Aside from the bullshit "security" issue, how many jobs are now gone because of this? I thought this regime was all about creating jobs and "making American great again".

If you're killing jobs left and right, that doesn't sound like making anything great other than unemployment.

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

Of course they're extremists. They don't believe anyone who produces anything should have the right to their own property. That people should produce music, software, and movies without getting any compensation.

Once again, if that is their belieft then they can go produce software, music, or movies and give it all away. Let's see how long they last doing that.

Stealing people's works does not help their cause.

It's their job! Their job is to prevent monopolies (in fairness, they haven't been doing too good a job of late in that department) so the consumer (i.e. you and me) don't pay exorbitant prices for products and services because there are only one or two providers.

What he wanted was for the government to roll over and let things go through since clearly the company was not able to compete in the free market. He wanted someone who could manipulate people's purchases by not showing competing products to take over the failing iRobot and get a stranglehold on the market.

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.

What do you want? "Punch the bully in the teeth" means what exactly? All out war? Would this really be good for people in the EU? For Denmark?

Assuming Denmark has put sanctions on oil ships, they can seize those ships in the Baltic and North Seas. They can use their own hackers, assuming they have any, and disable Russian systems.

There are multiple ways to fight back without sending in the troops. What's Russia going to do, whine more?

What I'm waitig for is when a Democratic president is in office and starts making wholesale changes. The howls from Republicans will be glorious. Sending their whines to the Supreme Court will be even funnier because if the Court says the president can't do that after they've let Trump do whatever he wants, they just outed themselves as partisan hacks and can be ignored.

As Jackson remarked, let them try and enforce it.

Denmark would have to do it through NATO.

No they don't. They are free to defend themselves without NATO. Which, like the rest of Europe, won't do.

Not sure where this fear of defending oneself came from, but Europe needs to get its head out of its ass and start taking action. Ukraine's shoulders are getting tired carrying the load for them.

What will you do about it? Nothing, as usual. You whine and complain Russia is doing this to you, yet you do nothing in return.

Either punch the bully in the teeth with brass knuckles or stop complaining you've been attacked.

As Ukraine has shown, taking the fight to the bully is the only way to get results.

Either run your website as a hobby or do not run it at all. Expecting to be paid for supplying information when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

Either play in your band as a hobby or do not play at all. Expecting to be paid for your performance when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

Everything for free doesn't sound like capitalism - it sounds like communism.

So that's why people on here keep talking about getting their software, music, and movies for free. They're communists.

Let's expand the fun: Did Israel commit genocide in Gaza?

Yes they have. Next question.

It's not just videos. Trying to listen to music has been thrown into the same cesspool. I was listening to a song last night and about a third of the way in the music stopped. I saw there were an additional 6 - 8 scripts which needed run to have the music play, even after I already enabled 6- 8.

I closed out of the song and did something else.

If you have to enable over a dozen scripts to play a 4 minute song, you suck.