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“No, that’s not how it started.”

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

This is a comment I found on SoylentNews that I’d hate to lose. It’s a truth-bomb dropped on the whole “white people were horrible” narrative about the founding and evolution of the United States of America. We learned about a lot of this stuff in history books back in the day, but history books are updated frequently and those who write the books control the contents. It’s important to look beyond what is commonly accepted as true if you want to find the real truth.

Quote sections are from the comment being responded to.

It started with a concerted, deliberate extermination campaign of those who were already there to steal their land, followed by a bloody, violent independance war. Those who worked the hardest to develop the land were slaves.

No, that’s not how it started. It started with people fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They landed in a place that had already been depopulated by disease and conflicts between Indian tirbes. The Pilgrims weren’t doing so well, and only made it because the local Algonquin Indians helped them. The Indians, for their part, were desperate to find new allies because the Iroquois were kicking their butts up and down the block. What ensued was a long period of Indians making alliances with various European powers, and with each other, and everyone jockeying for advantage. It was only at the end that the balance of power shifted against all the Indians of every tribe.

Slaves did not do all the hard work in America. They did all the hard work in the South, on the plantations. People in the North did not own slaves. They did all the hard work themselves. Even in the South, 3/4’s of the people owned no slaves and did the hard work themselves.

It is the most culturally violent and sexually repressed and disfunctional society of all the “civilized” nations. Culturally speaking, they are superstitious, simplistic, predatory, isolationist, paranoid, and primitive. They are the only western country where the vast majority of the population speak only one language, and also the only one still practicing the death penalty. I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Americans are more culturally violent than the Germans, Italians, and Japanese? They’re more culturally violent than the French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese who depopulated, exploited, and colonized vast swathes of the Earth up until modern times? They’re more culturally violent than the Russians who oppressed half of Europe for 70 years, and who violently suppressed democracy movements in at least three of their client states? They’re more culturally violent than the Koreans who fought a vicious civil war in the 50’s and in the 1980’s were having massive battles in the streets in the South?

Americans are fat, ugly, unsophisticated, obnoxious, entitled, loud, and in poor health.

I see you’ve never been to England, Germany, France, Italy, any place in Central Europe, or even Australia. Germany has a far-right party called the AfD. France has Le Pen. Italy just elected a right-wing Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte. Obnoxious? You’ve never seen Australians in Bali, Japanese in Thailand, Britons in Turkey, Germans in Mallorca, or French anywhere.

Culturally speaking, they are superstitious, simplistic, predatory, isolationist, paranoid, and primitive. They are the only western country where the vast majority of the population speak only one language,

Clearly, you’ve never studied history, and cannot be widely travelled. New York City is the acme of cultural refinement. There are towns in the midwest where people have never gone beyond a 100 mile radius. Paris is cosmopolitan, but those who live in the country’s south are some of the most ignorant, provincial people you will ever meet. Tokyo is an ultra-modern city with every convenience, but go due west until you hit tiny fishing villages on the Sea of Japan and it’s like travelling back in time.

Speak one language? Well, as a former English teacher abroad I can tell you, my friend, that the vast majority of people in the West who study English (assuming that’s not their mother tongue) learn it like Americans learn Spanish. That is, everyone “studies” it in school, but exceptionally few come to speak it. There are some outliers, of course, like the Dutch, but for them it’s rather cheating calling learning English acquiring a second language since Dutch and English are only about a half step removed.

In short, you’re reflexively and ignorantly characterizing the entire country and everyone in it. The only thing you’ve revealed with your screed is that you know very little about history or geography. You’ve clearly not travelled widely and have a limited aquaintanceship.

Do yourself a favor, and drop out for a couple years and backpack round the world. Avoid the cities. Stick to the small towns and countryside. Stick around for a while and learn the language and get to know the natives. Chafe against the differences when culture shock sets in. Then move on to the next place and do it again. You will come to have a far less simplistic perception of the world and its peoples.

PayPal Purge: A Precursor to a United States Social Credit System?

