Doesn't matter what polls say, doesn't matter what the media says, don't be complacent -- go vote. Go vote. Go vote. Go vote. I can't stress this enough, this kind of bullshit puff piece exists solely to keep people from voting by lulling into a false sense of security.

I don't care if there's a poll that says 100% of the country hates one or the other, GO VOTE. Ignore these bullshit polls, they are completely and utterly worthless.

Instead of working to create a cost effective, quick method for users to buy (AND OWN, NOT LICENSE) digital movies, the MPAA is instead going to try and censor the internet. Brilliant move, idiots.

Unfortunately, they could have a 0% approval rating and we'd still never get the 2/3rds majority in congress to do fuckall about it. This supreme court will continue to pander to corporate and donor interests and act wholly without ethics because our system was built on the concept that people in those roles would act with integrity and utterly falls apart when people on the supreme court flagrantly disregard their responsibility to citizens and act in their own interests.

Doesn't matter. The entire corrupt justice system continually gives this bozo every single possible way to weasel out of shit that no other person on the planet would ever be granted. Nothing is going to stick, all of the media attention about these cases is only hardening his support on the right. Our justice system is bought and paid for and he is one of the biggest contributors, absolutely none of the court cases are going to stick no matter how many things he may have done that are illegal. Anyone who thinks otherwise has had too much of the kool-aid at this point. Justice is dead and the highest court of the land is in his pocket. This is all for show at this point and it's only serving him and his base.

Vote like democracy and your country depends on it, because at this point it absolutely does.

I can own an ebook or an MP3, while some services license them many of them actually just sell you the media outright. Why are movies any different?

Otherwise, I agree, if we're (for some legitimate reason) forced into licensing instead of purchasing, the license needs to be perpetual and irrevocable.

That's not accurate. Go buy an MP3 from Bandcamp, you own the mp3 (it's a merchandise transaction, not a license, it's very explicit in the terms of service) -- you don't own a license to the mp3, you own the actual mp3 (same as you would own a CD). The same is true of several other mp3 stores and a handful of ebook providers, as well as when you buy ebooks directly from the author (quick example: https://melissafmiller.com/how-and-why-to-buy-ebooks-direct-from-me-and-other-authors/).

Owning the CD doesn't allow you to make derivative works as owning the CD doesn't make you the copyright holder, just like owning the mp3 doesn't actually mean you're the copyright holder, and I'm not making any argument otherwise (referring to your "legally permitted to do whatever you want" comment) -- but you absolutely can buy mp3s and ebooks and not license them.

DRM is an entirely separate issue and not relevant here as none of what I'm referring to relates to non-DRM protected licensed content.

Not only that, but their PR person gaslighting people with the article claiming that the game wasn't bad, it was just "cool to hate" has left a really bad taste in my mouth. The game could be absolutely amazing now and the expansion pack could be the game that we were always promised, but the experience and the follow-up has been so bad that I'm similarly waiting until post launch (heck, perhaps even until GOTY with included DLC) for any future CDPR games.

Sure, but who is going to hold him accountable? The justice department can't do anything when the supreme court is willing to fold on constitutional law in favor of personal interest and partisan loyalism -- checks and balances only work when they're impartial and that's just not the case right now. I definitely wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for any Trump conviction to have any actual impact.

"Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions"

Can't say I disagree. When you fight a cheater by playing 100% by the rules in a world where cheating isn't punished, you lose every time. This pretty much sums up the last 40 years of the Democratic party.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but you saying it over and over and offering no proof or corroborating evidence for your claims isn't furthering the discussion. I've provided two examples of cases where purchasing a file constitutes ownership and not a license, one where purchasing an MP3 constitutes full ownership of the MP3 via the terms of service, and one where purchasing an eBook constitutes full ownership of the ebook. According to you this is impossible, but I've provided two clear examples where it is, in fact, possible.

I am interested in hearing why you believe what you believe and what evidence you can present that supports your beliefs, but if all you can do is restate that you say it's x/y/z without any legal standing it and without anything that explains how the terms of service I provided are incorrect or unenforcable (e.g., can you provide me any previous situation in case law where terms of service expressly disclose an mp3 or ebook purchase as a merchandise transaction, but then treat as a revocable license?), I'm not sure where we can go from here. I appreciate your willingness to have the discussion but I'm not here to take someone's word without any corroborating evidence.

