[–] 11 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

It is indeed fuzzy. It depends on context and in the speaker. When speaking geographically, unless that context is very clear, many people will say “continental Europe“. Moscow and Belarus are definitely in continental Europe.

“Mainland Europe” usually means continental Europe without the UK.

“Europe has strict privacy rules.” Here, it means the European Union, but the speaker may have intended to include Switzerland and the UK. Technically it also includes overseas areas, though people usually don’t think about those.

“European houses are made from concrete.” This speaker is equating Europe to their narrow experience. Building practices, codes, and materials vary widely across Europe - whichever interpretation you use.

“European banks are highly regulated.” This is about the EEU, even if the speaker didn’t consciously think about it that way.

Is Belarus Europe? It depends on the conversation you’re having. Is Georgia? In most contexts, most people would say yes, although it’s not currently in the EU. Azerbaijan I’m not sure, I think most people would say no in most contexts. And of course the UK is a special case, with people even jokingly removing it from continental Europe.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    McAfee has always been more of an advertising application than antivirus. A free version would constantly try to scare you into buying it. A paid version always reminds you that you could be paying more to clean your PC, including showing perfectly normal settings as “potentially unwanted“. Even if you pay for all the bells and whistles, you’ll need to click away constant reminders of how good a job it is doing at protecting you.

    But, to be fair, the other big names do exactly the same.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 days ago

    So I guess penal labour is not forced labour? Let me check the definition.

    penal labour is forced labour …

    Oh.

    Well it’s not like the US has a higher percentage of people in a penal labour system than any other western nation.

    Oh.

    Well at least they’re only using penal labour in the common good, and not in for-profit companies, right?

    Uh-oh.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    It depends how you define “better”, but in terms of punctuality Germany consistently ranks near the bottom. Bottom 3 of the EU for high speed or international trains, bottom 6 for local trains.

    So yes all neighbouring countries may have their own issues with trains, but regarding punctuality they’re consistently better.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago

    Far from it. I think you vastly underestimate how many books have been published, and in what small quantities.

    Estimates are around 15% of books is digitised, and less than a third of that is searchable. I’m guessing a small fraction of that is torrentable (yes that’s a word I just made up).

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