Fond memories of running Rockbox on my iPod Video. Today, like many, I want to get away from my smartphone that only distracts me, and I wish I had kept my old iPod and upgraded its storage to flash. I wonder what battery availability is like now.
One of the many disappointing aspects of the PinePhone is that it would often stutter playing FLACs, something that Rockbox on weaker hardware never did.
I used a Kindle for a decade, but then switched to a Kobo device (Libra 2) and I really enjoy it. Kobo is friendly to users modding the device, so you can easily install KOReader that is a superior interface if you read a lot of PDFs.
In spite of being an avid reader, I have never actually bought an ebook. All my reading comes from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, or their predecessor communities for free downloads. Consequently, I never suffered from Amazon’s ecosystem: as soon as I took any new Kindle out of the box, I put it in airplane mode and only sideloaded books over USB.
Again, the Gazans I have known complained about being forced to stay; they saw it that way, and not being forced to leave if the border with Egypt opened. Some people want to fight for their ancestral homeland or whatever, but other people want money and opportunities. But yes, as I suggested in my post, Egypt’s behavior re: opening the border or annexing the Strip has always been significantly driven by how its own population and other Arab states would perceive things, and not necessarily what a young educated Gazan might want.
> Especially given that the people there don't want Egypt to do so, and have been rather...prickly
I have worked closely with young educated Gazans on projects that outsourced to them. They claimed that they would love to get access to the Egyptian labor market, and get an Egyptian passport so that they could have a hope of working in other markets internationally. They’d leave Gaza for better opportunities elsewhere in a heartbeat. Yes, of course some other Gazans wouldn’t want to leave at all, and Hamas wouldn’t permit Egypt authority over the area. But Egypt’s refusal to open the borders to Gazans is about a series of security concerns of its own, and not so much about universal Gazan resistance to the idea.
As a legal formality. A journalist who visited the registered address in Dubai fairly recently found no one at home. The app is honestly regarded as a Russian product.
Maps are actually a case where non-American solutions have succeeded to some degree: in the travel community outside North America, OSM-based apps like Komoot, Maps.me, and the Maps.me successor Organic Maps are very popular. Indeed, someone complaining about how Google Maps sucks is often a case of "spot the American/Canadian".
I have spent a lot of the last five years traveling the MENA region by bike, and the random local people I meet overwhelmingly want to exchange WhatsApp contact info (and are shocked to discover I don't have it, as I use only Signal). Sure, Telegram is around too, but WhatsApp's position is strong, and in any event Telegram is not a locally developed solution.
Your claim that people trust Telegram more is a stretch. I daresay the masses in the Global South think little about where their apps come from and are poorly informed about tech matters, just like in the Global North.
The Global South is overwhelmingly fond of WhatsApp, to the point that it has basically replaced the PSTN in some countries. And if this EU legislation passed, Meta would almost certainly get on board in order to not lose the European market. Where do you see deplatforming, or the shaking of WhatsApp’s monopoly and room for a local competitor to grow?
They can share those old photos and memories on social media, where their friends, families, and significant others can choose whether to look or ignore it.
> it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos
It definitely does replace that. It sucks so much to be trapped next to someone showing you their photo album or vacation slides, when you don’t really care, that this became a stock scene in 20th-century comedy TV series and films. Nowadays when people are sharing their photos online, that gives their peers the choice of whether to look or whether to ignore, and that is immensely freeing.
This sounds like the kind of abuse that led to changes in REI's returns policy. Back when you could return anything no questions asked for a full refund, people would e.g. buy a tent, sleeping bag, and stove, hike the Apallachian Trail, and then just return all the gear. Or buy one of REI's touring bikes, cycle one of the Trans-American routes, and then return the bike, etc.
Yes, you get it: with your detailed argumentation for one position you show you were already well aware of the distinction, unlike apparently the OP. But I suppose it is best that we refrain from further political battle here.
> It's because these things require real cost, time and effort from somebody else to acquire.
What you are writing there is a frequent complaint on discussion threads on news-for-nerds sites, but it misses the point: of course those things require real cost, time and effort from somebody else, and that is why there is a longstanding distinction between positive and negative rights.[0] Yes, the prominence of negative rights is a big feature of American culture due to the 18th-century Lockean context that the USA’s Founding Fathers operated in, but a lot of things have happened in the interim, and other views on rights have arisen. And even the USA gave lip service to the positive rights enshrined in the UN’s founding human-rights charter.
"Why would anybody want to be the enemy of the global superpower?"
In the case of both the Balkan wars and the invasion of Ukraine, it was because staying friends with the global superpower meant that one wouldn’t get control of the lands one claimed.
> A product using free and open-source data generated by the OSM community plus crowd sourcing traffic and keeping the code proprietary does not sit well with me.
This is already common. For example, Komoot which is now big in the bicycle-travel world, uses OSM data but keeps its code proprietary and even locks community-generated content down.
It's not really a matter of "Russian links". Maps.me was sold from its original founders to a payment-processing company that hasn't been developing the app further. That was the reason for the fork of its open-source codebase as Organic Maps, which is very actively developed.
My assumption is that they recovered apes placed into advanced test drones. After all, apes were put into early test spacecraft in the 1950s and 1960s. But today animal rights is a bigger concern, and the use of animal test subjects could cause controversy, so they want to keep that quiet. Hence the person testifying would disclose that only in a SCIF.
One of the many disappointing aspects of the PinePhone is that it would often stutter playing FLACs, something that Rockbox on weaker hardware never did.