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

In the video above, I discuss the Patreon Purge, the duopoly overlords Visa and MasterCard that are most likely to be pulling the strings of banks and payment processors like PayPal and Stripe to make finance-based censorship happen, and the logical progression of such behavior being tolerated and unregulated: neo-McCarthyism, discrimination against people for political beliefs and political statements by nearly all professions, culminating in industry-wide shared blacklists that could result in everything from no plumber coming to fix a flooding toilet (because a private corporation doesn’t like your politics) to your sick chemotherapy-racked child not receiving a life-saving cancer treatment and dying (because a private corporation doesn’t like your politics.) It’s not unlike China’s social credit system, except it’s going to be implemented by corporate entities instead of the government.

BUT IT’S A PRIVATE COMPANY BLACKLISTING YOU, NOT THE GOVERNMENT, SO IT’S OKAY!

Elaborating on FIPNA: why it’s needed and why money intermediates shouldn’t have freedom of association

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

This was written in response to a comment on YouTube from someone who was trying to understand my FIPNA (Financial Provider Neutrality Act) arguments. It’s not a simple problem and I can see why it’s hard for someone to see the whole picture if they’re not familiar with incidents where PayPal and MasterCard have brought down a censorship hammer in the past. I appreciate their questions far more than the other guy that was talking to me who basically spent the entire time recycling the bogus Limbaugh-level nonsense of calling me a socialist and suggesting that what I want is the same thing as holding a gun to his head and forcing him to do work for me. My full wall-of-text diatribe comment follows. I’d be interested in any comments you have on this subject; just know that comments here are moderated as I find time to do so.

What I’m trying to do is find a solution to the problem of financial services banning people in a way that smacks of collusion. It helps to define the problem better first. Patreon banned Sargon and blamed their “global payment network” which could be any of PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or MasterCard. Sargon moved to SubscribeStar which immediately got kicked off of PayPal as a result. PayPal has also banned a lot of people and categories of businesses in the past, and every time they’d blame a payment card network (Visa or MasterCard) and upon contacting the blamed card network, the contacting party would be told that PayPal was responsible, not the card network. This circular blame tactic results in both parties not taking any sort of responsibility…and yet the financial cutoff on the basis of not liking someone’s category of business remains in place.

The thing about financial service providers is that unlike nearly every other category of private business, a financial service provider or colluding group of them can render someone destitute with the stroke of a pen and existing law carves out huge exceptions for banks to harm people without consequences. A story comes to mind where Bank of America had a customer come in with a scam check and asked if it was legit and, if so, could he cash it out. The bank made him wait and called the cops and had him arrested. He ultimately didn’t get any charges filed but he did get to spend some time in jail and have an arrest record, and he couldn’t sue BofA because the law says that they can have people on the premises arrested without consequences.

Ignoring the banks themselves, the ultimate problem seems to be payment card networks, specifically Visa and MasterCard. All ATM cards that are also members of a payment card network in the USA are (as far as I am aware) issued either a Visa or MasterCard card number. This means that Visa/MC form a duopoly, or what is known in capitalism as a “monopoly of two.” Essentially, any duopoly acting in its own self-interest will end up cooperating such that they behave no differently than a monopoly. The competition that forms the basis of a core element of a capitalist economic system (supply and demand) doesn’t start until you have a third player in the market that directly competes with the other two. American Express and Discover are the other two major payment card networks but I have never seen a single ATM card with either of their logos, and frankly I can count the number of Amex and Discover cards I swipe in a year on one hand. They only compete with Visa/MC in the credit card space and they’re quite minor competition by comparison.