I think that a lot of people think what you think, and I think a lot of people think that because the majority of places online only allow purchases as licenses, but just because 85% or 90% of places you go online sell you a license to an mp3 or an ebook doesn't mean that other places don't exist where you can buy the mp3 or ebook outright. Further, I've done a lot of digging and I cannot find any case law that supports your claim that it's not possible to "own" a file. Authors own manuscripts they write on their computer and can seek civil or criminal penalties when those files are stolen, musicians own the raw files they make of their music and can do the same, etc.

I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it -- I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don't want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was "as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud". Uh huh.

I've set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I'm really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I'm sure they've thought of it and I'm going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.

In my opinion this is flawed logic. Not voting doesn't accomplish any of the things you want, on the contrary it plays into goals of parties because they want voter apathy -- the less people voting the easier it is for an unpopular candidate to win. I'm definitely not voting for someone I like, I'm voting against the person I think will destroy democracy (and I similarly hate that this is the set of options we are given -- no one would have picked these candidates).

If anyone has watched the last 8-12 years, they'd realize polls exist solely to suck people into a false sense of security to manipulate the vote.

Ignore the fucking polls. GO VOTE. Vote in your local elections. Vote in the primaries. Vote in national elections. Polls are completely and utterly bullshit, just ignore them and GO VOTE.

Agreed -- especially with things like the Secret of Mana remake in the recent rear-view, sometimes it is apparent that the team updating the game doesn't understand the overall charm of the original. Here's hoping that the update is light-touch and manages to keep the charm and fun of the SNES classic, but to your point even if not, the old one is still superb when played on an emulator.

You're confusing ownership of media with ownership of copyright. I'm not suggesting that I can buy an mp3 and reshare it (or the same for an ebook), that's a violation of copyright. I've never suggested that buying them lets me remove DRM, re-share, etc. It's a strawman argument that you and conciselyverbose seem very attached to, but not an argument I'm making.

Ownership is not strictly limited to physical items, and I'm very curious why people think it is. There's significant outstanding case law precedent that proves that ownership can apply to digital files as well.

Are you kidding? On the contrary, Carlson has been proven to be the perfect puppet, he let Putin show up and say whatever the fuck he wanted completely unchecked. Carlson's now on Putin's Christmas list. This isn't the last we're going to hear of their friendship.

It doesn't actually, the law is written specifically to disallow people from boycotting companies that destroy the environment, hate LGBTQ, actively promote anti-LGBTQ ideals, etc., but it DOESN'T stop the alternate -- the right can still boycott people who support LGBTQ rights, people who support working to fight climate change, etc. Just another one-sided law attempting to illegalize entirely legal business decisions by the left while allowing the right to continue saying it's OK to deny people wedding cakes if you hate the gays.

Agreed -- not only do I think OP misunderstood Louis's point (if you have the means to help and the opportunity to help, you should help), their post also doesn't make clear that the comments being cited and quoted in it weren't actually said by Louis during the video (or said by him on the channel), but were comments made on the YouTube video by people completely unrelated to him.

It seems easy to read the post and mis-attribute the quotes to Louis based on how it is written, but he didn't actually say any of those things.

Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I've just given up -- everything says it should work and I've tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex's ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!

You are correct about it being shot on a cell phone -- at present the top comment on the video is from @RickAstleyYT and says:

My wife Lene and I shot this video on a phone in Denmark, in a forest beside a beautiful beach. The song in essence is about how there is so much technology out there pulling and pushing us in our daily lives, that we need to remain human in this fast moving world. The idea of making a video simply, somewhere beautiful and real like this resonates with me, and I hope it does with you too! Rick x

Just makes me think of giving myself a high five. But I still do it :D

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1478&context=wmlr

Case precedent and law proves you incorrect. Fixed copies of digital assets have repeatedly been proven to be capable of being "owned". There is no requirement that an item be a physical, tangible good in order to be owned. I don't know where you're getting your information (because you refuse to cite it), but it's incorrect.

