If it’s in your systems in an open format it’s yours, if it’s outside your systems or wrapped in some kind of locked format that forces you to go through somebody else’s software it’s de facto theirs.

Due to my own experience in software development with 3rd party solutions from way back, I never adhered to Streaming solutions (even though I was tempted) and always stuck to getting my entertainment in a media format I controlled (legitimately for a long as I could, not so much once even physical media started having DRM) because I was aware that it’s risky to outsource so much control over one aspect of what you do (in this case entertainment) to an entity which, frankly, sees you as nothing else that microscopic fraction of their bottomline.

(The funny bit is that if Netflix would sell me their Series in an open file format that I could download and at a reasonable price, I would have sent lots of money their way, same as I spent lots of money on DVDs and even VHS tapes back in the day. In fact all throughout that period I was doing something like that for games: as soon as I discovered GOG with their DRM-free downloadable installers, I started acquiring all my games by buying them from GOG)

In the fullness of time, my caution seems to have been proven right.

That’s pretty much the self-made home media system I’ve upgraded to some months ago, only mine has an N100 CPU (which is nicer from a power consumption point of view for an always on system since its TDP is 15W).

It’s wired to my TV, running Kodi on the foreground, runs qBittrorrent on the background over an always on VPN and serves as my home NAS.

From Aliexpress I got a wireless remote that let’s me control Kodi as if it was a TV box, so from my sofa I handle it as a TV box whilst from my PC I can ssh to it and to any computer kind of management.

Probably one of my best purchases ever.

The only thing I get from meeting again people I haven’t seen for decades is to, using the abilities I’ve been acquiring with time and life experience to read other people beyond the superficial, find out that most many haven’t really mature much from the people I knew and at times how much I misjudged them back in the old days when I was very naive and ran around pretty lost.

The “I’m better than that” feeling would be highly satisfying if I was a different kind of person, but it’s actually just sad that some people turn out to either having always been less than I made them up to be in my mind or failed to actually turn into well balanced mature adults.

The other possibility is that it’s all in my mind and I’m just deceiving myself, as having become more more self-deluded when it comes to others with time looks exactly the same from the inside as having become a little wiser in interpreting others.

In summary: Projection.

The chosen form of most accusations can be explained by the one doing the accusing having reached their own conclusions about the likely actions and motivations of others by thinking “What would I do in their place?”.

I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.

One should be have been assuming since Windows 7 and automated online updates that the Microsoft key used to sign OS updates is in the hands of at least the NSA (and hence probably the Israeli equivalent) and they can push whatever they want to your computer as an OS update, bypassing all protections.

In fact the same applies to Linux updates of certain distros - if they’re maintained by a company based in the US they can be forced by FISA courts to provide the signing keys to the US Government.

More in general, just go read about FISA courts and their secret court orders - companies based in the US or hosting things in the US can be secretly forced to just “give the keys of the Realm” to parts of the US Government.

Since things like the Patriot act one should be treating companies based in the US as just as untrustworthy as companies based in China.

(By the way, some other supposed Democratic countries have similar or worse systems - for example the equivalent of FISA courts in the UK have things like secret court sessions were the side which is not the State is not authorized to have a legal representation, see most of the evidence or even know the decision of the court).

Have people already forgot most of what came out in the Snowden Revelations?!

That’s why they are superior!

I use MullvadVPN and I almost always encounter this issue.

It probably depends on which server(s) you’re using.

Company Town Halls are “we listen to you” theatre.

Modern large companies behave towards their employees the same way they behave towards their customers: they use marketing to influence them into doing what’s best for the C-suite, the Board and (usually) shareholders.

In Tech specifically this kind of crap has been common since the 90s even in Startups (as part of the “pay them with hope, sense of belonging and pride rather than money” technique), though the big Tech companies are the most extreme in this kind of stuff.

Well, they’re not domesticated enough to let me pet them unless I catch a chick which fell off a nest.

Sparrows.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.

LOL!

Reduced to name calling.

Good try, shame you don’t have the chops (as the way you express yourself gave away very early on)

I very explicitly said the whole thing is slower than the speed of light (much slower even) and even pointed out why: at the most basic of levels, the way charged particles push each other without contact is the electromagnetic force, meaning photons, but the actual particles still have to move and unlike photons they do have mass so the result is way slower than the speed of light.

