It is also a LOT easier to both post content and reach a lot of people via social media as opposed to doing both using your own website.

Once upon a time, in the long long ago, I could create content on my site and then automatically or semi-automatically share it on social media, where my social media followers would see it.

I don't know why you need actual land to consider yourself a country.

A state is an entity which has an effective monopoly on force over some piece of territory.

If you can't make laws and compel people to obey them, you're not a state.

you would have easily seen that installing Linux on a cheap and terrible "consumer" laptop isn't going to be easy, if even possible

And that is exactly the topic of inquiry at hand: on what boxen is installing Linux easy and possible.

You're been able to post to IG from the website for a while now.

Or use it but disable notifications. Or turn on do-not-disturb mode, like I usually have on. There's three people in universe whose calls or DM deserve instant attention from me, and none of them would contact me via IG, so.

So long as you demonstrate that you can keep them safe and secure, I'm less worried about you having a nuke than the US government having one. The US, after all, has actually flash-fried children with the things before.

As for mandatory vaccination, the SCOTUS found in Buck v. Bell -- and has never overturned -- that the same principle that justified mandatory vax also justifies forced eugenic sterilization. It's not just a theoretic "slippery slope", we already slid down it.

Discord is more like a 21st century IRC server than Facebook.

Never understood the appeal of IRC or of real-time chat. Where's the 21st century BBS?

Last I heard religion was firmly a conservative thing.

Catholic Worker Movement. The Catonsville 9. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.. Women's Christian Temperance Movement.

Religion is neither "liberal" no "conservative".

it's still completely inappropriate to offer them a "tender embrace".

In the same sense that it's inappropriate ti wear a "Free Hugs!" t-shirt making the same offer to a business meeting, yes. There is a lot of space between "this was inappropriate behavior for that situation" and "this person is an abusive predator and must be cancelled."

And yet Cuomo, against whom the allegations are worse and the evidence stronger, remains in office. As does accused rapist and known hair-sniffer Biden.

Yes, let's deal with this problem by changing the rest of the world

The whole idea of the free software movement is to change the world. So, yeah, if you believe that the world is wrong, you set out to change it, you don't surrender. (This is a response only to this argument, not a defense nor a condemnation of RMS.)

Why the fsck is there a daemon managing static data like user accounts???

...academics don't squash things that aren't "pro-liberal". They actively debate them.

Ah, if only that were true. Then there's be no need for FIRE.

A quick look at their press releases should establish that your claim is inaccurate.

do master devices buy and sell slave devices on a market as property?...

None of the things you mention are the defining characteristics of slavery. We can point to historical counterexamples for each -- American race-based slavery was not the only example, you know.

The defining characteristic of a master/slave relationship is that the master tells the slave to do something and, unlike other forms of servitude, the slave does not get any discretion in the matter. Not merely "device 1 tells device 2 to do something", but that device 2 does not exhibit any judgement or possible refusal in the matter.

That differs from a client/server relationship where a server can say "nope, not gonna do that, permission denied". The point of the term is that device 1 is in utter and total control of device 2. None of the alternatives I've seen discussed here capture that.

The only other terms I can think of that apply would be "Dom" and "sub", but those come with a load of baggage of their own. Plus, a D/s relationship has safewords, so unless device 2 has a red light that tells device 1 to stop, not the same.

Changing a variable name or a label on a pinout lets developers feel like they're "helping" without actually doing anything to break open the brutal and racist police state we inhabit -- that might actually be worse than useless.

I guess we can then move on to remove terms like "execute" or "kill" from our process control vocabulary and feel like we're "helping" abolish capital punishment? And we certainly can't "run" a program, that is disrespectful to the non-ambulatory. And so on.

The euphemism treadmill is endless -- and it doesn't go anywhere.

All that said: if some developer wants to play at "helping" by changing some variable names in their own code, it's not worth fussing about. It's when outrage mobs aggressively patrol other's use of language, seeking out conflict, that we have problems.

1488 is definitely a neo-Nazi identification signal; anyone who's done even the most casual research into racist hate groups would recognize it. Search if you want the ugly details. But it's also an integer that just comes up on its own sometimes. I'm utterly ignorant about Magic: The Gathering so not qualified to say if this is coincidence or not.