Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.
Maybe humanity's greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything's always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.
Its popularity.
Currently playing Talos Principle Reawakened (the UE5 remastered version). For anyone wondering whether it's worth it, yes if you have the hardware for it. Because they also massively improved one of the most complex but also most frustrating mechanics in the original game (with the recorder thingie). So there are very useful improvements overall. Also, it has an entirely new DLC I think, which is again noticeably harder than the 1st DLC Road to Gehenna. Game looks great as well, but you need serious hardware for it. It's not very performance efficient anymore. :) The Talos Principle series are probably the biggest and best 3D first-person puzzle games out there, together with the Portal series. Absolutely recommended.
Other than that, I've played The Ten Bells and Exit 8. These are great small anomaly-hunting games. I've never played this genre before so it was a great discovery for me. If you're curious about this genre, start with Exit 8. If you liked that and prefer more horror elements in it, as well as a bigger "map", play The Ten Bells. Awesome small games, needing only like 2-3 hours to finish.
In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it's newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It's pathetic.
Yes, but that somehow doesn't change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don't really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything's conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.
I prefer FLAC. Don't know if there's an option in whipper for that. But the Arch Wiki has an article for converting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Convert_FLAC_to_MP3
Corrected, thx.
Thanks, didn't know. It's indeed a well-established myth then. Corrected my post.
It's inherited from a historic convention from the UK. Historically the rationale was that the month was more important than the year, so they put it first, although this has no useful consistency or order to it.
Unfortunately, kind of dumb decisions from the past tend to stick and keep existing for an unnecessary long time because people get used to them and then never change them. Popularity or habit can beat reason, objectivity etc...
I use whipper. It's a command-line application but it's easy to use and works great every single time. At first you should let it analyze your drive which is the only step more involved. Here's a mini tutorial for that I wrote for myself but you can also read it on the project page where it's probably more up to date:
Analyze the drive's caching behavior:
$ sudo whipper drive analyzeFind the drive's offset. Consult the [[AccurateRip's CD Drive Offset database|http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm]] for your drive. Drive information can be retrieved with
$ whipper drive list.$ sudo whipper offset find -o insert-numeric-value-here. If you omit the-oargument, whipper will try a long, popularity-sorted list of drive offsets. If you can't confirm your drive offset value but wish to set a default regardless, setread_offset = insert-numeric-value-hereinwhipper.conf. Offsets confirmed with$ whipper offset findare automatically written to the configuration file. If specifying the offset manually, please note that: if positive it must be written as a number without sign (ex:+102-> 102), if negative it must include the sign.After that you just rip any disc by running:
$ whipper cd rip
And just as an example, here's my ~/.config/whipper/whipper.conf:
[main]
path_filter_fat = True
path_filter_special = False
[drive:<drive ID>]
vendor = <vendor>
model = <model>
release = <release>
read_offset = <my offset>
[whipper.cd.rip]
unknown = True
output_directory = ~/music/_ripped
track_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%t - %%n
disc_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%A - %%d
That's only true up to a certain size. If Ground News ever grows big, they'll still retain enough of a user base regardless of what they're doing. Compare it to e.g. Meta, Google, MS services. Or even X. Many people just never leave once they feel at home there. Meta could do even more disgusting stuff and people would still use WhatsApp, Instagram, and the likes.
It's usual fascism playbook. Once their oppression is met with any (justified) resistance, they have an excuse to "restore law & order" by being even more oppressive. Which is yet another big escalation milestone by a fascist regime. You probably can't turn this around anymore.