Everything about this seems almost designed to murder small businesses.

Those with enough capital backing, resources and funds can take the hit, maybe cut some expenses, shedding crocodile tears about how terrible the economic impact of this trade war has affected them while dispassionately watching scores of no-longer-employees pack their things and try to figure out how to tell their kids that the promised trip next month they’d been looking forward to all year is cancelled.

The point is that the company being sued has to pay those millions in the first place. The law firm does pay itself rather well for that work, but I’d consider class actions to be one of the more defensible legal actions.

The “Contain, Verify, Explain Foundation”, dedicated to the study of and protection against cyber-anomalies

Satin undies?

Close. Soiled undies.

It’s not the goal itself that’s the issue. Protecting kids from harmful content until they’re ready to deal with it is absolutely a worthwhile endeavour.

But the means to that end often pose a massive security and privacy issue.

You’re supposed to give all your identifying details to some website and trust them, that they’ll use it only for the legal purpose of verifying that identity and promptly deleting them, rather than selling them to criminals who now have everything they need for identity theft. Hell, just storing them is a risk because we all know how many companies (and people) treat IT security as an afterthought at best and a breach compromising the identification of thousands of people would be a fucking nightmare.

And what if your kid tries to circumvent it? Now their face is out there on some server, whether or not they succeed. Is that really better?

The argument is that the onus should be on parents to protect their children and help them find their way safely, rather than compromising everyone else with poorly thought-out and invasive policies.

Heh, flavour

(I like Fedora, but it obviously doesnt taste as good)

…and then you finished reading the sentence, right? Just in case it adds more nuance or context, or makes an argument you didn’t consider, right? You engaged their comment in good faith and gave them the chance to make their case before deciding whether you actually disagree with them, right?

Most cases of “we can’t find anyone good for this job” can be solved with better pay. Make your opening more attractive, then you’ll get more applicants and can afford to be picky.

Getting the money is a different question, unless you’re willing to touch the sacred corporate profits…

My milk ranking:

Almond < Dairy < Soy < Oat

I rarely drink any milk at all, but when I do, it’s gotta be oat.

(Also not a vegan, but that doesn’t have anything to do with my taste here)

Your wife is right to hate it. It’s rather shallow and narrow-minded.

That aside, if calories-to-price is your metric, are you growing your own food?

Oat is GOAT

(The acronym, not the animal)

I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. The IT world is full of people developing their own thing because they think they can do better, and sometimes they succeed and make something nice. Who knows, maybe they’ll turn out alright?

Then they took crypto bro venture capital and my charitable optimism went out the window.

everyone who talks about linux seems to be a programmer /coder, and uses jargon that i don’t even understand

I’ve been pointing that out for a while, but unfortunately there is a vocal subset of the community that thinks referring people to just read technical manuals is fine (if you can’t, just learn to read it, duh).

Some things are concepts you’ll learn easily, don’t worry, and for the rest, you’ll always find someone willing to break it down if you manage to look past the snobs. If you want, shoot me a DM if you just want to understand a specific term without someone making you feel like an idiot.

The problem is there are a billion versions of linux, idk what one to choose

There are plenty of suggestions here. Ubuntu is what got me started and I still think it’s a good start*. Mint is from the same family, “Pop! OS” too (the name sounds silly to me, but it’s legit and popular for a reason). Just look at pictures and see what seems prettiest to you, then go with that. The usage won’t be too different.
The grandpa of that family is Debian, but I’m not sure it’s quite as user-friendly out of the box. I’m mentioning it in case you come across the term.

The other big families are Fedora and Arch. I personally use a Fedora-Child, but to keep things narrow, I recommend the three mentioned above as starters.

* If you come across people hating Ubuntu - including myself - it’s usually for ideological reasons rather than usability ones. Don’t worry about that for now. Getting into the weeds of things is a skill you don’t have yet and that’s perfectly fine.

if i can play my steam games on linux

Steam, fortunately, is the one platform that works best with Linux. For their handheld, they decided to flip off MS and made their own Linux, along with a wrapper tool to make all the games run on it anyway.

You may hear the terms “compatibility layer”, “Proton” and “wine”, which is exactly that: A tool to make Windows stuff run on Linux. Again, don’t worry about the specifics, just believe me: I’m playing almost all of my steam games just as I used to.

If there is a specific game you care about, https://www.protondb.com/ has a large store of knowledge. Some things run out of the box, some may require a few extra settings that are usually easy to add, and if there ever is a thing you don’t understand, my offer stands.

The whole idea of moving to linux is overwhelming.

It’s a scary plunge, a leap of faith, but I assure you: There are people ready to catch you at the bottom. The reception wasn’t as warm when I jumped off of Win7, and the snobs are still around, but things have improved a lot over the past few years. Trust me, trust us: You won’t be left alone.

I can’t recall ever trying it with peanut butter, that sounds interesting

If the insulation doesn’t insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don’t know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I’m way off.

Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.

That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.

The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.

I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).

b-b-but muh communism

As someone else mentioned, ads are becoming less profitable. Particularly in light of the whole data collection biz, I’m starting to regard paywalls as a more “honest” type of monetisation. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to do either, and maybe there are better options, but I don’t fault them for it.

And how does the host pay for them?

I heard the Eldar have a really fascinating new-
Why are you all aiming at me?