He's also the reason no conservatives believe in climate change. He started the meme that it's a socialist conspiracy to extract money out of the US. So not only did he not contribute anything worthwhile, he actively worked to make money at the whole world's expense.

No, they still exist.

In this week's totally grassroots and natural discussion topics I keep seeing these two themes repeated over and over again (here and elsewhere): Open source developers should be paid employees - nay they must be! - oh and Firefox sucks. Boy does it suck. They're going to be just like Chrome, just watch.

It's like the "No for real bro I totally love paying for YouTube what the hell is wrong with you you freeloader" shit all over again.

I don't feel like an oligarch.

I recently was holding out hope for a franchise that was similarly treated. I can tell you from experience that Sims 5 will make a billion dollars and they will then fire all the programmers who made it.

Now they just need a Factory to create more Factories and they...

I apologize, this is Factorio, not Java.

For anyone curious, I'll save you a click. I don't think it's particularly funny, but Santos is an idiot, so more power to them I guess.

I'll try to give an ELI5 kind of answer here.

Before the Internet, "networks" were mostly one-offs you would dial into with a modem. Big or small, users would dial into the systems to enjoy whatever content was available on them.

The Internet was created as a way to connect multiple, disparate network nodes like these. Now, instead of just letting people access your content, you could now let them access other people's content as well.

There were lots of programs made to do this. IRC for chatting, Archie and Gopher for searching FTP sites for downloads you might want. There was also Usenet - a threaded discussion forum. The discussions looked a lot like Lemmy - there were subject lines and when you clicked on them there was threaded discussion you could read and participate in.

When this was all initially going on the Internet was mostly text-based. We may have been accessing Usenet from our Windows 3.1 laptops (I used a program called Agent), but all these programs were doing was trading text. Slowly though, bandwidth started creeping up.

As bandwidth began to creep up, people realized that huge text posts to Usenet could be used to post things like photos encoded to text. And thus was uuencoding born - and it didn't stop at photos. But because Usenet posts are limited in size, big files would get posted as multiple parchives - in multiple sections/posts that could be stitched back together into a whole again.

It was in this way that Usenet - a system designed for conversation - became a way to trade files.

Meanwhile the web happened. Discussion quickly moved to the web because you didn't have to download a separate program to view web forums. At the time, web forums were inherently inferior (they couldn't do threaded discussion) but they were also inherently superior (they could be moderated). Yeah, Usenet was unmoderated and because of this it was basically a huge pile of dogshit by the time the web got huge.

Usenet did continue to flourish though - as this sort of Frankenstein file-sharing system. The problem is that most Usenet servers were hosted by ISPs because they wanted to host discussions - not file-sharing. So they shut their Usenet servers down. But the file sharing was just too useful to die, so dedicated Usenet providers popped up and picked up the slack where the local ISPs left off. It wasn't hard. Usenet is just a protocol - anybody can adhere to it and create a node.

And clients changed too - from the readers I used like Agent, to new readers that recognized that people using Usenet aren't looking for discussion anymore. They're looking for an easy way to find the files they want and a program that will seamlessly stitch together all those PAR files behind the scenes for them to get it.

This was the purpose behind Newzbin, which was an elaborate way to access the remaining Federation of (now mostly dedicated, paid) Usenet servers and easily find and download all they had to offer. It was super easy and worked very well, so naturally, it was fucked into oblivion by Hollywood in 2010.

The great thing about Usenet though, is you can't kill it by killing off one node. The other great thing is that it's pretty stupidly complicated by today's standards, so it still exists because it's been largely forgotten while Hollywood focuses on stuff like torrenting.

If you want to access Usenet, you will need to purchase access to a company that runs a Usenet server and get client software that can help you find and stitch together those PAR files. I am out of the loop, so I am afraid I cannot help you any further with that. But hopefully if you know the history of it and how it works in theory, it should help.

Exactly this. If you don't want me to quit without notice, do you also vote against politicians who vote for "right-to-work" legislation?

Yeah, you don't get to write a fucking law that says you can fire me on the spot for any reason at all and then insist that I give you two weeks.

Besides, these days it's a different world - there's a labor shortage. A serious one. Warm body? You're hired. Nobody gives a fuck. They can't afford to. Especially in minimum wage.

Truthfully in a technical aspect: somewhat. But USENET is also largely unmoderated. So for the purposes of meaningful discussion, there is little comparison.

For anyone who wants to do this, use Kill Windows Update. It's simple. and it works. There's several million reasons why conventional wisdom demands that you NOT do it, but I don't give a fuck and if you don't either, then this program is for you.