It's popular for some of the cool kids to posture and kvetch about it right now, but no, normal people really don't care - as long as it's a good game.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

To be honest, I didn't much care for movie going then either, lol. But the wait for some other method for any given movie was considerably longer.

Society itself has changed.

For the shared movie going experience in a theater to be enjoyable, that depends on most people following largely unwritten and unenforceable (except socially) rules. And we mostly don't have that anymore, as a society.

Bitcoin doesn't lie on what it is and what it does. AI companies on the other hand ...

I've been hearing this a bit from very traditional greybeard linux users (I mostly just use linux at work and I'm very much a terminal jocky. tmux is my "terminal manager".) who have come around to KDE from being strong dislikers of it in the past. That Mate is just crusty and old, Gnome hasn't really been fun for a while but KDE has solved most of its nonsense problems and is now a quite complete and useable system, so its become their daily driver.

I just want to get alpine functional again so I can revert into terminal world permantly and never see a web page again lol

Is even shooging against the law now?

I mostly agree with you. But the devil is in the details.

Equating "opt-in" with "just don't use these UI elements" is too coarse-grained to be a useful rule of thumb. At the top of that slippery slope is stuff like freemium applications - until you give them a credit card, various buttons/features just show you an ad and a buy button. I think this is perfectly acceptable, even if it feels a bit tacky to me. But once you accept getting a little more adversarial with your UX design, it isn't all that far from arranging buttons such that you can count on a predictable percentage of misclicks, Zuckerbook-style privacy-settings, and other shitty behavior like that.

I'm not some gnu-eyed idealist, but I do expect software I run on my machine to behave in ways that align (or can be made to align) with my slightly idiosyncratic interests. Software that behaves like a tireless nagging 3 year-old or tries to trick me in to doing what the developer wants is garbage that doesn't belong in my house.

It is harder to express, but I really think the bar for an application like Firefox needs to be, good-faith accommodation of a very wide range of people, in basically every relevant dimension, which is a lot, because browsers touch nearly everything. "I don't want to (I don't want my kids/people at this kiosk/whoever to) interact with your robots" is a perfectly reasonable accommodation to make. None of this is new - discussion about (un)ethical patterns of human-computer interaction goes back decades.

Now think about having this same argument over a feature that inserts free clipart into documents or saves the current page to a clipping service. The fact that this sort of discussion about UI is even controversial is a testament to how much the money people are desperate to shovel this stuff at you are.

It’s almost impressive to hear you complain about “political indoctrination” while your post is a textbook example of it.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the last of those who lived through WWII are about gone. People don't have a grandpa talking about killing Nazis or a grandma talking about when she made tanks.

It isn't just US Americans, Europe has forgotten, too. Which is why Russia is walking all over them and they can't seem to respond.

And I fear we are going to refresh the antibodies, or to say it in a more American way, water the tree of liberty.

Your country (The USA) used to be the leader of science. That is one big reason it was so successful and is now the major power in the world. Seeing you and Trump tear all that down is really frightening. Jesus won't come to save you, you know? It's just a fairy tale just like Santa Claus.

Yeah I work in an adjacent field in soil science but studying how soils retain and release carbon and doing work with farmers on trying to capture more carbon by looking at soil practices. Turns out you can sink a LOT of co2 in soil if you do things right. (Well I mostly just take extremely shit python written by scientists and make into competent python (and in strategic areas cuda and C) and stuff it into giant pipelines. But I guess since I also write research proposals I SORT OF count as a scientist. One day the boss will let me drop a little bit of that NDA and write a paper on my "DumBoScan" algorithm..... I guess I'm a Lab assistant maybe lol.

But there is DEFINATELY serious concern about this with the boffins. We do rely on a lot of stuff from NCAR and related labs (Ie WRF model and so on) so .... yeah this is a huge worry. Its going to impact farmers for sure as those guys are very dependent on understanding weather and climate trends for planning harvests and the like.

Not like trump gives a fuck. I'm really glad I'm in australia, though a lot of our clients are in the US, we do seem a BIT more isolated from it as the euros and brazillians have been picking up some of the research funding slack.

Ah, well, with a huge screen I imagine it might matter more, yeah :)

That's another thing I've never got into. Our living room and bedroom are small-ish, or medium-ish at most; I really can't imagine using a huge TV screen in them. I never really understood the whole "cover your wall with a TV screen" thing :D