Ultimatelly it’s “Doing Research that advances knowledge for everybody” that should be allowed free use of copyrighted materials, whils activities for direct or indirect commercial gains (included Research whose results are Patented and then licensed for a fee) should not, IMHO.
If your business model only works if you break the Law, that mean’s you’re just another Organised Crime group.
I think we don’t want open entrance policies in place that would make it easier for MAGAs to come over. Best to have some kind of requirement which filters out the MAGAs as much as possible, say minimum education level to get a work or digital nomad visa or only people from “at risk groups” such as Transexuals qualifying for asylum.
Were I am now, Portugal, there’s pretty open immigration policy for Brazil with no actual minimum requirements and the result is that we imported a ton of far right muppets from there, to the point that in the last Brazilian Presidential election the proportion of voters for Bolsonaro in Portugal (as Brasilians can vote from abroad) was a lot larger than in Brasil - since Brasilians resident in Portugal can get Portuguese nationality after 5 years, this also help fuel the rise of the Far Right locally.
Having some kind of reasonably easy and fair system to filter out the Fascist assholes would be much better.
(What’s funny is that I went for writing an actual reply and did not downvote).
I think AugustWest’s point kinda got proven just now.
That’s indeed a natural conclusion about the kind of person who writes a post like that, but I didn’t want to rule out other explanations such as drug consumption or stupidity.
An alternative explanation is that the trolling style of your post is attracting downvotes.
The version, with the ox is from Portugal. Specifically the Portuguese saying literally translates as “put the cart in front of the oxen” (so we use plural oxen rather than horse).
Propely done Agile is more to solve the “We have the general idea of what we need but will only know for sure the details of how it will work once the users see it and start playing around with it”.
You still need to upfront know that a wedding is actually needed, but have a process for figuring out and trying out the details of the various elements of it (say, as part of deciding what kind of food will there be for the reception, actually preparing and trying various options) before the whole things actually gets “delivered”.
Agile also works well for environments were software is developed to serve the kind of business which is are constantly changing (for example, certain areas of Finance) or is something totally new being created from the ground up (i.e. many if not most Startups) because the business itself is a sort of a neverending “we’ll figure out what we need and if it works well when we get there and try it out” which matches almost perfectly the fast and scope-limited definition->implementation->feedback cycles of the Agile software development process.
I once had a customly designed project for an external client of a web-development company were I was technical lead and the sales guy who sold it to the customer without ever consulting us about it had the project management responsability.
On the very first day the guy got me, the junior developer and the designer together for the project launch meeting and started saying how we would have to work extra to make it fit his (ridiculously short) deadlines and I just said “No, it’s not at all possible to fullfill those deadlines so that’s not going to happen” and when he tried to argue with “what about the client” I replied that “You came up with those estimates and gave them to the client without even talking to us, the experts in that domain, so managing the fallout with the client from that is your problem not ours”.
I fondly remember all that because of the transition from downtrodden and unhappy to absolute happiness visible on the face of the junior developer when, after the sales guy / project manager gave us the “work extra hard” spiel I (as the tech lead) replied with “No, that’s not going to happen”.
(Ultimatelly the project took twice as long as the sales guy’s estimates)
The whole “putting the cart in front of the oxen” (as we say in my country) of this meme reminded me of that one (and that memory invariably puts a smile on my face).
When I was finishing of my degree at Uni I actually spent a couple of months as an auxiliary teacher giving professional training in Unix, which included teaching people shell script.
Nowadays (granted, almost 3 decades later), I remember almost nothing of shell scripting, even though I’ve stayed on the Technical Career Track doing mostly Programming since.
So that joke is very much me irl.
The 180€ Mini PC I have as torrenting server, NAS and TV Box (and it’s overkill for just that) says otherwise.
$300 will buy you a lot of Desktop PC nowadays if all you want is to browse the web and read emails (in fact that approx. $200 mini-PC of mine is more than enough if you’re running Linux on it as I do and if you add a simple monitor, keyboard and mouse you’re about $40 shy of $300).
A $300 PC is only shit if you’re trying to run things like AAA games on it or use Windows 11.
There used to be a point back in the day when you did need a good PC for things like document edition or watching videos, but now we’re well past the point where you needed anything more than the most basic PC for everyday stuff.
I’ve been a “digital packrat” for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).
Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.
Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I’ve had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)
I’ve been doing exactly this and for even longer than this guy.
Then again almost 3 decades in the Tech industry (which amongst other things means seeing several comes and goes of “providers”) have long taught me to be suspicious of being dependent on 3r party providers, and even more so of having my stuff hostage to their wills (either hosted in their machines or wrapped in encrypted envelopes which I cannot remove).
There is no actual good consumer reason for a seller of digital goods to keep it in their systems or in your own storage but encrypted, without letting the buyer have free access to what they bought.
Back when those things started a lot of people went for the convenience of encrypted Apple music on their iPods, encrypted books on their Kindles and buying videos that they could only stream never get and, inevitably, they got screwed and here we are.
I, for one, didn’t got screwed with that stuff.
Company Town Halls are “we listen to you” theatre.
Modern large companies behave towards their employees the same way they behave towards their customers: they use marketing to influence them into doing what’s best for the C-suite, the Board and (usually) shareholders.
In Tech specifically this kind of crap has been common since the 90s even in Startups (as part of the “pay them with hope, sense of belonging and pride rather than money” technique), though the big Tech companies are the most extreme in this kind of stuff.
In the big picture I expect collisions and debris in LEO are less of a problem because things at that level tend to naturally deorbit without regular use of propulsion to make up for the effects of atmospheric friction (which is tiny, but still there and adding up over time).
As somebody from a poor EU country with good weather - Portugal - if Albania is anything like here, it’s a great place to live as long as your income is at the level of somewhere else.
The problem is to live in such a place with the level of salary of such a place.
A lot more humane, though, as the flies get upright much more easilly than the cows.
So, only criminals will have them?
Gruesomely mass murdering civilians using bombs to get the rest to comply with your will is only “Terrorism” if the bombs were placed on the ground and then exploded, not when they were dropped from the air.
Hence the smaller per-capita representation of white people in the count of terrorists.
The entire purpose of writing good readable code which is mostly self-explanatory and were it isn’t it’s properly commented to explain what’s going on, is so that it it’s not a necessary for the person who picks it up later to be somebody who does remember what that code does and how it does it.
Whilst this is mainly important to allow other people to work in that code, as a side effect the actual person who wrote the code if they follow those coding principles needs not remember what it does and how it does it.
One of the upsides of being a senior dev is having figured this kind of thing out from experience, which offsets the downside that since you’re older and have done a ton of things, it’s less likely that you will properly remember the details of a specific code base after some months of not looking at it.