Theoretically they could hash the the two characters with a salt and store it that way, but extremely unlikely they'd actually do that. And also fairly pointless. But still technically possible.
I am using unRAID so if one dies I can just replace it. About 4 years ago I bought a lot of fifteen 3TB SAS drives and I have had them running 24/7 since then. Funny enough not a single one has died. They all had around 5 years of power-on hours and now they are up to 9 and still going strong. Honestly I expected to lose at least one per year but they are surprisingly resilient.
I don't necessarily hate Manjaro, but I do think people shouldn't use it. Besides the things people have already said, Manjaro goes against the spirit of what Arch is supposed to be. Arch has everything you want and nothing you don't. You set everything up for yourself so you know exactly how your system works and why X package is installed. You tailor the experience for yourself rather than having someone else tailor it for you. If you wanted that you could just use a distro meant for that in the first place like Fedora.
But even if you really, really, want preconfigured Arch you could just use EndeavourOS. It uses the normal Arch repos and has basically none of the issues Manjaro has in terms of security and stability. There is not really any good reason to use Manjaro over it.
We already live in a world with copyright law and it's a shitshow so how much worse can it be? Have fun owning nothing and being nickle and dimed by subscriptions.
Again, piracy is not stealing it is copyright infringement. I don't believe ideas are property so I don't believe in protecting them. It's not that complicated.
That's not comparable. Restaurants have to supply physical goods. It costs money to transport and once it is consumed it is lost. Software is not bound by any of that. You can make unlimited copies without lifting a finger and use it indefinitely. If I could open a restaurant and feed people by simplying copy-pasting the food yes I would do that. World hunger would be solved.
And people can still pay for the product if they want to. I pirate every game and then buy it if it's good. You can have free software and still make money these things are not mutually exclusive. You don't need piracy laws for money to change hands.
If those industries die that's great. The only ones left will be the people who actually want to be there rather than the ones who are only after money.
We have a really easy example. I want the social media industry to die so here I am on Lemmy. If Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and so on die that is a positive. Then the only thing left will be the free and open fediverse run by volunteers.
If you are on Android there is Finamp, which isn't quite as nice but it is clean and free. If you're willing to pay a couple bucks there's also Symfonium which IMO is even better than Plexamp. It has way more customization and I love that it uses Material You.
He uses Arch BTW