Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

What about trademark?

Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

What you do with this information is up to you.

I’m an effort to get you an answer that isn’t dismissive:

1. Youth indoctrination, social conformity, and cultural isolation. If your parents, friends, and most of your community tells you something is true, you are unlikely to challenge it for a variety of reasons including trust (most of what they’ve taught you works for your daily life), tribal identity, etc

2. People naturally fear death, and one coping strategy for the existential fear of death is to convince yourself that the death of your body is not the end of your existence. Science does not provide a pathway to this coping strategy so people will accept or create belief systems that quell that fear, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Relieving the pressure of that fear is a strong motivator.

3. Release of responsibility. When there is no higher power to dictate moral absolutes, we are left feeling responsible for the complex decisions around what is or isn’t the appropriate course of action. And that shit is complicated and often anxiety inducing. Many people find comfort in offloading that work to a third party.

That it would be viewed as awkward and unwelcome by the other participants. Consent is key, yo

I go for the hug when I see friends I haven’t seen in a long time, or when I’m parting ways with someone I know I won’t see for a while. But it’s definitely not a regular occurrence

No, it’s not socially acceptable. Yes, I wish it were. I don’t know if I’d go for full on snuggling but I come from a physically affectionate family and in general wish people were more comfortable with that kind of thing

Troll mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Rick Astley

Troll activist mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion live reading

Troll comedian mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian

Activist mode: Find a set of movies to rename that teach about the harm religion has caused

Ethical absolutist mode: Refuse to host them, and explain why

Non-confrontational familial support mode: Give Mom a unique user and make the god movies only accessible to that user

In all seriousness it depends on what your priorities are. Is it more important to you to provide judgement-free support to your mom so she knows she can rely on you, or is it more important to try to reduce harm in the world by deplatforming harmful media? Or maybe it’s more important to try to teach your mom what’s wrong with those movies and you can come to an arrangement where she can watch those movies only if she agrees to watch movies you choose in equal amounts (since you can track it) to counteract the propaganda?

What is most important to you?

That’s a non-trivial number of devices, so I would recommend a decent router that will last into the future, including service upgrades. Especially if anyone in the house is gaming and streaming movies at the same time

I recommend purchasing the modem and router as two separate units.

For the modem, because you have symmetric gigabit service, you’ll need one that supports gigabit upstream. That means the less expensive SB8200 is out. Instead, you’re looking at the ARRIS SURFboard S33. You can also find a comparable product from Netgear, the CM2000

For your router, I personally like and trust Asus. Their user interface is robust but user-friendly, and their firmware is well supported by the home networking community (including a stellar ‘expanded’ version called AsusMerlin that frequently has features pulled into the official firmware)

While you could go with an older model that only supports WiFi 5 (AC), those models have reached end-of-life and will only receive critical security updates. Instead, it’s worth spending a bit more for the WiFi 6 (AX) version.

The minimum you’ll want to support a symmetric gigabit connection like what you have is the Asus RT-AX86U. However, to support possible higher speeds in the future, and to get the most rock-solid performance, I recommend the Asus RT-AX88U. This is what I personally own for my symmetric gigabit connection

NOTE: There are older versions with the same model number that have extra LAN Ethernet ports (8 total) and no 2.5Gbps port. Do NOT get them! There are known issues when using ports 5-8 on these units

Again, you could find a similar product in the Netgear Nighthawk brand.

Anything above that is going to be extra bells and whistles. Things like extra WiFi bands, stronger radios, more 2.5Gbps ports, support for link aggregation, and some one-click gaming features that I personally think aren’t worth the money.

Depending on the size of your home and your personal use case, you may also find value in adding mesh WiFi nodes to your network. Asus and Netgear both have their own implementations here. Asus’ version is called AiMesh and is pretty seamless. All of their modern routers can act as the primary mesh node.

Personally I do not game on WiFi, so I went with 3x Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini (XD4) mesh nodes. They can be connected wirelessly to the main router, or by Ethernet to reduce latency. If I were going to be gaming on WiFi, I would have gone with the beefier ZenWiFi AX (XT8) nodes instead

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any questions! Happy to go into more detail on whatever you need

Based on your edit, what you need isn’t MoCA. What you need is a cable modem and a router (preferably as separate units, not a combo one like you have. Happy to explain why if you care)

• What is your ISP?

• What is your current advertised upload and download speed for the internet plan you have?

• Do you get TV or phone service through the same provider?

• Is your house wired for Ethernet? Coax? Both?

• How many people live with you?

• How many sqft is your home?

• How many devices well be connected? How many are wired? How many on WiFi?

• What is your use-case? Simultaneous streaming in 4k and latency-sensitive gaming? Mostly non-competitive gaming? Big downloads? Do you plan to stream content from your home while traveling or similar?

Help me help you :p

Just to make absolutely sure: you are POSITIVE that the device you’ve been renting is a MoCA-WAN router, and NOT a cable modem?

In the US at least, most of the single-unit devices that receive a coax input are DOCSIS 3.x, not MoCA. They are combining two pieces of hardware in a single physical unit: a docsis modem and a router.

Prior to having fiber internet, when my provider was Comcast, I owned two separate devices instead of renting the single device from my ISP: a DOCSIS 3.1 modem from Arris, and a standard Ethernet router

Just want to make sure you are absolutely confident about what your ISP is actually providing before you spend money on new hardware :)

That’s actually a GREAT idea.

