Comments by "Traveller" (@traveller23e) on "More Perfect Union" channel.

@spaceguy.x A lot of other countries have standard taxi rates, if you inform yourself with the local legislation ahead of time you can normally tell scamming drivers to screw themselves or report them. However that isn't to say that taxis are cheap, in my country for instance a taxi to an airport is generally more expensive than a normal fare and in my city specifically it's a full 25 or 30 times the cost of taking the bus.
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Protip: rip those discs ASAP onto your own storage as they do wear out and (depending where you live maybe) it's probably perfectly legal to make personal backups.
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@hidicproductions4849 Haven't parts of Germany been trying to switch to FOSS for government stuff for a while now? I think that more and more groups should move that way, trying to regulate Microsoft artificially like it's the only way we can use computers is always going to have us lagging behind their latest round of fuckery, so as I see it the only decent alternative to FOSS would be to somehow nationalise Microsoft (however tf that could be achieved from a legal standpoint) everywhere people heavily rely on it. And honestly their OS really isn't worth all that hassle for all kinds of reasons imo. That said, one way to regulate it that would be useful would be to require out-of-the-box implementation of POSIX and various other standards (including filesystem-level permissions) for commercially-sold (or licensed, nice try) consumer operating systems. Microsoft sort of barely not-really half-asses these right now through things like WSL but that would force them to make a system that's actually compatible with all the others out there thus somewhat leveling the playing field.
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@franknuzzo2576 Which consumers though? I would much rather a 1 or even 5 euro transit fare than whatever "market rates" dictate for sitting in gridlocked taxi traffic. And as someone who lives somewhere, I would much rather that somewhere not have heavy traffic around it. I see no problem with making people who don't want to take the bus cough up medium-large time.
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@RealShaktimaan Startups aren't the ones dominating markets with locked-down appliances, they're the ones that either fail or occasionally grow big enough to be bought out by larger companies or sued to oblivion with some excuse or other. Bear in mind, when IBM released the PC a bunch of companies immediately attempted to reverse-engineer the bios. The dumb ones got sued out of existence for copyright infringement but the smart ones used a cleanroom technique to get away with it (two teams, one looks at the code and makes a spec, the other writes new code that follows the spec). However nowadays with all the EULAs including things like "you may not attempt to reverse-engineer, disassemble..." I suspect the legality is a lot murkier and depends on the exact jurisdiction where the EULA can be enforced (which could be up to the company that wrote it).
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@RowenaSnow-px3jg You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.
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@zah936 Social media/"content" websites in general these days are to the point it's like having a casino in your own home.
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