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn't find this acceptable as I had written proof I'd taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said "yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad" and "but it's out of warranty". When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I'd been an Apple customer for decades and I'd had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I'd never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they're high quality and don't have these types of problems), she cut me off and said "Apple doesn't have a customer loyalty program, sir." and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I've been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.

Wait, you're telling me that this is a one-sided law made in bad faith to illegalize behavior that's 100% constitutionally protected but that negatively impacts the conservative right while still allowing actions that negatively impact the left? Say it ain't so.

In a world where Steve Huffman has called reddit's data "his data to sell", it has become abundantly clear that he has absolutely no respect for the fact that it is his users and moderators that create the community -- all that he and the admins do is create a system whereby the community can create and curate content. Without users, he has a big expensive and empty server.

It's not "his data", it's the community's data. The fact that he's acting like he owns all of it pretty much sums up why I overwrote and deleted all of my content on reddit, and it is precisely why I will never provide free content for that website ever again.

I used redact to do this and my edits were reverted and my comments un-deleted. Presuming that this was because I used a tool and it was easily identifiable as being done via API, I went back in and manually edited about 30% of my comments last night and noticed that they were all reverted again today. I've now manually gone in and edited all of my comments this morning and deleted them as of about 2 hours ago and they have not returned yet.

Yeah, but the right only agree that indoctrination exists when it's colleges indoctrinating people into free-thought which they call being woke. Say that word to them and they'll be like "rubber, glue, you" because that's about as many syllables as the average right-winger can muster, and about as intelligent a complete thought as I expect from them as well.

Can't argue with any of your points -- I can only commiserate with the way you feel as I share a lot of the same sentiments. I appreciate the open candor and willingness to have a dialogue about this!

These laws never seem to backfire because for them to backfire, the left would have to start using all of the loopholes that the right have put in place, and for some reason the left continues to act like they're "better than that" as the entire country devolves into fascism. I hope they sleep well at night when they say "well we may have lost our country to fascist dictators, but we didn't break a single rule on the way!"

Just look at the gerrymandering in this country and how it wholly benefits the conservatives and you'll realize the democrats are wholly incapable of even stressing against the rules, even to save our country from people who are actively working to destroy our freedom and our rights. We're never going to beat the opposition when the opposition cheats at every turn and we obey all the rules. It's a losing game and there's no ethical silver bullet that we can say we upheld when our country is overtaken by immoral and deceitful thieves.

I think it's a mix of things. I agree a lot of people don't participate in the primaries and they really should, but I'd also stress the importance of elevating the quality of the candidates we have. I don't believe any of the primary candidates right now have any idea what it's like to live in the USA as an "average" person. For starters, the average age of US citizens is 39, but the average age of the 3 current candidates is 74, with each of them being a minimum of 30 years older than the average American. I am not trying to promote ageism in any way, but I would really prefer if we had leadership that was less removed time-wise. I just don't personally believe that someone at 70 or 80 has any reasonable idea what it's like to be an American in the 30-40 age range right now -- their experiences with that age come from a time prior to the advent of cellular telephones, social media, personal computing technology, etc.

On top of that, even if you look past the age gap, the choices we have so far really don't instill great confidence.

RFK Jr is an admitted openly vocal anti-vax believer and also a vocal science denier (he still promotes belief in the link between vaccines and autism which has been systemically dis-proven), neither of which are popular positions to the left and will likely cost him votes. Biden has a low approval rating and a lot of Democrat voters don't see him as a strong or effectual president, but he's likely to get the nomination because he previously beat Trump and seems to be the defacto "if you're voting against Trump instead of voting for someone, vote for him" nominee. Marianne Williamson is at least a fresh, non-dynastic face in the political race with a reasonable track record as an independent, but because she'd been an independent until 2019 and because she's female there's a subsection of voters who will adamantly refuse to vote for her regardless of her political stance, making her unlikely to win the nomination over Biden.

I really hope that we start to see greater candidate diversity in the future and I agree that it starts with showing up to vote, I just wish we had candidates that felt more representative of the party ideals and also of our overall population than what we're getting now.