Bringing my point full circle, the Visa/MC duopoly control the payment card networks that the entire country has to use to engage in electronic commerce. Even when you individually consider alternatives like using PayPal with a bank draft only, PayPal still needs to maintain their relationship with Visa/MC for every other customer that DOES use a Visa/MC card, be it a bank ATM card or a real credit card, otherwise Visa/MC will threaten to pull their partnership which would decimate PayPal, if not outright destroy it. This means that if a corporate executive at MasterCard (or someone who knows such an exec and has influence over them, i.e. a wife, family member, or close friend) decides that they hate Sargon’s politics or that Sargon rubbed them the wrong way one night when they were browsing through YouTube, that executive can leverage the banhammer power of the entire MasterCard company to force every downstream payment processor and intermediate money handling platform that has any payment processing relationship with MasterCard to refuse to do business with Sargon under threat of losing the ability to process ANY payments through MasterCard OR any other provider that partners with MasterCard, *potentially up to and including entire banks.*

This is the real reason why Stripe, PayPal, and Patreon seem to be colluding even though they may not be: it’s MasterCard pulling their puppet strings and I guarantee you that we have no access to the payment card network blacklist because the payment card networks will have that blacklist under strict non-disclosure agreements with hefty penalties for breach of that section of the contract. Because MasterCard could theoretically bully any kind of financial institution into doing their bidding and taking the public heat for it, my proposed solution is a law that requires all financial service providers to provide their services universally to anyone legally allowed to request them. The devil is always in the details (for example, loans would still require due diligence and be subject to rejection based on reasonable assessments of risk) but the basic premise is that everyone should generally have a right to open a bank account, get a payment card that can be used to engage in commerce online, and freely enjoy the use of that card as a means to send and receive funds between other consenting private parties without concerns over being “cut off” for any reason other than commission of a crime. When the outrage mob shows up and demands that PayPal cut Sargon’s account because he’s “muh alt-right troll insert emotional buzzwords here rah rah,” PayPal can throw their hands up in the air and say “hey, it’s the law, we HAVE to service Sargon no differently than we service you guys, so you’re wasting your time!”

I’m theorizing to some extent because there is a huge information vacuum right now, but based on all available evidence, Visa and/or MasterCard are the puppetmasters and the fight must ultimately be brought to their doorsteps. One last point: the reason I want a Constitutional amendment rather than a normal law is because a normal law will fail on FIrst Amendment grounds, namely the right to freedom of association, but a Constitutional amendment would be able to supersede the First Amendment right to freedom of association specifically for businesses that serve as financial transaction intermediates (anyone between your personal money and another person you’re trying to do business with being able to receive that money.)

Windows 10 is hard to support because it’s inconsistent and settings keep vanishing

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

(This was left in response to a video called “Why Microsoft Can’t Design a Consistent Windows”)

They CAN offer a consistent Windows, they just choose not to. Windows 10 is a support nightmare. How to accomplish something (and whether or not it is even possible to do so anymore) depends on what build the person is on, which means to support Windows 10 requires being familiar with all possible builds that one could encounter. That means knowing all the “settings shuffles” and control panel neutering of Windows 10 builds 1507, 1511, 1607, 1703, 1709, 1803, and soon build 1809 as well. In each build, Microsoft strips out Control Panel functionality and forces it over to the Settings panel, but they are notorious for killing off Control Panel stuff despite the Settings equivalents omitting important settings or capabilities. It used to be that you could change a network from “public” to “private” using Network Connections in the Control Panel, but that was lost and HomeGroup was the only place to easily find a “switch” for that setting. Then they killed off HomeGroup functionality. In Windows 10 build 1709, to change a network from Public to Private after the pop-out prompt when you first connect is gone, you have to HAND-EDIT THE REGISTRY SETTING FOR THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE STATUS OF THAT NETWORK.

When they worked on killing off Default Programs, they made it redirect to Default Apps which doesn’t let you pick a single program and one-click associate ALL file types it can handle with that program; there was a workaround where one could run a batch file that invoked the old Default Programs panel, but now that’s also going to just redirect to the Default Apps panel which STILL CANNOT ONE-CLICK ASSOCIATE ALL FILE TYPES.

I don’t buy excuses like “we support lots of different hardware.” That’s a cop-out. Touchscreens were in use long before Windows 10. Also, Microsoft DOES NOT listen to the vast majority of user feedback. I have repeatedly reported many serious problems using their feedback mechanism and those problems persist today.

(Another user asked: “What support scenario do you work in?”)

