Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically “piracy” but it’s amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

What is it supposed to say? “Tailor swift” on Wikipedia just redirects to “Taylor Swift”

When real life does not match up with the description given by social rejects on a site notorious for infidelity

Yep. Anyone can do that, actually. I can declare you a terrorist. It’s totally my right to do so, but the question is–so what? What am I going to do about it?

The US government has declared the Iranian organisation a terrorist organisation. What have they done about it?

The amount of outrage on this thread is just ignorant people learning how international geopolitics and the concept of absolute state sovereignty work for the first time. Yes, it is the case that big countries get to stick their fingers into the business of little countries. Yes, it is unfair. But that’s how it is and that’s how it’s always gonna be for the foreseeable future. That’s how it always has been for all of human history. From Ur to Rome to Vienna to London to Washington. From Chang’an to Beijing to Nanjing to Tokyo and now back to Beijing. In the next century maybe it will be some other country kicking around everyone else instead of the US. But I can practically guarantee that there will be kicking and there will be people continuing to complain about how unfair it is, because it is and always has been.

I’d like to say we should do better as a species, but in reality, what we have now is really fucking amazing compared to when Genghis Khan would come romping around town destroying your villages and murdering your people, or the Romans coming and demanding fifty talents of silver by sunset or else, or the Belgians planting rubber trees in your backyard.

It can save people. I’m saying it doesn’t always do that and occasionally it works the other way around. It is not a binary “yes” or “no”.

But if we have the opportunity to trade a robber for an evangelist, then I’ll take that trade any day. Robbers actively hurt society as their dayjob. Evangelists at most just talk and vote annoyingly (depending on your political views)

You can call it misplaced, unfunny, or naïve but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it. Plenty of people in prison use religion as a means of self-improvement and then wrench themselves back onto the straight path after their release.

(I feel that if I don’t say “an equal number of people use religion as a justification for evil deeds” someone will mention it. Religion doesn’t make you a good person in itself. It’s your actions that decide that and religion is a means to that.)

Not for the shipping company. It’s not their oil. The Iranians can ask the shipping company for compensation, which they could easily refuse and there isn’t much recourse that the Iranians would have. The Chinese could demand compensation but if the company again refuses or claims insolvency or whatever, it’s easier for the Chinese to just stiff the Iranians with payment instead.

I wasn’t aware that you were a sovereign state or that I had any money deposited in your banks or that I do business of any sort with you.

You can sanction me by putting a permanent embargo on conversing with me by blocking me if you want

I hate that “confirmation bias” have become moo words with people nowadays.

The logic is pretty sound:

• A company that does business in the United States must comply with American laws.
• It is forbidden under American law for a company that operates from the United States to do business with Iran.
• The company, through its child, shipped oil from Iran.
• American authorities, enforcing American law, ordered the company to divert the ship and turn over the oil for confiscation because the shipment was illegal.
• Oil is confiscated.

I remark that sanctions do not require the approval of the United Nations. Under customary international law, it is an application of sovereign authority. Any country can apply sanctions and can do so in any way you like. What the USA has said is that “if you want to do business here, we forbid you from doing business with Iran”.

The ship was not intercepted by the Navy. They served a court order on the company and the company turned the ship back and its cargo was seized

The legal grounds: The oil was shipped by a US company in violation of US law. American companies can’t do business with an organisation that the US government has designated as a terrorist organisation. Thus American authorities siezed the ship and its cargo.

They are not. I do not refer to the package called “LibreOffice”. If you search for “office” on the Windows Store, you’ll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.

The Windows Store limits the number of machines that you can install paid software on to 10. If you are managing a lot of computers you’d be better off with some actual management software or at least a package manager like Chocolatey. Then you can push software to your machines, run updates, or uninstall stuff whenever you like.

They can install the same management software that most companies around the globe put on their employee’s phones to track what their minions are doing on company hardware. You don’t need special backdoors for that.

I’m sure the Government can go tell a company to remove the backdoors on Government devices:

Remove all the backdoors and we’ll buy phones for each of our 100,000 employees and award your company a ¥3 gazillion support contract. But if we find out the NSA hacked our phones then there’ll be big trouble, Mao Zedong-style.

This is like the people who repackage and rebrand LibreOffice and then resell it for $10 on the Windows Store to gullible users.

And the worst part about that is that it doesn’t even break the law.

I didn’t say that the dislike for the symbol was rational; I just said that I understand how people could come to dislike it.

I hope your realise that people can understand why others think in a certain way without agreeing with that way of thinking. You seem to think that because I said that I can understand why Finnish people might not like the hammer and sickle, I must therefore support banning it. I don’t.

I’m not gonna say I agree with this or defend censorship but when your country got invaded by the most famous communist country in history and had a bad time under their rule, then it’s quite understandable why people there don’t like symbols associated with said country.

The entire affair is just a mess of history. A fascist dictatorship being replaced with a communist one.