'nuff said.

Exercise a firm hand in turning your current country of residence into a shit-hole, then escape to greener pastures and leave the rest of us holding the bag.

What utterly treacherous fuckers they are.

The law should state, and enforce, the following: if a company is planning to brick or partially brick hardware post-sale, the entire design and source code for the product, along with the code for the web services which support it, must be released as FOSS prior to said bricking.

That's just for starters. The law should further decree that, after a specified date, any new devices and supporting services must have ALL the information necessary to reproduce them placed in escrow with a government body before the product and service may be sold.

As I see it, the kind of behaviour described in TFS is just a slightly different form of bait-and-switch. If I recall correctly, there have been laws against that shit for a very long time now.

You just contradicted yourself. In effect you said "a != a".

Said every pusher ever...

It's about indoctrination - about setting expectations for, and acceptance of, the world the oligarchs are busy shoving down our throats. The tech sector should be utterly banned from schools, except at the express invitation of those schools and with the explicit approval of a majority of the parents.

Business is continuing to co-opt and control education just as they are doing with government This whole blood-sucking movement needs to have a stake driven through its heart before we burn its body and piss on its ashes.

Just for once, I'd like to hear the tech bros say something definitive about global warming and their role in it, and about what they foresee as the future of humanity outside of the enclaves they will build to protect themselves from the consequences of climate change and from the wrath of the rest of us.

Seriously, I'd like to hear their honest thoughts - or an admission of their lack of thought - about where all this is going. I want to know - absent the propaganda, spin, fantasies, and utter lies - what they foresee as an average day in the life of an average person in any given country 30 years from now.

I mean, they hold all the cards and it's probably no longer possible for us to stop them from burning the world down - so why don't they just tell us honestly what they think life will look like in a few decades?

Or are they too chickenshit to look that closely at the likely consequences of their attitudes and actions? Do they really not think about those things? If that's the case, then I want to know that too. I want some kind of understanding of the kind of mind that can look at all the shit that's threatening all of humanity and then say "let's do more!".

Fucking bastards. I wish I could believe in a god - then I could believe in Hell and imagine them roasting there for all eternity. But "this is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper", I guess.

get up with fleas. I have ZERO sympathy for idiots who paid to have their privacy raped, yet who now whinge about their attention being raped by ads. Here's an idea - stop paying for hardware you don't really own, and over which you have essentially no control beyond pulling its plug.

You're the author of your own misfortune, and the remedy is simple: unplug this shit and cancel your subscription. Or, you can wait for that waaaambulance that isn't ever coming.

My feelings of disgust are about Microsoft and its attitude; pretty much all I use it for is running chdsk on NTFS-formatted media drives that I keep in the rotation so the files can be accessed via Windows if necessary.

I just asked my wife, and she mentioned the following:

-- Programmable buttons keep getting moved
-- Renaming now requires a drop-down menu
-- A key sequence that works in Outlook or Word won't work in Teams or Excel
-- Keyboard shortcuts used to apply across the suite / OS but now need to be programmed individually
-- Sometimes updates break Quick Bar customizations
-- Sometimes updates nuke custom dictionaries

My wife is dealing with overuse injuries acquired at work, and can't type for very long without being in severe pain. I'm being purposely cryptic here when I say that the amount of typing she is even allowed to do is limited. She dictates much of her work via Dragon, which poses its own challenges. And in her case there are significant instances where Dragon simply doesn't work. Every time she has to play whac-a-mole with features and menus and key combinations, it's not just an annoyance - it's literally a cause of pain whose consequences are felt far beyond working hours.

These things aren't anywhere near tragedies in the grand scheme of things, but they are certainly cause for a declaration of "fuck Microsoft sideways with a running chainsaw". They're also manifestations of the same forces and attitudes that are breaking our civilization.

First, AI isn't just surrounded by a hype minefield, a good part of it IS the hype minefield. So the solution is very straightforward. The minefield is very clearly delineated and marked, so just stay the fuck away from it!

Note that I said it's simple. I didn't say that it's necessarily easy.

Brendan Carr has the balls of the oligarchy resting on his chin, so this latest betrayal of Americans is not at all surprising. It's just business as usual.

Usual, that is, for a newly-minted Fascist regime. Give it a few years, and the mere notion that consumers might have any say in how they're treated, or any recourse against injustice, will be a quaint and distant memory.

Data of that volume typically don't appear overnight. And it seems unlikely that they just now realized "OMG! That data is critical!"

My point is that the need for backups probably didn't just spring up unexpectedly or grow too quickly for them to keep up. It seems likely that they had years to initiate and implement gradually without breaking any budgets, but chose not to do so.

There's a difference?

I'm being serious here. I suppose some small portion of advertising avoids being propagandistic, but IMHO the vast majority of it is exactly that.

I'm guessing that this whiz-bang improvement in realism and engagement is just the ticket to encourage adoption of TVs and monitors which either won't work, or will have key features crippled, unless you connect them to the internet so they can serve you ads, spy on you, and force some kind of subscription service after you've had the product for a while.

These days, when it comes to tech, with few exceptions true ownership of a product is rare and getting rarer. You pay for it, but the manufacturer in effect continues to have a majority say in what you do with it, and when and how you're allowed to use it.

Tech savvy people may be able to get around some of these downsides, but the vast majority will suck it up and sacrifice another wedge of that freedom cake that's already down to damned near its last crumbs.

We don't have Micro Center in Canada so I can't comment on the quality of service they offer. But getting iFixit stuff in front of consumers can only be a good thing. Between getting people to consider repair rather than replacement, and showing them that they might even be able to repair some devices themselves, this seems like an idea whose time has come.

It might even influence the non-tech-savvy to at least learn which devices are easier to repair and make better choices which might influence manufacturers. (Probably not, but I live in hope).

No. Some parts of the Linux ecosystem have a few bad practices and attitudes in common with Microsoft. That in no way makes Linux "just as bad".

Red Hat and Ubuntu provide a lot that many alternative distros rely on. So if they were to either go away or start locking stuff away behind non-libre licences, it would hurt. But Linux would still be OK. There might be a few bumpy transitions ahead, but Linux - as a libre OS and as a community - would survive.