The specific problem I’ve had is with control panel items being removed from Control Panel when a Settings panel that replaces it hasn’t picked up all of those settings yet, or is lacking in functionality. The biggest thing that kills me is Default Programs: in the old one, I could pick a program and associate ALL types that program supports with that one program, but in the new one I have to click each individual type under the program’s name and click the program in the list that pops out. For media players this would be a disaster; MPC-HC supports over 100 file extensions, for example, and I used to be able to associate all 100+ of those with two clicks. Now it’s more like 250 clicks if I want to do the same thing. In the first build where they removed that control panel, I could still run a long esoteric command to bypass the redirection to Settings and get the old panel back up, but then they made the panel itself redirect to Settings as well and I’m stuck.

That’s mostly an issue for me when I’m doing Windows installations or installing a particular set of programs, but there were some builds of Windows 10 where they took away the HomeGroup functionality (which I don’t use anyway) when that panel was also the only clear way in the GUI to switch a network that was Public to be Private instead. Until they added the setting back recently, I had a lot of customer computers where the ONLY way to switch the network mode was to edit the registry, and it couldn’t be done with some simple trick like a .reg file either, so it was always a manual registry edit. I also had several business customers get the Windows 10 1703 update and it switched ALL their networks to be Public automatically without prompting anyone, causing their computers to be unable to share printers and files and causing a panic on payroll day

I deal with normal people. I have to support those normal people. In Windows 7, I knew where everything was. I could easily talk to the user and tell them what to click. If I couldn’t remember, I’d follow along on my own machine. With Windows 10, fundamental stuff like the control panels change in every new “feature update” and there’s no guarantee that different users and myself will all be on the same build, so I can’t even follow along on my machine anymore; their network settings panel might look very different from my own because they got a new build and I’m still on an older one. It’s an absolute nightmare to do any sort of phone support for Win10. I often have to do a remote or have them bring it in, and the internet around here is absolutely abysmal because CenturyLink takes $500M a year from the Feds to expand rural broadband but only spend it to compete with areas that a competitor starts serving, and they control all the phone lines in the area.

The Financial Provider Neutrality Act (FIPNA), my legal solution to the payment processor bias problem

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

This is not a new problem but it’s becoming a much larger one. Many years ago, PayPal notoriously banned “adult” fiction book sellers (not actual pornography, just books with pornographic descriptions using words) from their service and it caused quite a stir. With the #PatreonPurge, PayPal’s banning of SubscribeStar, and a wide variety of individual de-platforming by other payment processors such as Stripe, we’re seeing overt actions by financial platform providers reminiscent of the days of Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklists, disrupting free exercise of speech and the ability of mutually consenting parties to engage in beneficial commerce in the age of the internet.

My solution is simple: FIPNA, the “Financial Provider Neutrality Act.” This would be a law (preferably an amendment to the United States Constitution) that forces the provider of ANY financial service platform (banks, card processors, online payment processors, investment firms, etc.) to accept and retain everyone on that platform unless they have actively used that platform to break the law or are otherwise legally barred from opening a bank account with that platform. This protection extends beyond banks to all “financial services platforms” because despite allowing you to have an account in which you may deposit and they retain funds, PayPal and others somehow are “not a bank” and are able to skirt a wide variety of consumer protection laws due to “not being a bank.”

Imagine if every bank in your town closed any bank account you opened shortly after you opened it because they didn’t like your political beliefs! That’s shockingly not far from where we’re heading with this behavior.

I am generally a pretty hard classical libertarian, but the immense control that near-monopoly corporations have over major aspects of the internet represent a colossal threat to our fundamental freedoms. What good is freedom of speech if you are banned from the public square? What good is freedom of speech if you can’t buy dinner because a required third party can block people from giving you the money that they WANT to give you? If you can’t exercise your fundamental freedoms in any effective way then you DO NOT actually have those freedoms.