To disprove the idea that a push on a solid object can travel faster than the speed of light (which is what the OP put forward), pointing out that at its most basic level the whole thing relies on actually photons which travel at the speed of light, will do it.

There was never any lower limit specified in my response because there is no need to go into that to disprove a theory about the upper limit being beyond a certain point. (Which makes that ironic statement of yours about the speed of sound-waves quite peculiar as it is mathematically and logically unrelated to what I wrote)

Going down into the complexity of the actual process, whilst interesting, isn’t going to answer the OPs question in an accessible and reasonably short manner using language that most people can understand.

And how do you think the information that an electrically charged particle is moving reaches other electrically charged particles…

You’re pushing the atoms on your end, which in turn push the next atoms, which push the next ones and so on up to the atoms at the end of the rod which push the hand of your friend on the moon.

As it so happens the way the atoms push each other is electromagnetism, in other words sending photons (same thing light is made of) to each other but these photons are not at visible wavelengths so you don’t see them as light.

So pushing the rod is just sending a wave down the rod of atoms pushing each other with the gaps between atoms being bridged using photons, so it will never be faster than the speed at which photons can travel in vacuum (it’s actually slower because part of the movement of that wave is not the lightspeed-travelling photons bridging the gaps between atoms but the actual atoms moving and atoms have mass so they cannot travel as fast as the speed of light).

In normal day to day life the rods are far too short for us to notice the delay between the pushing the rod on one end and the rod pushing something on the other end.

According to a post from our Admin, in the small instance I’m in there has been a sudden influx of new users (about 200) in the last day or so (as new users have to be approved, somebody is getting cramps on their approve finger).

(Guess Anarchism and Piracy could technically count as NSFW in most workplaces, especially the latter)

“The German Nazi Party adopted and developed several racial hierarchical categorizations as an important part of its fascist ideology (Nazism) in order to justify enslavement, extermination, ethnic persecution and other atrocities against ethnicities which it deemed genetically or culturally inferior. The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping and it was accepted by Nazi thinkers. The Nazis considered the putative “Aryan race” a superior “master race” with Germanic peoples as representative of Nordic race being best branch” (Source)

In their ideology, German people and Arian Race were the same thing, same as Zionists conflate Israeli with Jewish.

All you proved with your decontextualized quote is that Nazis also claimed to support Germans (which makes sense, as ethno-Fascists are a kind of Fascist hence also use the “love of the nation” in their speeches). That doesn’t disprove that they had an ideology of racial superiority, saw other ethnicities as inferiors and committed Genocide along ethnic lines which is what makes the not merely Fascists but actually Nazis (and the reason why people remember them still, whilst almost nobody remembers the parties of the traditional Fascists such as Mussolini or Franco).

To back your claims that Trump is a Nazi rather than “just” a traditional Fascist, you need to show that he has the kind additional ideology elements that made the Nazis be something else (much much worse) than merely Fascists and that’s the whole rabid violent racism thing.

Well, that I respect because it’s all consistent.

It’s the hypocrisy of using Nazi as a partisan political insult (all the while ignoring all the support going on for the real modern day Nazis in one’s own party) that I find disgusting.

That’s traditional Fascism, which is all about the nation.

Nazism would be “Latinos have been poisoning our White blood”, a whole different ball game and far, far more prone to extreme violence in the form of things like ethnic cleansing.

If you want to see how present day Nazi ideology manifests itself, look at Zionists: they claim to represent an ethnicity, that their ethnicity are a superior people (“the chosen people”) and that the neighbouring ethnicity whose land they invaded and who they are currently mass murdering are less than human (“human animals”).

I have yet to see Trump claiming to represent whites, saying that whites are superior and wanting to invade Latin American and murder the latinos because of deeming them subhuman.

Don’t get me wrong, Trump absolutely is a Fascist. However directly so far he doesn’t seem to be a Nazi and if he is a Nazi because of who he “sits with” then so are the Democrats since they all sit with the Zionists, the biggest and most murderous Nazi-like ideology around.

The expression Mango Mussolini fits Trump so well exactly because he’s a Fascist in the same vein as Mussolini, not the same vein as Hitler.