I have no direct information about this specific case, but in ye olden Unix™ days, there was no /sbin, so all those binaries instead lived in /etc. The Red Hat symlinks could be a backwards-compatibility thing.
Part of the problem is that the browser just mindlessly goes along with it.
We've got into a situation where the vast majority of users don't know and don't want to know about any of the details of what's going on, and by default most browsers just allow them to be tracked in a variety of different ways. Website writers/maintainers quite often don't know themselves what a framework is doing, and everyone writes using the assumption that cookies are something they can just use. It sometimes looks like everyone except the end user was involved in the development of the situation.
What you're saying isn't wrong, but I doubt that societies where rulers have a monopoly on violence have existed long enough to have had an impact on evolution.
> That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build.
There’s no reason to assume software being innocent/bug-free unless proven otherwise. This is not the case with humans, at least in civilized parts of the world.
There’s probably a lot more than what is obvious here.
Compare a modern clip to something that was made in the 70/80s. I guess it does take some skill to not end up with 2 bodies just lying atop each other and properly cutting away the boring/disgusting stuff while still maintaining some "flow".
And there’s lots and lots of competition .. so differentiating on quality might still be worthwhile, despite it possibly not being the most important factor.
I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.
Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?
Hence piracy.
Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?
The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something right now, don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.
And as soon as everyone starts using s/he, bigender people get annoyed that heshe wasn't used. It's language...it's difficult to get everyday usage "normalized" into a different direction.
I nowadays just use he or she (or rather: try to stick to that - I fumble at times when writing casually), in german and in english. The german form is longer, because the noun also has a gender there.
