Play on an offline physical chessboard and the game will let you do anything you want.

What kind of rube works in the same country they live in? I met a lot of WFH workers when I visited Thailand, and not a single one of them was working for a company in Thailand.

You're saying not your circus, not your apes?

Yeah it's easy to forget that Steam is good only because we have an extraordinarily principled person overseeing it. If something ever happens to Gaben or he loses control of it, it's going to turn into the flamiest garbage dump of shit you've ever seen. Monopolies are almost always bad.

USB A came out right 20(?) years earlier than C - I’m guessing here, don’t slay me.

Pretty close. It's debatable at exactly what moment a cable "comes out" (is it when the specification is finalized? When it's published? When device manufacturing starts? When a popular consumer device first has it?) but my personal opinion is 1996 and 2017 for USB-A and USB-C, so 21 years difference.

It is the ticket. Tickets don't really exist. Even before the Internet and digital technology, what we called a "ticket" (a slip of paper that you showed to get in) was in reality just a receipt/proof of purchase. "Ticket" and "receipt" are 100% synonymous.

I'm not sure, but that's very curious! Maybe they're considering OSM itself non-free?

Specs? How much fiddling do you want to do?

Distro won't matter so much as Desktop Environment. KDE Plasma and MATE are both sensible choices, both very popular, and good for anyone who wants a familiar mouse and window kind of experience.

If it were me, I'd probably just download something like Debian and then set up one of those two DEs (which might even be possible directly from the installer; I can't remember).

Sadly most people CAN'T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.

telnet or ssh (usually telnet)

If you're connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you're connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.

Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there's the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.

I don't have statistics to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet an entire doughnut that most reddit users have never posted even a single comment. People with that level (dis)engagement aren't the type to seek out alternatives. They just kind of drift away.