Good thing I never trusted it.

This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.

And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this… and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.

In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.

The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.

Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.

Good thing I never used telegram.

Google maps is the last vestige of Google that I use. I was never a Google search user and I only use Gmail for ‘official’ stuff.

So yeah, I want this to work.

This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.

There is little question that corporations are behind them all.

I am aware, but sometimes my autism still demands I write it anyway. In my experience comments read by people can still inform them even if they have no idea who wrote them and the reason why. I just want to leave the world a better place than I found it.

Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.

The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.

Robocop… the movie they love but don’t realize is a complete mockery of THEM. As a kid I thought that Robo was just cool, but as I got older and rewatched it a few times, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You know what’s one profound thing I noticed a few years ago that flew over my head? The ED-209 robot does not have a non-lethal apprehension method. It only threatens to kill for non-compliance, and then does so if compliance is not absolute. It has no way of restraining or leading arrested suspects if they comply, and no other method to deal with non-compliant suspects other than to blow them away. No tasers, no net gun, no ropes, no tear gas, no sci-fi ‘set for stun’ laser beam, nothing.

On top of that another thing I realized is that Dick Jones considered that thing to be street ready to take on law enforcement. From everything to ultra-violent encounters to jaywalking and parking tickets. What it tells me about his mentality is that he would be a HIGHLY successful billionaire today…

Not only that, he will probably set all the cameras that he is in control of to switch off on command or if he is in the vicinity (in addition to purging the previous 10 minutes or so) so that he is NEVER caught on any camera, period.

Which is far worse. Governments are, to a large extent (even dictatorial governments) still have some accountability to the people. Corporations NEVER have that. The greatest propaganda trick that corporations did is that somehow they are better than governments and the less restrictions on them, the ‘freer’ and ‘richer’ the average person will be.

While wearing a mask that’ll fool AI on top of a ski mask beneath it.

they put that shit into water bottles… water bottles! Like they have a water bottle that can be synched to your phone and it’s % shown on screen and it changes color at set intervals to remind you to drink. Like for fucks sake dude!

They consider themselves to be gods and so far better than you and me that any behavior on their part is none of your business (even if it directly affected you and your entire family and community) but if you so much have a 10 minute variation in your sleep they want to know and probably film you when sleeping without any justification and they will tell you to go to hell if you tell them to stop.

Nope. It is only for the peons. Dissidents will have ANY behavior be seen as bad and the fascists will be identified specifically to train the AI to ignore them or automatically rule them out as suspects. Blame their victims and not the perps.

BTW, people like Zuckerberg fucking HATE people like you and me. He considered the people who trusted him with their emails (when he was in university and coming up with the idea of Facebook) to be absolute idiots and even more so for trusting him with that information. He lives his life in a way that insures that we know as little about him as possible. He lives in a compound that is impossible to view via satellite imagery AND he has the actual house he lives in surrounded by dummy buildings specifically so that people cannot spy on his with telescopes. He is obsessed with privacy and probably has never been seen on CCTV in years.

Unless I use flatpaks again? Remember I am going to be a first time Linux user. It’ll be the first time I use anything!

Is updating the software an issue? I always try to keep my stuff up to date. Sometimes I can be a little lazy, but I do care to keep the latest stuff going. Doesn’t the software have notifications that a newer version is available?

I have been talking and thinking about switching for a while. I want to go straight to Debian.

I am going to be buying a monster high end machine and I want to do all the AI stuff on it.

Never say never.

Unfortunately yes… I also remember when windows 98 crashed in a demonstration.