Some people do actually use this software to make a living. That’s not corpo-speak, it’s a reality.

Anywho, I’ve never paid for Photoshop. Just updated my pirated copy every half-decade or so.

The latest flavor of trying to fix Gimp’s UI by modifying it to look like Photoshop. These go back decades and usually end up being abandoned after a few years.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

The whole premise is flawed. Gimp should be a viable program on its own, by having a UI that actually makes sense and not by copying the market leader, because this will always mean playing catch-up, it will always mean being seen as a lesser copy.

Let’s be realistic. None of the FOSS alternatives come even close to Photoshop. Gimp has never been a good piece of software. Not to mention, if you’re doing commercial work, you need the original software to reliably work with clients and others.

One of the activists started the brawl by grabbing an officer from behind. That was more than stupid.

This was a thing until well into the 2000s. VHS stayed around for a long time. We only got our first DVD player in 2003 (it was dirt-cheap - a tiny silver thing the size of a PSOne that cost maybe €35, a small fraction of the price we paid for our VCR in the '90s) and you could still get many of the latest movies on VHS at that point, both legally and illegally. There were regional differences though. From what I’ve heard, my country of Germany held onto this medium for longer than others.

Most piracy (in my experience at least) involved recording TV broadcasts and then duplicating it for friends and family or duplicating content that was otherwise available within your circle. Some people recorded DVDs onto VHS (there were even devices that had both disc and tape drive that did this very conveniently), but this wasn’t that common.

Slightly off-topic, but I had a neighbor who was very proud of being able to circumvent the copy protection and compress movies on DVD to fit onto a single CD (which would still play on a DVD player) at an acceptable level of quality that was somewhere between VHS and DVD (but closer to the latter with the right codec settings). I taught myself how to do this later on as well, although only in order to share movies and shows with others, since I quickly preferred having media on hard drives and USB drives instead of juggling discs around. My personal go-to method was to rent DVDs from the local library for free and then create backups of those I wanted to enjoy more than once. I did the same with PC games and software from that place…

True, but you can build a strong army and security apparatus that are able to resist Russian imperialism while also protecting fundamental rights at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive - and the country is more than wealthy enough to achieve this, but only with fair taxation that rewards labor and primarily makes those contribute their fair share who have the most.

Notice where they are allowed to do this and where they are not. It’s in cities where these companies have the most political and economic influence.

Yup. I’m all in favor of militant pacifism (and taxing the rich). It’s crucial for maintaining peace in today’s world. Look dangerous, be dangerous, but only use this power to defend yourself and others from aggression.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Pick virtually any advanced technology or scientific field and there’s at least one lab or company right at the cutting edge in Israel. This country has very little natural resources, a small population, has been sanctioned and blockaded in one way or another since day one, so it was an obvious choice to heavily invest into education, research and high-tech manufacturing. That’s why the gap in capabilities and standard of living between Israel and its neighbors has been ever widening.

It’s very much comparable to Taiwan in this regard and the end result is similar: You’re likely owning a whole lot of devices with tech from both countries (at the very least tech based on patents from there) or have been unknowingly using it in some other fashion.

All of this took smart minds many decades to build up. Unfortunately, Netanyahu is squandering his nation’s potential with his selfish and criminal recklessness.

There’s a reason I contrasted the West-German with the East-German situation. One was clearly an occupation, the other was a lot more nuanced. Perhaps I should have elaborated on just how independent the West-German government was in its decision making even before 1955. This kind of behavior simply isn’t possible under anything that can be described as an occupation.

I didn’t say figuring out, I said figuring. Presented with two choices, close everything down or pay rent, they chose the latter.

Alright, fair enough.

Germany is very different in this regard. They haven’t been perceived as occupiers in ages and rightfully so. Until Trump began destroying the close relationship with Germany, US soldiers on German soil weren’t seen as much of an issue. It’s not like they were omnipresent after the end of the Cold War, outside of close to where they are stationed. You’d occasionally spot a handful e.g. on the train (although these days, you’re more likely to come across Mormon missionaries, at least it feels that way) and it’s not like anyone has an issue with their easygoing nature. British soldiers had nowhere near as good of a reputation, by the way. It had nothing to with the British government, but rather with the behavior (often drunken excesses) of poorly disciplined conscripts stationed here and the (to Germans) shockingly rough discipline imposed on them by their officers and MPs.

That’s not to say that US soldiers being stationed here wasn’t controversial at times. When Bush Junior started his illegal war against Iraq (an immensely unpopular thing in Germany - I was one of millions protesting against it), the fact that Germany was a major logistics hub in the war despite not officially participating (it only secretly did) was being heavily criticized. Earlier during the Cold War, when Reagan had his “Star Wars” moment, it led to a surge in anti-American sentiment, since Germany would have become an irradiated battleground between the two superpowers in case of a hot war, so anyone heating it up wasn’t exactly looked at fondly. By the time Bush Senior was in office, the whole thing had cooled down again though and shortly afterwards, the whole thing was over anyway.

