Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
I just can’t with today. I got up early and started writing, and it was going pretty well. Then, the Jetpack (WordPress) app got put in the background. When I went back to it, nothing would render (no text appeared). My entry disappeared into thin air.
So I’ll start over, and it will be nothing like what I was thinking earlier because I’m not thinking about that now…. whatever it was. I had a better idea to introduce you to my life of crime, unintentionally, of course.
When you are in a choir, it is frowned upon and also common practice to copy things. It’s very illegal. But I have aided and abetted many times. I struggle with copiers, because I think they sense my fear.
The next time I unintentionally broke the law was when my friends were putting a giant amount of music on their servers and giving me access. “It wasn’t illegal” because my friends said it wasn’t. What they meant was that copying off their server was legal. I later found out that was not the case, but luckily, not because I was caught. The safest way to share music was to borrow CDs and transcode them yourself, which is where the term “sneaker pimping” originated. It was underground, like “Winds of Change” during the Cold War…. yet less inspirational and more sitting there waiting for the CD-ROM that copied at 4x speed and generally wrote two bad discs before a right one. That got better over time, but in the beginning, it was atrocious. The CDs were expensive and then half of them failed.
I unintentionally broke the law the other day when I installed Windows 11 in a Virtual Box. My key wouldn’t activate anywhere but my original machine, even though I wasn’t using it for that. So, it’s off to find another solution, because the longer I spend with Windows, the more I’m irritated by it. You mean I can’t change my own time zone, I have to connect to location services? No matter what I do, I can’t make it where you don’t get to access my location and the rest of my information, and who knows how deep they’re digging? I don’t have anything to hide, it’s just the principle of the thing.
Facebook and everything else is built on stealing your information, why they’re free. We’re just dependent on it now, because we’ve been on it since you could get an account. That’s probably 15 years for me by now.
So, it’s a little intimidating when it’s not apps you can choose to install. If I really thought that gathering my ad information was important, I could delete Facebook off my phone/tablet and clear my browser history. What do you do when the data mining is the operating system itself?
They’re not even breaking the law unintentionally….. because what they’re doing might be legal, but it’s nowhere near moral. And the bitch of it is that we could have open source and secure social media, but it would never take off to the degree that Facebook did…. so you either install Facebook or you’re cut off from most, if not all of your friends.
That’s because free software has two problems. The first is that few businesses will buy in because they have to have someone to sue if things go wrong. The second is that if you put it out there for free, people assume it has no value. It’s the opposite. It’s millions of coders giving their time to create something that doesn’t depend on reporting to any kind of mothership and doesn’t cater ads right in your taskbar. Well, not ads, but sensationalized news to get you to click when it’s just nonsense. And you can’t turn it off if you just want the weather icon. If you close the obnoxious news banner trying to keep you up to date, everything goes with it. If you leave it on, every time you hit that hot corner when you’re trying to do something productive will make you want to punch your monitor.
Last week I was in “game mode,” where there are no distractions. I thought I had a complete crash when Windows put the game on the taskbar to ask me how likely I was to recommend Windows 11 to a friend. Luckily, I have enough VRAM that I could go back to it, but not every piece of software is that stable. Windows is becoming cancer, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I just don’t have a choice.
If Windows games could run on Linux perfectly, I wouldn’t need it at all. Steam is making headway, but I don’t have a Steam library. I chose GOG because then you own the game outright. I did not know that it would be different in every way from the Steam version and new releases make it crash…. frequently.
Sometimes you make choices in life. They lead you down a bad road….. and in a church choir, no less…….
Stories That Are All True 
Back when I was in choirs, I seem to remember that copying music *wasn’t* commonplace. But choir directors as just as subject to the temptation of “if you can, go ahead” as anyone else.
I have been saddened by the ubiquity of streaming music and what kind of havoc it creates for musicians trying to earn a living. But Apple Music works too well. I do buy hard copies of cds and albums to support the musos but I don’t know if I’m making much of a differences
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I honestly think it depends on the choir director. I’ve had them at both ends of the spectrum, being sticklers for having enough copies or Xeroxing everything. There’s always that one guy who forgot theirs, though. I suppose that’s legal because the copy was already bought, but still. The thing about streaming music that’s hard is that it’s hard to be successful in the studio alone. You have to go on tour to make up lost revenues. But I agree. I have all the streaming services because I don’t have a phone with a lot of storage space. It’s a conundrum.
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