If your supreme court is issuing diktats to executive agencies they are extremely part of the government. I don't know of any state where "the government" writ large doesn't assert absolute power; we are discussing the components and functioning of said government.
Their terms state you can also be a non-US Resident Citizen (expat). But generally yes that service is only for US Persons.
I wasn't really making a point about privacy.com specifically my comment was more to imply there are services that allow for arbitrary billing addresses.
Debit / credit cards always show country where card is issued. By now you literally can't get card from a country you are not reside in. I guess there are few prepaid card exceptions, but they're generally rarely accepted anywhere. Banning those on e.g Stripe is super easy and a lot of SaaS do it.
I not saying it's impossible to bypass these checks, but you either have to be very tech-savvy person to do it right or you you even have to break the law.
Good luck explaining sunken costs here! I have had many, many discussions about this on this very site and I think that since it is so non-intuitive to anyone that has not taken business courses they just do not believe it.
While I personally have doubts about this microwave "cracked glass" concept being implicated in cancer--if anything I'd be more concerned about the effects of eating stuff that came out of the microwave for various reasons--we know that "non-ionizing radiation" is not the same thing as "can't cause cancer": it only means it can't directly damage DNA, but has been shown to be able to re-fold DNA or indirectly lead to oxidative stress via localized vibration and heat.
Could you please hint us to the sentence where he calls the 2% “stealing”, too?
You yourself say that "the increase from 2% to 30% is way more questionable".
What is "questionable" about that? Maybe that is not stealing but it is an obvious fraud.
I really don't get what your motivation could be to defend that kind of shit.
> What is "questionable" about that? Maybe that is not stealing but it is an obvious fraud.
The plugin author claims that the ramp-up to 30% is an anti-abuse measure. Supposedly, something triggered the abuse abuse flag and the rev-share ramped up as a "get in touch with us" signal, with the additional rev-share refunded when the user does get in touch.
Taken at face value, I think that's not unreasonable, though the lack of logging from the plug-in author's side is questionable (asking the customer how much they wanted refunded).
Where I think the jury is out is whether that is actually what happened, or whether the plug-in just ramps up every customer to see what their pain tolerance is.
The 2% is stealing because no reasonable person would expect to see such a clause in an open source software project. The 2% clause was hidden, all the way at the end of the doc. The plugin author is a conman.
Why do you call it Open Source? The plugin itself does not call itself Open Source, and clearly links to another project for those people who want an Open Source program.
The code being free does not mean usage is free. Qt’s code is free to look at, but you still need to pay them for certain things. Licenses apply to the code, not what it does.
This is used for popular game engines. It's not a bad model. If you make nothing you pay nothing if you profit you pay a %. It removes the need to buy upfront.
Rebutting the argument doesn't rely on tech knowledge.
“But, your honour, I didn't copy this person's book! I used the autocomplete on my phone, and it just so happened to produce their 500 000 word novel!”
You need tech knowledge to think that's even plausible. Sure, they wouldn't dismiss it out of hand (I think “laughed out of court” is a figure of speech), but I wouldn't be surprised if it got a few giggles.
Democracy breaks when power is concentrated.