The history of software piracy is a reverse history. Somewhere in the 1960s code was getting robust enough that people would share their code across government and academic computers. By the time the home computer market became a thing in the 70s (Altair & BBS) sharing code was how enthusiasts actually learned to do things on their devices. Then in last days of disco a weird little Little St. James Island frequent flyer wrote a paper in a popular computing mag arguing that programmers should share because he was a greedy little entitled asshole who became the world’s first cintabillionaire by taking the OS code already freely shared with other programmers, copying it, slapping a copyright in it, and selling it back to the company that did most of the work on it.

One of the best jokes of the 90s:

“Windows 95 is a 32bit port of a 16bit shell for a 8bit clone of a 4bit operating system by a two bit company that can’t stand one bit of competition.”

Doctor Strangelove wasn’t just King Kong (Pickens’ character) dying at the end, but most of humanity as well.

For your argument that Democrats are the same as Republicans because of Gaza to have any weight you’d have to establish that 1) the Democrats are the “genocide” party and the Republicans are not, and 2) Democrat supporters follow the party lock step on the issue of genocide. As an independent, it sucks that there is no anti-genocide party, but there is way more opposition to it on the Democratic side, both among elected officials (who are beholden to AIPAC) and voters. The “both sides” argument just doesn’t hold water.

There’s this quote from Chomsky about how spectator sports plays into propaganda because it trains people to think in terms of aligning themselves with a group of people that they they don’t know or have any meaningful connections to, while vilifying the other groups and their supporters who are just like they are. When the team that they are only connected to in their minds win, they win. This is the mindset that gets working class people to obey the orders of plutocrats to go kill working class people just themselves.