The same people selling the clearnet will be the same people who will never let the existing stuff die, so they can sell the problems, the “solutions”, child-porn, and most stupidly, considering they seem to honestly believe they want to force this on the rest of us, to feel they are “above the law”, and not confined to the bounds of their own machinations.

I’m not convinced more than maybe 5 or 10% of people will ever actually use the clear-net, or even be able to afford to either. The same idiots trying to force it are populating their new “walled-garden for the rest of them” with, basically, AI spoofs of the rest of the population. They are already huffing their own farts past the point they won’t be able to tell the difference, like an artificial resurgence of The Bicameral Mind for “the ruling class”.

I mean, community-sourced is what I would want anyways, so …

Sure it did. Tiles on Windows Phone were a big hit for a time. If anything, the problem on that side of things was that they didn’t commit and make sure the things that worked on the phone also worked on the “tablet” version.

Instead, they took the approach that "the developers will thank us for charging them an arm and a leg to learn and use the new APIs, like they always have, forgetting that developers often follow users, and almost every user was verbal about hating what MS had done, including Windows phone users who understood what had been promised then effectively bait-and-switched.

Microsoft’s way has just always been so inspiring, you know?

I never got into gnome. Was more of an XFCE guy for a time, enough-so to realize Gnome had “deprecated” anything I liked about GTK. I was more looking for a classic start menu style with minimal overhead, and XFCE gave me that, while most other DE’s wouldn’t let me do stuff that Windows 95 had been cool with.

Windows 8 had a “reason”(TabletPCs, and the success of Tiles on Windows Phone) for the changes made. The old UX was still there if you knew where to look and what settings to change; Some searching online could mostly have you back to what you wanted in under an hour. It was coded by humans, tested by humans, and consistently worked as intended.

Windows 11’s changes have no such saving-graces or anything resembling rational justification. They let their AI re-code a bunch of fundamental features, and particularly the UI/UX, from a low-level programming language to frameworks intended for fucking websites, just so they could say it was capable of doing-so. Along the way, they used AI to test the results and skimped on or ignored the results from testing done by humans.

How many times before has Microsoft publicly admitted one of their products is broken and promised to fix it? What does being technically solid have to do with UX? EVERYTHING.

… Windows 11 is far worse. 8 was solid compared to 11. 8 was a pain in the ass, but it mostly did what it was supposed-to.

If it had 5G, I might bother, aftter toying with it as-is to see if I could just live with it.

Otoh, the way their description reads, it wouldn’t surprise me if it also filters client traffic in hot-spot mode, which would be a bridge too far to me.

It’s actually not that hard to figure-out which file in the torrent they give you is the one book you want, by which I mean, I don’t recall exactly how, but my dumb-ass figured it out and did it a few times.

If you didn’t know, you don’t have to download and seed every file in a given torrent. In fact, a lot of torrents seem “broken” because .nfo’s, .txt’s, Extras and/or Samples aren’t being seeded.

Any company that sent me this far-into the weeds for them ghosted me or replied with un-reasonable terms when I came up with something appropriate. Usually they replied with a whole boiler-plate they had on-hand, but apparently wanted to pretend it was a negotiation, until they didn’t. A couple times, the legal department on the other end got shitty with everyone and tried to act like their company had never and would never interact with a contractor who hadn’t already signed terms I found exploitative and walked-away from when they wouldn’t budge.

There are plenty of licenses out there that would work, but when you’re two-companies removed from the legal offices of the company with the ultimate say, its never as simple as trusting your friend. That said, my limitted experiences with similar situations never involved an insider I was close with, so I mean it when I say I wish you the best of luck.

You’re always gonna need to be ready or at least able to stop and ask yourself, were the favors that big, or did they just tell you they were? It’s the middle of the weekend and you’re fretting over this instead of spending your own time how you see fit or coding for profit.

A company that’s asking you to figure this stuff out for them isn’t necessarilly going to sign-off on anything too reasonable, but I’ll agree my advice was more suited for after that happens.

“My lawyer will need to talk to your legal department, he charges $xxx per hour…” If you think I’m being snarky, I’m really not. Your entitled client is hoping to force you to, or let you, do something stupid so they can hang you out to dry or wring you out for free or discount labor, maybe even a “small guy like you should be willing to pay us for the oportunity to do this work”.

I’m not saying to pretend you are a lawyer, I’m saying to get one, and if its all above-board, things will work-out. If it ends up a “missed opportunity”, then it was never really an opportunity in the first place.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’ve always made double or triple the $$-per-hour as a contractor than I have as a W2. Some “clients”, head-hunters, and would-be “lead-finding services” would try to interact with me as though being a contractor just meant I was jobless, which, maybe they would have been right, in a world where I had or made the time to interact with people set on wasting it like so…

Read that last sentence again; By entertaining their non-sense, their assumptions about how they can get-away with exploiting you become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hire a lawyer or become one. You can be out some money paying the lawyer(which becomes overhead expense to factor-into what money the client should owe you, in beautiful black-and-white contract/invoice form that let’s you sleep at night), or you can be out time, near-infinite amounts of time, doing your client’s homework on-top-of the programming they ostensibly are paying you for. Everything you care about suffers in the second version, including your code quality.