Arguments about corporations having freedom of speech fall sorely flat here because this is an issue of corporate freedom of speech vs. individual freedom of speech, and the individual’s freedom of speech should always take priority. It’s debatable whether a financial platform is engaging in speech at all; they act as middlemen in transactions that skim money off the top, not as creators or publishers of speech, and if you are cut off from your income by an activist financial platform like Patreon and PayPal have been doing, your freedom of speech IS being curtailed because you can’t speak when you can’t pay for your survival.

I understand that we have hundreds of years of case law that says corporations have the same freedoms as individuals because corporations are groups of individuals exercising their freedoms and I don’t necessarily disagree with that concept. Where I draw the line is when corporate freedoms conflict with individual freedoms, and in such instances I believe that individual freedoms must take precedence and restrictions must be imposed on the corporation to preserve those individual liberties, lest society become like the worst-case example of a democracy: “three wolves and a rabbit decide what’s for dinner.”

See also: Patreon May Have Violated Anti Trust Laws In Sargon Debacle and Patreon + PayPal = Antitrust Violation (I’m done)

UPDATE: George Carlin, as always, puts it best. Here’s his diatribe on political correctness; “political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”

How to permanently disable Adobe’s PDApp.log (and others) on Windows or Mac

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

UPDATE (2020-02-16): Reports are coming in that this doesn’t work with the newest Adobe CC programs since they’re rotating the logs now. If this doesn’t work for you, it may be best to run a temporary file cleanup tool daily, such as Disk Cleanup included in Windows, CCleaner (warning: since Avast bought it, it’s a bit spammy now), or similar. Alternatively, if you are handy with such things, write a batch file that deletes the log files and add it to Task Scheduler as a task to run when you normally won’t be active on the machine.

UPDATE (2019-10-21): Adobe’s support has noticed this post and is attempting to have the bug behind this issue fixed. See the comments!

I recently discovered that Adobe’s Creative Cloud software left a massive pile of PDApp.log files in my temporary directories, as well as a few others such as CEP8-PPro.log and AdobeIPCBroker.log. These were taking up quite a bit of space, and I’ve looked up PDApp.log only to discover that some people have had serious issues with PDApp.log consuming all available free space on their drives after a while. One user reported having a 600GB log file! Needless to say, several people have asked how they can control these log files, but as usual, Adobe support and forum users offered no actual solutions.

I’m here with your solution!

Adobe log symlinks
What a sweet, sweet sight these are.

On Windows, you’ll need to open Task Manager and kill all Adobe processes to unlock the log files (not just stuff starting with Adobe, but also Creative Cloud processes and any node.exe instances they started) then open an administrative command prompt and type the following two commands:

cd %temp%
del PDApp.log
mklink PDApp.log NUL:

This goes to your temporary directory, deletes the PDApp.log file (if you get an “in use” error here you missed an Adobe process in Task Manager), and creates a file symbolic link to a special device called NUL: which is literally the “nothing” device. When the Adobe apps write to PDApp.log now, all writes will succeed (no errors) but the data will simply be discarded. You can repeat the delete/mklink process for any other Adobe logs you don’t want around anymore. Best of all, because symlinks on Windows require admin privileges to modify, the Adobe apps won’t rotate these fake log files out! Be aware that cleanup tools like CCleaner or Disk Cleanup may delete these links, so you may need to repeat these steps if you delete your temp folder contents with a cleaning tool. You may want to write a small batch file to run the commands in one shot if you like to delete temp files frequently.

On Mac OS (note: I haven’t tested this myself, but it should work) you should be able to kill all Adobe processes with Activity Monitor, then open Terminal, then type this:

ln -sf /dev/null ~/Library/Logs/PDApp.log

Linux/UNIX administrators will recognize this as the classic “redirect to /dev/null” technique that we all know and love. Since I have no way to test this, Adobe may rotate these links out, but you can use this command to lock down the symlink if it does:

sudo chown -h root:wheel ~/Library/Logs/PDApp.log

This will ask for your account password since it requires privilege escalation. This command makes the link owned by “root” which means normal user programs can’t rename or delete it, though they can still write through the link, so the trick will continue to work.

