Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 23, 2024

Mike’s family comics are the best! Wish there were more!

Those canisters grow shorter and taller; must have springs inside them, LOL.

I watch my favorite movies on my laptop via a site called Fandango. Of course, my faves are the old Hollywood Classics (CASABLANCA, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN), and revival theaters have gone the way of the Beta Max!

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Technological hurdles to be overcome.

I actually had exactly this conversation with my niece – the nice one in her family – and her brother – not so nice – agreed with me. Things would be cheaper to buy id people were not stealing them. Probably, though corporate greed might mean they kept the price the same.

Though they did have trust issues with me, I once spent a day successfully convincing them Darth Vader was the good guy, made the tough calls against those Rebels bent on destroying civilisation. They were young at the time.

Of course, nowadays corporations will happily take away content that you paid for….

And how do you feel about libraries? Some authors are actually opposed to them. Apparently they think that most borrowers would buy their books if they couldn’t borrow them. I think there would be far less readers and lower sales.

Is PirateBay even still a thing these days? I may have to look that up later.

I seem to recall that those “file sharing” sites contained MP3’s with distortion added to discourage downloading, and the later ones were a petri dish crawling with viruses.

Back then commercial CDs and DVDs were encrypted so you couldn’t copy them, but there was always some way to get around that and copy them anyway

Some movies MUST be seen on the big screen—-you minimize and you cheat yourself.

When we lived in Egypt in 2010, our only access to US TV shows was through Pirate Bay. We didn’t like it, but that was the culture.

Revelation 9:21 – 21 Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.

Mike fails to understand that the architecture of the Internet subverts property rights in information. The Web interprets censorship and paywalls as damage, and routes around them.

ARPANET was designed to maintain command and control in the midst of a nuclear conflict with the Soviets; but to defeat Communism, it had to adopt it!

There are no rules, it’s the 21st century and the ground you were standing on in the 70’s is no longer there. You’ll get used to it in a decade or 2. We get jackets ! …. ;-)

Remember “Alice’s Restaurant?” Most people do, but most people have forgotten an old place where you can get what you could get there. It’s called “Usenet.”

Mike fails to understand that the architecture of the Internet subverts property rights in information. The Web interprets censorship and paywalls as damage, and routes around them.

ARPANET was designed to maintain command and control in the midst of a nuclear conflict with the Soviets; but to defeat Communism, it had to adopt it!

Once again, Mike bought her laptop and their house with proceeds from his company, Vulture, which… checks notes … buys intellectual property for pennies and then resells it at profit. Maybe he’d approve of what Alex did if she sold her downloads on their corporate website. But Mike always has been the biggest hypocrite in the strip.

Now that all the rocks have been turned over isn’t it funny how un-funny utter lack of even the concept of morals is?

When you buy an ebook on Amazon, you don’t own the book. You bought the right to read the book on any electronic book reading device that is registered to your Amazon account. The book is encrypted with Digital Rights Management. There are software programs that can remove the DRM, but it’s probably illegal. BAEN ebooks are sold without DRM.