While I agree there's not a universally agreed upon definition of terrorism, I want to hear more about why you think bombing with novel munitions expressly delivered to dense urban areas which killed 250k people 90% of whom were civilian, in an attempt to scare them into surrender, is not "terrorism".
Killing people while trying to scare them into surrender is a feature shared by both terrorism and wars. A big bombing campaign done by an army is a war, not a terrorism.
Even when they specifically target civilians? What would you call a bomb exploded in times square? What if it were placed there by Iranian soldiers? Is that war, or terrorism?
If those soldiers are in full uniform bringing in an unconcealed bomb, and it's part of a broader campaign that's also going after military targets, I would not call that terrorism.
There is no distinct line between war and terrorism. Even before World War II, leaders would proudly and openly call for terrorism against their enemies and civilians. Most notably communist leaders like Lenin, who didn't shy away from using the word "terror" and "terrorism" to describe their own campaigns.
As for allied bombings, there is a chapter here on the term "Terror bombings":
The war was won by systematic, deliberate terror bombings, these weren't accidents or rare incidents.
From the great general Patton:
"We then went to the town hall and saw the Mayor, the Chief of Police, etc. I told Truscott to do the honors as he had captured Messina. The town is horribly destroyed – the worst I have seen. In one tunnel there were said to have been 5,000 civilians hiding for over a week. I do not believe that this indiscriminate bombing of towns is worth the ammunition, and it is unnecessarily cruel to civilians."
As for the Germans, they were among other things conducting terror attacks on civilan ships with their submarines, and openly calling their population to "total war".
The allies won the war by conducting terrorism of the largest level in human history. That might have been the only way for them to win. I don't think anybody here is a better general than Eisenhower or McArthur was, to be able to suggest a better way.
All sides of WWII were conducting outright terror attacks on the civilians of their enemies, with the allied terror bombings of German cities and terror nuclear bombings of Japanese cities being the most devastating of these.
I never enjoyed the Android syncthing experience, so I just plug my phone in once a month and manually copy the vault over. I don't ever edit on my phone, so I don't need two-way syncing.
On macOS when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it takes forever. On KDE when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it's instantaneous.
On macOS when I connect or disconnect an external monitor, my applications get all confused on where they should display, especially if I then reconnect a monitor. On KDE when I unplug my monitor everything goes nicely onto one desktop. When I put a monitor back in, everything goes back to where it was before. It just works.
On macOS, every time I install a new program I need to do some dance with System preferences to allow it to run. I tried some command line settings that supposedly disables this, but it never sticks. Every few months, the process is different than it was before. On KDE, I just run my software and it works.
On macOS, I don't have useful window snapping behavior or full-screen behavior, nor am I able to have focus follow my mouse. On KDE, I have these.
macOS just doesn't work for me. But the competitors have a good solution.
Why not? People choose their tools by criteria that matter to their use cases. For some, alt-tab behavior doesn't matter. For others it's a primary pain point.
Computing should be personal. Some people like to mold their tools to their way of working. Others adapt their way of working to their tools. KDE is for the former, and macOS is for the latter.
Why would someone else use my criteria? They should use their own criteria? I certainly am not going to use your "it's niche so it can't be useful" criteria as it's important to my usage.
That's the point of this. TouchID is no longer enabled. Someone unknown party approaches you, you close your lid (disabling TouchID). Then they "legally" ask you to put your finger on the sensor. You do. They didn't ask you before you close your lid.
You're thinking more along the lines that they ask you to touch the sensor and you use your fingernail razor blades to damage the sensor or something like that.
> Did Satoshi not care about the ethical implications of creating bitcoin? Mr Back may not be Satoshi, but he's also made a career driving the adoption of bitcoin and bitcoin itself has enabled many, many terrible crimes.
Nobody seems to be angry at the inventor of coins and bills, though.
Yes that's all reasonable but the comparison is paying for (or giving them other revenue) corporations who also love to shuffle money around and can support causes you are actively against. The point being made was that people give causes trying to improve society more scrutiny than they give for-profit mega corporations who have in the past shown that they use their money for a lot of things detrimental to society.
Assuming there is a healthy market, then you have alternatives you can purchase your products and goods from. These alternatives may have other trade-offs and in fact, there may well be open and closed alternatives as well as hybrid options.
Some people simply want the "best fit" solution for a product. IMO, this used to be Outlook+Exchange, hands down... M365 scaling has enshittified the bundle in a lot of ways leaving a wide gap for alternatives. Google's GMail is a leading alternative that is a closed service. Thunderbird is an open solution that solves part of the problem (shared calendars/contacts only having half the solution).
When you pay for a product, you often are able to give feedback and request for features... the expectation is that you are getting value for what you are paying and that the company continues to do so while adding features that add more value in time.
When you donate to an open-source project, and that project redirects funds to have a multi-million dollar marketing event that only benefits middle managers and seeks to add revenue with features the majority of donors oppose, then someone who would otherwise support the development might rightly feel a bit betrayed or choose not to donate altogether, much like someone might not purchase a given product or service from a company that does what they feel are bad things.
It's not dramatically different, it's just when/where the individual might expect a level of transparency, value or direction. A purchase is against existing value... a donation is against future value.
I think we're talking past each other. I am not saying that people shouldn't be upset that if they donate to an organization that a large portion of that money might go to things they rather that organization not do. Like a $100 donation might have $20 of overhead or waste.
What I don't get is why people don't think the same for for-profit enterprises. If I spend $120 a year on some SaaS, I don't ask what portion of that goes into the CEOs pocket who might use that money to buy politicians to advance tax policy they prefer, or government contracts against the public interest, etc.
It's not about the expected value of a product, it's about what else your money funds when you hand it over to a corporation that people rarely consider. They should consider it just as much as they consider donations to non-profits.
Also, the assumption of a healthy market is not one I would take. A lot of corporate money is spent on regulatory capture and other ways to prevent a healthy market. Funded by customer spend. A purchase is against future value in the same way that past purchases are what allow companies today to make markets less healthy.
While I get what you're saying, I think it's exactly in that the expectations are different between a donation and a payment for product/service.
You pay for an existing product/service and expect that product/service to be fit for a need... that's generally it as far as expectations go... some may actually care about a company being a bad actor and boycott etc, but that's secondary in and of itself. You immediately get the product or service that exists.
A donation, is against expectations for results... though there may be other reasons to donate to a cause/charity.
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