“The Wealthy” here is one guy, who got employees to do it, and he is not only not in jail, he got tens of millions when he left eBay after the court case started.

The Wealth lt DID get away with it. Their goons didnt

Music. Most music fans can barely even play an instrument themselves

The bigger problem is that most people just aren’t up for installing an OS themselves. I’ve certainly never had the chutzpah to replace Android, and I’m more tech savvy than most

Do Google actually ever end up paying these fines? If so, over what period and how much have they paid so far?

I had difficulty understanding the error messages, mainly. “Warning: this xibstop is a fleng. Do you want to flargle you shmoigen at 0000HgvbXX44? This cannot be undone”

Of course, I couldn’t actually google what it meant without running into a whole load of other terminology I didn’t understand, least of all because my WiFi hadn’t kicked in yet.

Basically, you need to put the work in to understand the context of what’s going on. With Windows, this took me about a year when I first got a PC. I imagine it’ll be the same with Linux.

I need to keep a windows installation because I need MS Office. LibreOffice is fine 98% of the time, but I’ve got a handful of complex documents and spreadsheets that just don’t render correctly in LO, and I’m not going to spend the weeks it takes to correct them.

I’ll look into refined, but currently can’t afford anything but essentials so it’ll be a ways off before I can get a new HD

Linux I’ve had to fight and beat into submission just to try and install it without accidentally overwriting my windows installation, and have all my hardware working. I’ve tried and failed 6 times now

Mojeek is an interesting alternative. Not brilliant, but at least it IS an alternative

What are the advantages over Open Office?

Yup. I’ve had to add exceptions to my VPN for this reason. Mainly food/grocery delivery sites for some reason

In a way, life is a dream, inasmuch as it’s interpreted through the same wetware that dreams are. Much of the same stuff is at work at all times.

I think fairy tales and religious stories tickle something in us IRL because they have an almost dreamlike quality to them

Same. They don’t warn you about that. Fortunately they fade after a couple of years.

Same

Same

They storm the capital building.

There’s plenty of resistance and progressive movements locally and nationally - you just tend not to hear about them unless you’re the sort of person who gets involved

Yeah the grass to milk, meat and hide pipeline is a great one

Any chemistry we could perform to make it more viable? E.g. cook it with alcohol?

By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won’t play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.

The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh… and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)

The only person I’ve ever heard say it is Eric Cartman

Ooh, it’s been a good while since I heard that