Server admins should be able to opt-in to pulling in the top N posts per hour/day/week from connected instances. Could even have an option like “if a community shows up more than X times this way, subscribe the server to that community”, and then toss all that stuff into Discover section or something.

While you may be correct, that was my experience. As a new user, I joined two Lemmy instances, was unsatisfied with the full feed on both, and said “screw it, I’m going to the biggest server”.

The problem with telling people they can fetch the missing comms are threefold:

1. It becomes a perpetual maintenance task. New communities are being created all the time and I don’t want to have to reference other servers’ feeds regularly to stay up to date on the newest stuff. I might as well just be on that other server

2. Part of the joy of the firehose is seeing when some completely obscure community has a wildly popular post that one time because it’s extra funny or shocking or whatever. Those posts just won’t make it to most smaller servers.

3. It’s an “unknown unknowns” problem. Sometimes you know what it is that you don’t know and can go find it. But often I don’t know which things I don’t know, so I can’t seek it out to add to my server. The beauty of a big server is that I don’t have to do that legwork or even think about it.

All it takes is one user on the server subscribing to the Western Spotted Bull Frogs community for me to see it when they have a post blow up. The chances of one such user being on my server go way up here on lemmy.world. I’m sure there are smaller servers that are “good enough” in that regard. But why would I bother when I have what I want right here?

Not trying to be argumentative, just calling out what I see as a fundamental truth about Lemmy, compared to other fediverse applications. Like, on mastodon a big server’s fedirated feed is more or less unreadable. That makes smaller servers appealing as it helps prioritize what makes it into the feed. On Lemmy, the voting system does that prioritization, removing one of the big reasons to avoid larger servers in the first place :)

I tried a smaller Lemmy server first and it didn’t meet my needs.

I used reddit in two specific but different ways:

1. About a dozen subreddits that I would visit individually. Small Lemmy instances work fine for this. Just subscribe to the ones I care about

2. Browsing r/all, taking in whatever was popular at any given moment. This only works on big Lemmy instances with wildly diverse federation.

I love the firehose of “what bizarre things bubbled to the top today? Oh snap, there’s a scandal in the professional bowling community. This Farscape meme is hilarious even without context. Wow, look at that crazy picture of an owl riding another owl riding a bear” or whatever.

There was never enough content on small Lemmy servers to satisfy that itch. But scrolling the main feed on lemmy.world is good enough

You are missing the point. I am NOT saying that he isn’t using a dog whistle here. I am NOT saying this isn’t extremely thinly veiled threats. I am NOT giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I am saying that this particular instance is a weak example by comparison to some of the far worse things he has said, and headlines that deliberately exclude context to make it sound worse than it would with the full quote do more harm than good. I am saying that it distracts from the much more easily defensible criticisms, by inviting pedantic arguments and cries of unfairness.

You are literally the person I’m trying to communicate with: Stop making it easy for people to derail the conversation. Stop making it easy for moderates to buy into the “democrats are manipulative too” song and dance. Please. It does us no good

Nani the fuck did you just fucking iimasu about watashi, you chiisai bitch desuka? Watashi’ll have anata know that watashi graduated top of my class in Nihongo 3, and watashi’ve been involved in iroirona Nihongo tutoring sessions, and watashi have over sanbyaku perfect test scores. Watashi am trained in kanji, and watashi is the top letter writer in all of southern California. Anata are nothing to watashi but just another weeaboo. Watashi will korosu anata the fuck out with vocabulary the likes of which has neber meen mimasu’d before on this continent, mark watashino fucking words. Anata thinks that anata can get away with hanashimasing that kuso to watashi over the intaaneto? Omou again, fucker. As we hanashimasu, watashi am contacting watashino secret netto of otakus accross the USA, and anatano IP is being traced right now so you better junbishimasu for the ame, ujimushi. The ame that korosu’s the pathetic chiisai thing anata calls anatano life. You’re fucking shinimashita’d, akachan."

Please, my fellow democrats, I beg that we pick our battles better. This was said in a context that pretty clearly was referencing the impact of a trade war with China. He was talking about car manufacturing in Mexico and tariffs and how it will impact the American economy. There are plenty of quotes where the dog whistle is clear as day. This is not the right example to use when having this argument

The decision to stay home on election day isn’t made of a single event. It’s a chain of them that demoralizes someone into apathy

Believe it or not there are still moderate ones out there, they just have shut up because they’re embarrassed

Fortunately, there are only a handful of states that actually have a chance to alter the outcome and several of those states will have a lot of conservatives going “wtf was that?” Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin are the four I expect would see the most suppressed republican voter turnout from this train wreck of a speech

Gonna disagree with you about the quality of Mando; it’s just an incredibly different type of show. I feel the exact opposite of you: I thought the first season was meh until the end, and the show has continued to get better from there (with some individual episodes that were crap).

For the record, Andor is by far my favorite piece of contemporary Star Wars media. It’s not even close.

What I’m saying is, not every show or movie has to be well received by every fan.

Hell, I even enjoyed Obi-Wan for what it was. A sad waste of potential? Totally. But some of the things it set out to do were done well (specifically, showing Obi-Wan’s state of mind during that time period)

I don’t expect Mando to press the same emotional buttons as Andor, and I don’t expect Andor to make me go “whoaaaaa awesome lightsaber duel!” the way Ahsoka did. Let them be different. We don’t have to tear down anything that doesn’t fit our image of the perfect star wars show

IMO Google is like Joe Biden. Not good, but infinitely better than the shit show that is the alternative (in the context of advertisers specifically)