because without their support and protection the evil people are a lot less likely to do the evil shit fearing the repercussions.

In this specific instance, given that the US has been vetoing UN Security Council resolutions to stop Israel and is by far much more powerful than Israel in the World stage, the theory that they’re the “main obstacle to peace in Palestine” makes sense, or in other words, that the murdering sociopath would have to stop murdering due to fear of the consequences if the US stopped supporting it.

Whilst it seems likely that it is, whether the US really is the “main obstable” or not is something that we would only know for sure after the US stopped supporting Israel.

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 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.

Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).

I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.

(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)

Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.

So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.

At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.

And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.

Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.