Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

Only if we value safety and convenience over freedom.

Personally, I’ll take the freedom.

If you think that’s a satisfactory replacement for the average person you don’t know much about motorsports. The costs alone are outside the reach of most people.

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

Same. I like the whole engagement ring ritual but I’ll be damned if our marriage is going to hinge on my “proving my love” with some overpriced trinket that costs a couple months’ salary and loses 95% of its value when it leaves the store. If that’s what it takes for us to get married it’s not the type of relationship I want in my life.

Moissanite is by far a better buy. It has more fire for 1/100th the price than a natural diamond.

But I feel like the people saying clear stones like diamond and moissanite aren’t pretty have never seen a clear, well cut, multi karat, example in the sun. The rainbow colors and brilliance from a clear high refraction stone like a diamond is frankly insane. You can see the rainbow colors shooting off of it from like 100 yards away if the lighting is right. No colored stone has quite the same wow factor as a good diamond or moissanite in the right light. That’s why diamonds have historically been in such high demand.

Opal, Alexandrite, and many other stones are equally beautiful in their own way. But it’s weird to make that point by putting down clear stones that are absolutely spectacular.

I agree diamonds are dumb and overpriced when you can get a better result from moissanite or lab grown.

That said, I’m curious why you assume it’s a blood diamond? Conflict diamonds only account for ~5% of all diamonds in the trade. Russia and Canada combined account for >50% of all rough diamonds in the industry.

That’s because Swiss precision is meaningless when a $1 chip can keep time better than a $6k mechanical watch. The only way they can survive is by selling the luxury angle.

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.

The onion did a bit about ten years ago on the Palestine-Israel conflict, reporting:

“Israeli and Palestine leaders have shown they see eye to eye in nearly every facet of the proposed solution, including such provisions as: seizing all territory, watching the opposition burn in righteous fire, and building a unified nation on the corpses of their enemy. Yet, they still haven’t come any closer to putting a stop to the conflict”

Kind of sums it up.

If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.

I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that one, bud.

I have been to places where the only reasonably close food is a piggly wiggly or a dollar general and that’s it, but most towns over ~35,000 people have some sort of grocery store with a bakery department. The vast majority of the US population lives less than 20 minutes drive from such a town.

I’d also argue that if you don’t live near a decent grocery store you have likely accepted a lack of amenities and would make your own bagels if that’s something you really cared about.

This is because they know if you are buying a bag of pre-sliced bagels you don’t care about quality and they figure they can just phone it in.

You don’t think that was implied when I said they vastly outperform human pilots?

There are numerous advantages to letting a flight computer do the piloting. Higher allowable G limits is one of them, albeit far from the most important.

You’re right on all counts here.

Computer algorithms (such as AI) can’t replace organic judgement-based decision making, but they vastly outperform humans when there is a well defined cost function to optimize against, such as, “hit this target in the minimum possible time”.

I think you can compare it to autonomous cars. They can drive from point to point while avoiding hazards along the way, but they still need the passenger to tell them where their destination is.

Were you not here for the bit about the beans?

Technically correct but there is a reason why people talk about a body’s sphere of influence.

Because the biggest practical downside of Linux is a lack of natively developed big name software. It’s annoying to find some great software that perfectly meets your needs and then discover than it can’t run with decent performance on Linux.

Market share growing means that Linux becomes a better and more accessible option.

R