We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.
I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.
Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.
Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.
Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.
Linux. I signed up with my first proper ISP as a kid in the '90s. The service included a shell account on their Linux server accessible by telnet. I thought it was really cool and decided to see if I could run it on my own computer, and to my delight, I could.
That thing you’re buying from Amazon? Just go to the manufacturer’s website and buy it directly.
That works if the manufacturer is reputable, but if I want to buy some obscure gadget from a Chinese company whose name looks like the result of somebody mashing their face on a keyboard, no way in hell am I buying it direct.
Or if it’s a no-name thing like a generic charging cable, just buy it from literally any other generic [category] retailer.
Are those guys really any better than Amazon?
Side note: one nice thing about Amazon is I can have items delivered to a locker at a nearby grocery store, instead of having it sent to my apartment building and hoping the courier delivers it to me and not someone else with a vaguely similar name. Couriers keep delivering other people’s packages to me. I even encountered one courier who didn’t speak English and couldn’t read apartment number signs, and had to basically do his job for him. It’s seriously disturbing how bad package delivery is these days. Is there some way to get non-Amazon deliveries sent to some reliable pickup location?
I’ve heard that there’s a hidden monthly data cap, and you get throttled real hard if you reach it, but now that it’s “unlimited” they aren’t telling you what it is.
Small convenience? A lot of goods these days can only be bought online, and buying them from a no-name website is a great way to get your card number stolen. Using Amazon is basically mandatory.
7·2 years ago
Removed by mod