This is just yet another “fuck you” to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.

It’ll be “allowed and supported” when e.g. you can download F-Droid from the Play Store instead of having to side-load it.

The internet is ^{supposed to be} peer-to-peer

FTFY. Megalomaniacal corporations, especially advertisers and the copyright cartel, are Hell-bent on “fixing” that so they can better control and exploit everyone, though.

The games I bought (not licensed) on Steam are also products (not services). Anybody who claims otherwise is either a self-serving liar or a fucking moron.

I can easily imagine it. I’ve still got boxes full of software on floppy disks and CD-ROMs that I “perpetually licensed” (a.k.a. bought), so don’t try to bullshit me that it isn’t possible!

“Perpetual licenses” are what used to be called “normal sales.” Every “licensing” scheme except perpetual ones are scams!

I imagine this is a fuckcars zone but it’s a hobby for people.

More than you know: even I use a bicycle as my daily-“driver,” LOL!

Of the six cars I have, only one isn’t an old, unreliable project car and/or two-seater. Even then, I only have that because my parents essentially forced it upon me. (They have some kind of silly hang-up about having a cargo bike be my sole means of transporting the kids, other than public transit.)

Perhaps ironically, good urbanism is what gives me the freedom to treat cars as a hobby instead of a necessity, and I firmly believe that’s the way it ought to be. It’s a lot like how people can be into horses while also still understanding that it’s a dumb idea to commute to work on horseback.

Presumably anything you’d agree to while buying from an independent dealer would be between you and the dealer, not you and the manufacturer, right? I don’t understand how the manufacturer would be a party to the transaction.

(It might be that I’m naive about how modern car sales work.)

Hence the “…with a problem” part.

Whoops, I really meant “devrais.”

Lego vehicles from the toy store will outlast this shitshow.

To be fair, those would outlast Toyotas, too.

Why would someone own 8 vehicles?

Because he’s a car enthusiast with a problem.

(Source: I own six.)

Je devrais demeneger a Montreal.

Wow, I never thought I’d find an actual good argument for keeping independent car dealers as middlemen instead of allowing first-party sales, but here we are.

The trick is designing the thing in such a way as to resist infiltration by astroturfing marketers.

It’s not an invalid question without context.

On the contrary: it is more than famous enough as a right-wing “gotcha” question that’s very fair to assume it’s invalid by default. Positive context would be necessary to justify treating it as genuine.

You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally…

First of all, that’s a Clean Air Act thing with limited purpose and scope, not a blanket restriction on owners’ right to modify their property. Moreover, it is certainly not a restriction imposed and enforced by manufacturers that somehow justifies making the software closed-source and DRM’d. I want to make it clear here that, by supporting closed-source vehicle software, what you are really supporting is private enforcement of laws instead of government enforcement of laws, which is incredibly fucked up.

Second, it is not true that the act of messing with the emissions system is itself illegal. What’s illegal is the act of using the vehicle on public roads afterwards. You can use your emissions-system-modified car off-road or on private property (e.g. farms or racetracks) all you want.

Third, the way that law is implemented is, frankly, bad and wrong anyway. Instead of saying that parts need to be EPA-certified (or, in practice, CARB-certified) to be legal to use and that the ECU has to report “ready,” what it should do is say you can modify it however you want but that it has to pass a real “stick-a-probe-in-the-tailpipe-and-actually-fucking-measure” emissions test instead of a bullshit “visually inspect and plug a computer into the OBD2 port” test.

…nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc).

No, that’s a lie. It is perfectly legal to swap your factory seat belts for a DOT-approved and properly-installed four-point racing harness, for instance.

I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.

That sort of thing could already happen for decades due to people fucking up their mechanical modification of the brakes, yet that’s always been allowed. In practice, it isn’t actually a widespread problem because people aren’t actually as suicidally moronic as you seem to think they are, and that isn’t going to magically change just because a computer is involved. Your argument is nothing but exactly the kind of fearmongering that I’m calling bullshit on.

As someone who’s been a fan of Free Software since I first heard of it in the late '90s, I used and recommended Macs in the early 2000s because (at time, at least) Apple was leaning into the Unix-nature and BSD underpinnings of the thing and coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator.

Not so much these days, though. Apple’s pivot in ideology towards locked-down consumer crap like iOS and the App Store – even going so far as to ditch bash for zsh just because they hated GPLv3 – ruined it.

Not gonna lie, the extent to which the motor, controller, etc. are proprietary is an important consideration for me when buying an e-bike. For example, I would rather have one that can’t connect to my phone etc. at all than one that can but requires a proprietary app.

(I also care about things like weird proprietary headset and bottom bracket hardware, on e-bikes and regular bikes alike.)

for the eight years I owned it

I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles

Whether it was <17,000 miles or <27,000 miles, if you put that little mileage on a car in eight years IMO you should reconsider whether you need to own one at all.