It's a little longwinded and meandering, but it's a good piece and a good message. This is why things like Linux and opensource are so important. On the surface it looks like a bunch of nerds making our computers slightly more of a hassle to use and slightly less compatible with everything else, but maintaining full control of what our systems do, what other system's they talk to, and maintaining a chain of accountability that goes all the way to the hardware is so important. Sadly it's important in ways that the average person doesn't care much about, or rather they won't care about them until it's too late. Until every computer for sale everywhere is just a surveillance device shaped like a laptop that plays youtube and opens facebook while logging and sending off every click and keystroke.

Now I'm all fired up. I'm going to go install Linux on an old thinkpad.

Arc browser

What's so cool about it? Not being a smartass I'm genuinely interested. Their website is cagey and their youtube is talking heads and fluff.

To be fair I only do work from a work computer, and my work computer already has a ton of shit on it I'd never use in my personal life.

It's especially rough when you remember seeing it on the internet before and even had it yourself at one point. There are/were a bunch of music artists I discovered at both the old eMusic and the music section of old download.com, but those collections weren't archived anywhere in any meaningful way when the sites changed. It took me years to finally locate what I was after. It's just so draining to know that something used to easily and freely available and to not be able to find it no matter how hard to dig.

On TV? What TV? Cable TV? Where do you think you are lol

Yeah, but if your boss or client sends you a document that doesn't work you're not going to tell them "Uh well this is a badly formed document and you shouldn't embed scripts and it's your fault that my FOSS alternative application can't work with this". At least I hope you're not.

So do I call her Mother or Goddess.

The game was rigged from the start.

Maybe I'm missing context, but the article doesn't mention what this admission looked like. Was it just a use saying "yeah I downloaded the new ghostbusters movie, it sucked glad I didn't pay for it", or was it someone admitting to camming/distributing/facilitating piracy at a base level? Surely they are not going after someone for just casually mentioning they pirated a movie?

Try what? Add some pointless solder to a disk and then what? Wait years to see how long it takes to die? How many do I need for a sample size? Do I need to test the same model? What about workloads the drives should be under?

This is pure untestable unverifiable snake oil.

I've never heard of a Steam ban for running a pirated game that uses cracked steam_api.dll. The whole point of the cracked .dll is that it doesn't communicate with Steam anymore.

While I personally haven't run into the same roadblocks as you when using alternatives, I appreciate the counter-point and reality check.

Stock up while you can! Try to download some longer series and then when you're off wifi break them up into an episode a day or so, so that there's always something new to look forward to, in the same way you'd have new content on youtube each day.