This is incorrect. Occupation ended in West-Germany in 1955, when the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO - and it had already been gradually reduced from 1949, when more and more powers were transferred to the German government. Sovereignty was officially granted to the young democracy that year in both foreign and domestic matters, but there were a number of exceptions: The right to station troops (as part of NATO) and to deploy them in Germany in case there was an invasion from the East, even without explicit consent from the West-German government, as well as the right to restore order in case of national unrest, in case it endangered the stationed troops (but this came with the caveat that the German parliament could override this).

This doesn’t mean that America (as well as other Western allies like Britain and France) didn’t exert a great amount of influence on the young republic, but even under Adenauer already, it was able to forge its own foreign and domestic path and did so often against the wishes of what the West wanted, exhibited sovereignty far more quickly than many (more so in France and Britain than the US, for obvious reasons) were comfortable with this shortly after the end of WW2.

The situation was fundamentally different in East Germany, which remained under strict control of the Soviet Union. This ranged from the relationship between occupying soldiers with civilians to the way even major internal decision making within the ruling party had to get signed off by Moscow. Russian soldiers stationed in Germany were not just there to possibly attack NATO (it was never a defensive force - their doctrine was all about offensive, contrary to NATO), but also to maintain Communist rule in case of a revolution (see e.g. the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany, the Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring, etc.). There’s a reason the reunited Germany went to great lengths to get rid of these troops as quickly as it could, even paying Russia handsomely to bring them home. When Russian barracks were inspected after the soldiers had left, they were found to having been in an absolutely desolate state.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US didn’t just flippantly “figured something out”, but instead dramatically downsized its deployment, but kept it active as both a logistics center (same as Britain, which by now have left the country) and as a deterrent against Russia, which despite a thawing of relations with the West still had nukes and conventional troops pointed West. While “Ami go home” was a popular sentiment particularly among the Left and especially when tensions heated up again in the early '80s due to Reagan heating up the arms race with the Soviet Union again (which would ultimately be a major contributor to its downfall, as the mismanaged economy had no chance of keeping up with the West), most people understood that American soldiers on German soil were there to protect them against the Soviets and later Russia, not an occupying force anymore.

Before Trump, it was pretty obviously meant to protect against Russia as well as part of Germany’s integration into NATO - and the majority of Germans were more than fine with it.

You can block these with one of uBlock Origin’s filter lists.

I experimented with this as well, but since I was keeping full copies of the discs on my hard drives anyway, it was unnecessary in my case. I still have most of these disc images; now on my NAS.

I think the first time I tried N64 emulation must have been in late 2002. There were indeed still games released for this system at the time, although not many. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (ported to the console in 2002) was one of the last big games for it. Fun fact: The PC version at lowest settings looks almost identical to the N64 port.

Early N64 emulation was spotty, but the fact that it worked at all absolutely blew my mind, especially since I was just in the process of switching from N64 to PC as my main gaming platform. Super Mario 64 was one of the first titles to be properly playable with next to no issues, but outside of that game, it was a bit of a gamble and remained so for years. Performance could vary wildly, glitches were very common (some titles remained unplayable until surprisingly recently, like the excellent voxel-based Command and Conquer port for the system) and the plugin system proved to be a nightmare, as it fractured development resources.

GameCopyWorld is still around today and still being updated. Looks the same as it did decades ago.

My go-to method was to create a disc image of games from the local library and then use either DaemonTools’ copy protection emulation feature or a crack from that site. They had and still have a really good selection of the latest titles (nothing 18+ though, the equivalent of the American M-rating), although it’s almost entirely console games now due to mandatory online activation with most PC games.

There was also software (probably still is) that records the state of your computer before using a program. Then you’d run the program and it recorded any changes (with filters, of course), which you were able to undo with a simple button press. At the time, it was usually a change to some registry entry. This was another method I used to reset timers and usage limits of software like the one you mentioned. As before, I tracked down registry changes by hand until I discovered a more convenient option. This was necessary, because many programs with usage limits left information behind when uninstalled so that you couldn’t just do what you did.

I could swear I did something like this (although obviously not at a kernel level) decades ago with trial versions of software that would only work for 30 days or similar. At first, I did this by hand for the entire system, but I’m pretty sure I had a program for Windows 9x that could independently set time and day for any given application, without affecting the rest of the system.

Yup. Clothes in particular have infested previously safe secondhand stores and sites, where you used to get cently used quality items in the past. It’s a minefield and people just don’t realize how dangerous these items are.