Technically this is different. 9/11 they forced planes to land at the nearest airport or literally be shot down. This just prevented new takeoffs and stopped planes from entering US airspace. Still serious, but not as total. The 9/11 one had like small regional airports with planes just parked like a parking lot it was crazy.

He was clearly a threat. I’m so glad they’re keeping us safe!

Eobard.

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I’ve cracked the code. I have learned robospeak.

*That we know of

This is the fallacy. It is not simply “My money/time” -> “Unique thing”. The entire technological base of human civilizatio made it possible for you to make that thing. Most of the costs were bore by society. Yet you would now wish to privitize the profits and deny society access to that way to do things without your permission.

Take open heart surgery for example. There is very clearly a right way to do it. Perhaps a few good ways to do it too. But 1 way is the BEST way. Imagine if only 1 surgeon owned the patent to that best way. Other surgeons have to figure out their own way. Even if they figure out the same way as him independently he did it first so they can’t use it. This would make that surgeon very rich, but it would harm medicine overall, and harm heart surgery’s progress.

Then what happens? Let’s take the language example. “Hi, how are you?” is patented. “Hello, are you well?” is patented. “Howdy!” is patented. etc. You want to greet someone. Now you don’t just need to figure out a way to do that. You have to make sure YOUR way to greet someone is different than the thousands of patented ways to greet someone. So you have to do something like “Hey, hey, hey! Me say welcome to you! Haha! Good, yes?” this is what I meant by it getting silly. All the obvious ways to do something become patented and so you have to find some roundabout way to get the same result. Which is usually inefficient and complicated for no good reason.

Patents also do not simply stop “stealing” as you put it. If you and someone else both put in the effort to independently invent the “turns lead to gold” machine then whoever patents it first owns it. The other person, despite also putting in the effort and not even knowing you exist, just has to basically go fuck themselves.

But I’d push back on even that. You don’t own an idea. Because 99.99% of the effort to get to the point where that idea could exist was not yours. It was every other humans. You stand on the shoulders of giants and touch the stars. Then want to claim the stars as your own.

Oh boy. Now this post? This is brave.

It’s the psychosis of the petit bourgeois. They’re treated like a sacred cow but only while spending their money. In all other aspects they are treated as expendable. And so they cling to this one area of privlege like their life depends on it.

Value comes from labor. That value is tied to the specific thing being made. Even if your initial creation of the software is difficult the fact that it can be copied for no cost dilutes that labor value down to nothing. A new copy does not take money away from you. It does not steal your labor value. That is the anti-piracy argument and it is empircally false. As I said you are welcome to do a donationware model and still have it be entirely moral and I’m sure that you’d get more than your labors typical market value back. But what you want to be able to do is to withhold the code and not allow it to be copied without paying. So that you can extract infinite value from something that cost a finite amount to create initially and now costs nothing to copy. That is exploitative.

Why? The way I see it the current system only serves to concentrate the profits in the hands of the corporations that hold the patents and IP. In what way would removing that harm the working class?

Typically Americans are the ones going to other countries and installing dictatorships.

I think it’s because of capitalism as cliche as that sounds. People are so used to the idea that they’re entitled to things and stuff like “the customer is always right” that they’ve got it in their head that the consumer is sacred. That they have rights or something as the user. That people who make things should be grateful they use them. Rather than the other way around being the case. If you use FOSS software and you never donate to any of them, never submit issues, never provide diagnostic data, etc then you are just a leech. You aren’t entitled to anything. There’s nothing wrong with leeching off something like this that’s why people make it but for fucks sake be grateful. Even a little bit of money makes a difference btw. I use Debian and I will send them 5-10$ a year. I’m also considering sending them some of my old hardware but I’m not sure if it would be very useful to them lol.

Even if he is he was being paid for the workload he was doing before. That workload has vastly increased. It would not be reasonable to expect him to take on a bunch of new work with no pay increase. And that’s assuming its even possible for him to do it all by himself.

Well yes, but proprietary only works with patents. All it means without them is you have to decompile it and reverse engineer it. Which is pretty easy to do these days.

But I’d push back on the idea of “The same code you made” being special. Code is just language and math put together. Take a sentence. “Hi, how are you?” under patent rules once someone patents that specific way to say this nobody else can do it. You can do the same function but have to phrase it differently. Like “Hello, are you well?” and eventually this just gets silly. Being the first to do something the most obvious way to do it shouldn’t give you a right to not let anyone else do it that way.

My argument is based on a fundamentally different way of viewing invention. Many people think of it as a singular inventor/genius coming up with an idea nobody had before, and then anyone else who has the same idea after them is “stealing” it. This is just silly imo. That inventor is not special.

Inventions do not happen because someone has a special idea. They happen because the material conditions exist to make them possible. You wouldn’t invent the car before the steam engine for example. Or the book before paper. Take Calculus. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were getting to the same conclusion (inventing calculus) around the same time entirely independently. Because it just so happened they were alive at the right time to do so.

In general inventions will arise some time after the conditions to create them exist. This relies on the work of all human civilization prior, and so these inventions should be the collective property of all humanity.

If one accepts the premise that discovery is an inevitable result of material conditions, the moral and economic justification for patents collapses. In this framework, the patent holder isn’t being rewarded for creating something that otherwise wouldn’t exist; they are being rewarded for being the first to reach a finish line that many others were already approaching. The patent then functions as a tool to capture a monopoly over a natural progression of knowledge, effectively taxing society for a discovery that would have happened regardless.

I’m not really trying to argue with you here btw. Just explaining my complete view on the topic. I get that you might agree with some of this, and disagree with some. I just wanted you to have a full picture of where I’m coming from.

I use mine for pulling packages because I want it to work without internet. I just keep a USB stick with the installer to install the distro from and then would point my sources to the local mirror and update it for an installation. That’s not really my use case tho since it’s more something to help me maintain my existing installation and always have any packages I might want. Not meant to be a full backup. So yours being bigger does make some sense.

138GB:

sudo debmirror --nosource -m --passive --progress --verbose --host=deb.debian.org --root=/debian --method=http --dist=testing --arch=amd64 --rsync-extra=none locationcensored/DebMirror

Way smaller. Like 180GB or something like that I don’t remember exactly. But I didn’t do the full mirror I just did source and non-freefirmware and stuff like that. I can check my mirror update command when i get on my desktop to see exactly what I did. I have a script that has it in there.

I disagree fundamentally. Just because you came up with an idea first does not mean you should be the sole person able to use said idea. All this does is hamper the progress of civilization. You are under no obligation to tell others how you did something, but if they also figure out how to do it then the law should not shield you from competition and people making your thing cheaper. This is especially true in the case of software where its infinitely copyable at near 0 cost.

I’ve made things before. I’ve never tried to make a profit off of those things. Despite being broke myself. Because I see it as simply extortion to withhold something in exchange for money. The only way I’d ever monetize something digital is to give it out for free and ask for donations if people feel like it and it helps them. Something physical is slightly different as it costs money to make more of them, but I still disagree with the idea that you’d be able to ban others from using a technology just because you happened to patent it first.

oh no the poor entrepenuer! Not. All software should be FOSS anyway.