UPDATE: Some have asked what the purpose of the PDApp.log file is and whether it’s safe to do this. The answers are, respectively, “logs information for troubleshooting Creative Cloud installation problems” and “yes, absolutely.” If you’re not having installation issues, this log is just taking up space and wearing out your SSD. If you need to “re-enable it” it’s as simple as deleting the “decoy” links you made with these directions which will allow the logs to be created as if nothing ever happened.

Too many YouTube ads on mobile and TV? Bypass them with SaveTube and Plex!

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

Adblock Plus does a great job of blocking ads on desktops and laptops, but on “app” devices like phones and TVs, ad blocking simply isn’t available. This isn’t a solution for blocking ads during casual browsing of YouTube on mobile and TV apps, but it’s a great way to get videos you know you’ll want to watch later and watch them on “app” devices with no more ad breaks ruining everything. You need two things: Sebaro’s SaveTube (and a browser extension like Greasemonkey to enable running user scripts if your browser doesn’t have native user script support) and a Plex Media Server setup. I can’t explain in this post how to install browser extensions like Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey and add SaveTube to it, nor can I explain how to install and set up Plex, but your favorite search engine and the Plex website can tell you everything you need to know.

  1. Install SaveTube.
  2. Have Plex installed, set up, and working. You’ll need Plex Media Server on your computer and the Plex app on your phone, tablet, TV, Chromecast, Roku, or whatever you happen to own.
  3. Create a new folder for your YouTube videos and add it to your Plex Media Server. Call it “YouTube videos” or whatever you like and classify the folder in Plex as “other videos.”
  4. Open a video you’d like to watch without ads. SaveTube should appear at the bottom right corner of the screen if you have it installed properly.
  5. Click “Get” in SaveTube to save a copy of the video to your computer. This defaults to the highest resolution MP4 that contains both audio and video in a single file. In general, you can’t download 1080p or 4K content already in this “muxed” file format, so it’s best not to mess with the default choice. SaveTube’s red-orange options are called “DASH streams” and contain ONLY audio or ONLY video, meaning you’ll have to remux the separate streams if you want the options that aren’t available in blue. As you can tell by now, it’s easiest to just hit “Get” and leave the other SaveTube options alone.
  6. Repeast steps 4 and 5 for every video you want.
  7. Move the YouTube video(s) you downloaded to the folder you made and added to Plex.
  8. Open the Plex Media Server web portal, click “…” to the right of your YouTube video library, and have it “scan library files.” This will refresh the list of available videos with your new additions.
  9. Open Plex on your device of choice and enjoy the videos you fetched 100% ad-free!

Legal disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but for a layperson I have a fairly strong understanding of copyright law. It is my non-professional opinion that the actions taken here do not constitute copyright infringement or a violation of the non-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. YouTube’s page code has a block of text called “var ytplayer” that contains unencrypted URLencoded URLs to these video streams and there are no access controls on the server that restrict you from accessing videos through the links in that block of code. As long as you follow standard copyright law restrictions for the content (no redistribution, no public exhibition, etc.) this should be 100% legal. If you’re asking why this would be legal when “YouTube-to-MP3 sites” aren’t, it’s because those sites engage in redistribution of content which is an action protected by copyright. In fact, you can do the MP3 conversion yourself if you use SaveTube to download a “medium bitrate audio MP4” and use a free conversion tool like ffmpeg, Audacity, or Format Factory to convert the .m4a file to .mp3 format instead.

If you’re an attorney (a real attorney, not a person like me that simply thinks they’re smart and probably isn’t) and you believe that this procedure is not legal, please feel free to contact me and explain.

