Abstaining from alcohol is one of 75 different activities and behaviors identified by the Chinese government as a sign of potential religious extremism. It is listed in brochures distributed in some parts of Xinjiang to educate the public on how to identify extreme religious activities.

What next? Breathing air?

While I agree that many FOSS devs/maintainers would find donations and other monetary support very useful, please remember that money isn't the solution for everything. This is especially the case for mental and emotional wellbeing. Funding might increase the entitlement and demands of the users on the maintainer's time. What the maintainer really needs might be some time off or reduction on their workloads.

I'm all for donating to these projects. But don't let that be an excuse to treat them badly and make unreasonable demands on them.

I'm sure that this won't stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.

One of the main factors contributing to this problem is how customers simply give up their rights for convenience. Pro-customer options don't disappear. They die a slow painful death.

Take the example of DRM in books. All the easy options like from Amazon are DRM encumbered. But the DRM-free options are still available if you are willing to search a bit. They don't cost much extra either. But people don't care. And direct sellers providing DRM-free books wither away in neglect. Similar examples are still around for reparable devices, DRM-free multimedia, etc.

Consumers rights are not a given. Like any rights, those are the ones you have to defend. You have to put at least a little bit of effort to protect it. When I suggested this recently, I was accused of 'victim-blaming'. What escape is there when the victims are not ready to fight back?

Mastodon has no privacy at all. Even if you host your own instance. People use Mastodon for freedom and to get away from manipulation by corporate social media.

I don't think they have any religious basis for this.

The same applies to Russia. You can say something similar about ultra conservative Catholics, since the Pope has called for tolerance. Yet, they would rather denounce the Pope than tolerate LGBTQ+.

The key idea is that bigotry is not driven by religious affiliation, but rather by authoritarian attitudes. That's what's common between China, Russia and the ultra conservatives in the US. Tolerance of LGBTQ indicates freedom and liberalism in some sense. And both are challenges to the stakeholders of authoritarianism. They want a world where people live within the framework they dictate - and thus the bigotry.

Don't ever buy HP printers. Their customer abuse is getting egregious by the day. Though, I wish there was more competition in the printer market.

Articles like these are the proof - Americans wouldn't know fascism if it hit them in the face. And they need reminders that water is wet. After all that has happened and is going on, does anybody need to be told that the US is under serious threat from an exceptionally out-of-control domestic terrorism problem?

I'm starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they're trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.

BTW, this isn't the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.

I don't know what people are expecting to happen with the Linux desktop. If there was ever a year of the Linux desktop, it was probably in the mid-2000s, when Ubuntu made the Linux desktop usable for regular people and promoted it with free installation CDs.

Ah! Nothing like millennia old scriptures to convince people that a genocide is necessary!

Mechanical CAD. Something like SolidWorks or Fusion 360.

FreeCAD just isn't there yet. They're still struggling with the topological naming problem. However, Blender was like this in the field of 3D animations. Now it's the standard. That gives me hope for FreeCAD. Anyway, MCAD is very important. I'm learning modern C++ and the FreeCAD code base in order to contribute.

I also wish there was a better CAD kernel than OpenCASCADE.