Up-skirt photos are the one area where this gets me caught-up; Either a hypocrite or a shitty person. For the sake of consistency, I tend towards shittiness - the only real reason there’s anything like an expectation of privacy in public is so shitty (powerful)people can get-away with shitty things, when really, being in-public is being on-display.

Then there’s my stance on getting “caught” having sex on a park bench in a secluded forest by way of a trail-cam. I’m far from convinced that video evidence should count as evidence of an otherwise truly private, victemless, “crime” that otherwise wouldn’t be. We should only be jailing public officials caught-out in conflicts of interest/corruption like-so, and almost never the camera-man.

Instead, its the opposite. We are surprisingly far into all of this deep-fake and leaked-video shit for the average person to have any qualms about saying “whether that video is real or not is none of your business”, as if significant resources will be spent validating all but the highest-profile of images, but I get there are people who are generally embarassed and not just wrapped-up in their personal “sin” of having been portrayed or caught in a compromising position.

None of it upsets me so much as former strippers or adult film stars losing their jobs over shit that’s years-behind them, while genuine pedos escape notice for decades. I’ll say it again: society and the law are laser-focused on the wrong shit, and from the wrong-end of the turd at that.

Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.

Just a thought: politicians should not be allowed to use such apps. This right-to-privacy shit has gone too far, in the wrong direction, protecting ONLY the wrong people.

I mean, given that its based on specific teachers, the opt-out or in is going to have to be allowing the child to stay with the teacher the school assigned the child to, or request a transfer … unless magically trusting the researchers to scrub students faces. The biggest problem I see is the school acting like that last option is something that parents should even seriously consider.

Without a Plug-In? Hard agree, nor should they.

What in God’s Green Earth are you talking about, “windows-or-nothing people”? Employers? Schools? Told a lot of them to kick dirt, but with them owning the buildings, that basically amounted to me walking away.

One of my favorite things about my current employer is that the “Windows” part doesn’t matter -it just happens to be the only thing the bespoke software suites we use will run-on, and the entire shift is spent in those applications anyways. I’ve almost got my boss convinced to ditch Acrobat Reader though, or rather, its constant demands to be allowed to present AI Summaries of confidential documents is doing the convincing for me.

The simple fact is, all four of my children can generally get done what they want/need to in Windows, Mac, Chrome, Android or IOS, including customization or “esoteric” stuff, and get on with their lives, without coming to me pretending there aren’t a million tutorials on Youtube for whatever and that they shouldn’t even have to check there first. Only one of them has shown the same aptitude, willingness, patience, what-have-you, for Linux. Another is just too young to tell where she’ll go with all that.

I meet my users and use-cases where they are and presume a heterogenous network/device environment. That becomes and stays true the moment you introduce a game console, a printer, a tablet, phone and/or a router of all things.

I like Linux, love it and can’t wait to get back to using it more in fact, but using only Linux isn’t going to leave me with any way to relate to or convince people who are sceptical and comfortable with another OS they are already comfortable with, and forcing it into the present state of my life is going to demand time I don’t have available for the next year or so, but it was my daily driver for years and will be again.

Meanwhile, I’m counting down a shorter-every-day fuse for when the one boy wants an Amiga or roll-your-own-“retro” device of some sort to go with his RaspberryPi, OrangePi, plus various consoles and old phones he’s torn-down to the compotenent leven and built back up(successfully … err … to a surprising degree anyways), and his brother just laid claim to my (kickstarter-era)Snapmaker A350 CNC/Laser/3D Printer.

Some people still want to feel like Windows is something they own, like back when it was something you installed on-top-of DOS. Taming the hostile mess its become is still rarely worse than de-bloating a new OEM PC ever was, and if you use your PC rarely-enough, there’s hassle aspects that blur into near-parity versus Linux(updates, anyone?)

… share a PC with others, and just keeping Open-Shell(plus PowerToys and/or StartAllBack, or sometimes Rainmeter for a laugh) on one’s profile looks sufficient, versus dual-booting or whatever. Personally, my Laptop can go un-used(by me, anyways) for months and months, and letting my family use it helps keep it up-dated and let’s me know if problems arrise before I run face-first into them in a moment when I just need the thing to work.

I’m looking-forward to each of my kids having their own capable laptops(just ONE more …), but until then, Windows updates are stupid-prone to breaking dual-boot, only one of my kids likes/uses Linux half-so-much as I do, and even he is in more of the tweak-it-until-it-breaks-and-start-over dabbler stage, so I let him keep to his own laptop and a pile of old used ones(and consoles…) that are older than he is. 99% of what I would use it for in the mean-time, I just use my phone.

Crazy to game on anything you trust with important data in general. Same for internet browsing-in-general though. Good Luck.

Between this, and Macron towing the Trump line on Hormuz, I hope he remembers to mock them for constant surrender in his next rant. Y’all invented the guillotine, and now worship the oppressors. Gross.