Windows batch file that converts all files in a directory to Apple ProRes

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

Windows batch file programming is terrible because the commands have poorly thought out syntax and peculiar requirements, such as double percent signs in batch files but not on the command line. I often make batch files that perform conversions with ffmpeg and when I decided to start trying out Final Cut Pro 7, I realized that I needed to mass convert MP4 video files to ProRes. My Windows machines are much more powerful than my Macs, so I wanted to be able to convert a whole directory to ProRes on Windows by dropping the directory onto a batch file. It took forever to hammer around cmd.exe’s stupid peculiarities but I finally got this together which works (note you’ll need to install ffmpeg somewhere in your PATH or specify an absolute path to it, and you must replace “C:\processed” with your desired output path):

for /F “tokens=*” %%D in (‘dir /b /a:-d %1’) do ffmpeg -y -i %1\%%D -c:v prores -profile:v 2 -vendor ap10 -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -c:a pcm_s16le -ar 48000 “C:\processed\%%~nD.mov”
pause

If you want different ProRes levels, change profile:v to 0 (Proxy), 1 (LT), or 3 (HQ); if you want ProRes 4444 you’ll have to change the encoder to prores_ks and set the level to 4444 and the pix_fmt to yuva444p10le.

The “pause” at the end is just in case you have problems and need to scroll up.

Windows 2000’s user interface was way better than Windows 10

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

This is part of a comment I left on a video about Windows 10. It seems like it should be here as well. It’s been modified for better presentation.

The Windows 2000 user interface was better than all that followed. Some improvements were made in each successive version but Windows 7 was the last one where the few bad UI change decisions could be easily worked around and adjusted to by users. Everything UI went straight to hell after Windows 7. The Charm bar is dead in 10 because it was an extremely poor UI decision from the get-go.

  • “Tablet Mode” on 10 is worse ON TABLETS than “normal” mode.
  • The “flat” design scheme with monochromatic ambiguous icons is more difficult for the human eye to scan and recognize.
  • A lack of borders, shadows, 3D edges, etc. makes UI elements mush together. Low contrast between UI elements greatly exacerbates the flat design issues.
  • Retracting Modern scrollbars are extremely annoying to use and greatly slow down anyone trying to use such scroll bars.
  • Removing the 3D appearance and dark borders from normal scrollbars and reducing the contrast between scrollbar buttons and the bar itself have made normal scrollbars much slower to use for experts and nearly impossible for novices.
  • The schizophrenic Control Panel/Settings dichotomy can only be described as a disaster, with every build of Windows 10 changing the names of categories, adding new ones, making Control Panel items kick over to Settings panels instead of doing what they’re supposed to do, moving settings around with no educational hints as to where the settings have moved to, etc.
  • There are no hints to educate users about how to use the system, what changes have been made, what features are available.
  • There is no longer any form of offline help available to learn about the system.
  • Things that can be clicked often don’t look clickable and vice-versa.
  • Things that can be dragged now have zero visual indication that they can be dragged; there are no drag handles on the Start menu edges and no border frames on scalable Modern program windows, for example.

Windows 10 is objectively a terrible user interface. People succeed in spite of it, not because of it.

How is downloading an illegally distributed work considered copyright infringement under the law?

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

I’m explicitly looking for more information on this. On a plain reading of the statute that governs copyright, U.S. Code Title 17, I don’t see how downloading (or buying a bootleg, or in any other way acquiring an illegally distributed work) constitutes copyright infringement.

17 USC 501(a) says that copyright infringement occurs when someone violates the “exclusive rights” of the copyright owner.

17 USC 106 lays out what constitutes exclusive rights: reproduction (making copies,) creating derivative works, distributing copies, and performing or displaying the work “publicly.” Nowhere is the act of obtaining, acquiring, purchasing, receiving, possessing, etc. mentioned.

I suppose one could see the “making copies” part and argue that downloading is making an illegal copy, but the problem with this reasoning is that the person downloading didn’t make the copy that they’re receiving, they simply received a copy that was made by the uploader. I liken this to getting on eBay and buying a bootleg DVD of something: the bootlegger made and distributed the copy, not the purchaser. The U.S. Copyright Office has a statement that treats uploading and downloading copyrighted material as the same act and claims that they’re illegal, but there is no statutory or case law reference.

Please, if you know what the “glue” is that allows the jump from the copyright statutes that don’t mention acquisition to “downloading music is copyright infringement,” chime in and drop some references to the applicable statutes or case law, for the edification of all of us.