Do you run a business? I do. Industry-wide races to the bottom that have existed for decades before I was even born have put margins so razor-thin that paying more than slightly higher than the usual industry thresholds is untenable for smaller businesses. You raise your price too much to compensate, and your business dries up. Regulations designed to curtail abuses by large corporations can be devastating for small businesses.

I don't like this fact, and this obviously isn't going to be true for every industry, but these twee 'truisms' don't accurately represent reality.

Do YOU? Because I did farm chores growing up and the stuff you're tasked with doing is never particularly dangerous. Dirt and grime washed off just fine and it was good exercise and time outdoors.

>The phrase 'if you're not the customer, you're the product' comes to mind

That doesn't really apply to the warez scene. People aren't releasing cracked software for profit, they're doing it for the challenge and to say they were the first to do it. It's pure ego.

I think that's almost certainly the case for the people actually cracking the software, but because a lot of the time there isn't like a "Steam Store for Cracked Videogames" or similar for software, it can require significant effort to find the canonical source.

If you know of some common Adobe patcher tool, or Windows activator, and just do a Google search for its name, what fraction of those download links will have a matching hash to the original release?

You are right that, in the non-repackaged-with-additional-malware case, it seems a lot of the guys doing the cracking are just puzzle-solvers. Weeks to crack some Ubisoft DRM but probably never even touched the game.

I'm not sure that precludes that cracked software being redistributed with added malware.

>Bonus annoyance this year: the eternal covid lamentations of bar and restaurant owners, as if governments purposely wanted to destroy their businesses, as if one's bar is more important than other people lives, as if they didn't paint themselves and their stupid restaurant for years as an example of entrepreneurship (apparently the free market is a good idea only when your business goes well).

Fuck off into the sun. Of course people are going to lament when their jobs vanish and the business they built over years of hard work is in a very real danger of tanking. I should know, my food service business is down quite a bit - and we're one of the lucky ones that is doing well enough to stay afloat given that we had a strong takeaway focus even before the C-19 hit. An entire segment of jobs blown away - what do those people do? Shit like "learn to code" is not a helpful answer, and history suggests that what they do end up doing after a long enough period of hopelessness is not pretty.

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered BSD community when IDC confirmed that BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for BSD because BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for BSD. As many of us are already aware, BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that BSD has steadily declined in market share. BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, BSD is dead.

Fact: BSD is dying

Fads was a strictly YTMND term. On 4chan they were generally called memes, on SA they were image macros.

Because it's wrong, new accounts absolutely do not get shadowbanned. People make burner accounts for 2-3 anonymous posts all the time.

I already had it. No need to get vaccinated for something I've already had where the current research is indicating that immunity is either permanent or very long-lasting.

I don't really consider myself an audiophile, but I do love music and vinyl. My general suggestion if someone wants to buy new is an Audio-Technica LP 120X turntable and a pair of Klipsh R-51M bookshelf speakers. The 120x has most of the features a newbie will want/need, and the speakers are fairly low priced while still sounding pretty good (although they're not quite as punchy on the bass as I'd personally like). The setup will probably run around $500, but the turntable won't make mincemeat of your records like a cheapo Crosley.

Of course, the real answer is to find vintage equipment at a local audio place, but that isn't always easy for newbs and is a bit dependent on your local music nerd community.

That's one thing I've always wondered about with the vinyl scene. My dad's an audio enthusiast, and he once told me that when my mom and he had 2 incomes and no kids yet he bought a diamond tip for his record player for hundreds of dollars.

So that's a crazy thing that the thing that would make your record have the best audio quality, will also just rip into your record so bad it will probably also immediately be the last time you could listen to it at that quality.

He swapped his collection to CD's the second that became a reasonable option.

I got a tetanus shot about two months ago. I used pain medication (just normal-ass ibuprofen) because the injection site gets very sore after a few days. There's a lot of valid reasons to be concerned about being in the early run of a brand new vaccination, but injection site having a bit of pain is hardly one of them.