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Why is it legal to buy and sell used books/discs but illegal to buy and sell used digital files?
  • Maybe things have changed, but in the US it used to be a question of when does a digital file "exist". The law was: when you buy a digital asset, the first time that asset is instantiated is the one true version of the file. To sell it you MUST sell the device where it first appeared. So you have to sell the computer, phone, or tablet that was used to download it. Maybe that law has been revised.

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    Can someone answer a nagging question i have about CRT?
  • These concepts confuse me. There is clearly a range of variation in physical form of humans. Over time we've assigned meaning to some of those variations. Sure you can DNA test and try to correlate those variations to DNA but the underlying idea that assigns meaning to it all is purely made up. Historically, I can't see anything positive to come out of these constructs and I see nothing useful about them. Ultimately, what does that have to do with CRT (seriously, after all these years I can't even tell you what CRT is, it seems like an idea for judging bias in legal settings, not something 3rd graders will ever learn).

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    when will be your last time to vote for the "lesser of two evils"?
  • It always has been, and always will be, voting for the lesser evil. That's because of the voting system. Single vote, winner take all. Push for ranked choice or some other vote system. Then we can learn if it's turtles (evil) all the way down.

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    Never more nervous
  • Like many people, I suffer from Refrigerator Blindness. My wife, however, does not. I learned to never assume we are out of something. I always assume I just can't see it.

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    Are you a professional or a hobbyist? How did you get your start in programming? What type of project/s are you working on currently?
  • Pro and hobbyist. I started by learning Basic back in the late 1970's. Got a EE with strong emphasis on Analog and DSP. Did analog for test and measurement systems but had to add microprocessors (and EPROMs and RAM) to build the systems that control the analog. For embedded I learned C. For PCs I did Basic, Forth (ugh), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, then C#. I'm heavy into unit testing. I did web development as well, back in 1997 to maybe 2010. Perl, PHP, MySQL, Linux, then Drupal. A lifetime ago.
    I can't tell what I'm working on now (professionally) but hobby-wise I do a lot of arduino stuff and some of it has been a blast. I did an automatic dog food dispenser a few years back that was an amazing tour of engineering your way out of failure. The look on my dogs face when the MK1 version sent a fire-hose stream of dog food across the room was awesome.

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