Interesting, thanks

That’s really weird explanation on part of CF CEO, as just after DNS request you usually connect to the site which address you requested and site gets a lot more details including full IP address anyway.

Why do you go there then? If you don’t, they won’t get their $3 out of you and universe is in balance again :-)

if that were not true, they wouldn’t be in business.

Why? They are not loosing anything while developers are gaining time using their website.

They had 66 million dollars revenue in 2021. They have about 20 million registered users (and much more unregistered, and that’s revenue not income, but let’s forget that). Do you really, honestly feel, that SO doesn’t save you $3 worth of time per year?

Because if he’s able to help anyone on SO, he very likely profited many, many times from free access to knowledge there before he got to this point. Given activity of average user he probably gained orders of magnitude more than he given.

I find rambling about money and compensation in such context distasteful.

SO provided platform which, while not perfect is used by millions of people. They aren’t overloaded with ads and dark patterns as many of the clones. If it’s worthless, why people are using it instead self hosted blogs for example?

Well guy complains about compensation for his “work”. I assume he’s ready to shell out a few dollars for when he’ll need it :-)

Would you prefer SO to be paid?

Probably goryllions as your friends nicely put it :-) why are you asking instead providing a number? Whatever I say, somebody will say that this answer is US propaganda, since it will be way to low to support idea that US is baddest of the bad guys.

I agree with your sentiment, but this thread is about communism. As someone who actually lives in post-communist country I can assure you that net effect is not what you’re looking for.

Right now my life is significantly better than someone who decides to live on government welfare.

30 something years ago, when we had socialism in my country it didn’t matter if you worked, got drunk or slept at work. Everybody had the same shitty flat and the same shitty products (assuming there were products at all).

This system has a lot of problems, but socialism sucked indefinitely more.

How is it different from having extra two kilograms of medical equipment in your bag?

I’ve no problem improving society just for the sake of it, given that everybody else also does. Sadly any bigger group of people will start getting freeloaders and I’m allergic for such BS.

I guess my grandparents who were “liberated” by Stalin’s army were also paid off by US propaganda?

Good thing you mentioned nazi Germany, because it’s actually known figure - 17 milion. That’s third place amongst dictatorship countries. Stalin did 23 million, Mao did 74 milion. During colonization actually Belgium was most bloodthirsty with 15 million attributed to Leopold II. From older history Genghis Khan was responsible for about 40 milion.

Recent war on Ukraine is couple hundred thousand in most grave estimates. Afganistan where both US and Russia waged wars lost in total similar number of people. To put things into perspective entire population of Iraq and Afghanistan combined is 83 million.

Then there’s case of native Americans which is very hard to assess ranging between 3 and 100 million. But that happened 100 years before USA was established so you have to decide if you want to associate these with USA or European countries.

Considering as anti US stance as possible - about 300 years of US history may more or less equal to 50 years of reign of Mao(though in reality it’s probably much lower number). So while they definitely have their sins your original statement doesn’t check out from math perspective.

Man that was a few weird paragraphs to write :-/

They have to be certified by Mastercard/Visa, so no chance for open source. A few banks have their own implementation. Apart from mentioned samsung has its own version.

In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it’s hard to escape for you.

In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.

Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn’t work in some cases.

That’s easily detectable. Try beating Google Safety Net that way.

“Can” and “have a reason” are different things. With attestation they actually have a reason.

I don’t believe in ethical companies. Microsoft was cool once, then Google was cool, now some people seem to think that Apple is cool.

Best way to not get burnt is not to get vendor locked with one of them. Android allows me to install Firefox(real one, not Safari re-skin), replace launcher or even entire OS with Graphene. Google sucks in many ways, but if I’m not happy with them I just install software from another vendor. With ios I have to throw away half of the hardware I own.

I never wrote they are objectively inferior. I even admitted they can be marginally better in some areas. My point is they’ll vendor lock the hell out of you and the trade off isn’t worth it.

Meanwhile you wrote two walls of text to defend company that uses your children and technology worse than ICQ (released in 1996) to make you buy their products. You’re free to do so, but I’m not sure which one of us is salty :-)