We are discussing the porn itself, not what happened in the process of making it. If it were illegal to possess a video because it depicts a crime, then it would also be illegal to possess a video of police murdering innocent people, and we definitely don’t want to go there.

How was he supposed to know, if no one ever told him? They didn’t teach about child porn when I was in school, and Stallman is older than me.

Printers should probably be connected by USB for security reasons anyway.

We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there’s nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.

I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.

Most people observe that everyone else thinks it’s bad and don’t question it any further. That’s not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.

Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don’t know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child’s privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject’s privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.

Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.

Printers these days tend to be driverless, so that’s pretty much a solved problem.

And back at that time if you installed any flavor of Linux you were lucky if the OS install didn’t fuck itself over

I was using Linux religiously back then, and this is false. As long as there’s a driver for all of your hardware, it generally worked fine.

But that “as long as” is doing some heavy lifting. The usual suspects were pretty much the same as now: Broadcom, NeoMagic, and NVIDIA. Some cheap printers and modems were problematic as well, but if you paid for good hardware, it would probably work.

The wireless kind, presumably. Those always need their own firmware and therefore their own driver.

Which is not a desktop.

Since when did Bethesda have QA?

If you can’t afford Starfield, how can you afford a computer capable of running it?

Yikes. Thanks for the heads up.

What’s wrong with it?

You might pay for a subscription-based future, but I will stay on PC where this sort of nonsense is not tolerated.

With a console controller? Being barely able to aim isn’t my idea of easy. Mouse and keyboard, please.

Who needs a wireless mouse when you’re sitting right in front of the computer it’s plugged into?

I take it you don’t already have a desktop you can use?

“If you open this device, the contained alien immediately escapes, rendering it inert.” There. Problem solved. Case dismissed.

Why not use a full-size computer for all that stuff?

I don’t see any riots. Seems to me that nobody cares—not even the people being made homeless.