Insane Clown Posse, is that you?

Once they realized you'd pay the hire price, if the fees are gone, the businesses are just going to go 'yummy more money for me'.

This is dumb shit. Many stores around me explicitly charge you the difference if you pay by credit card to cover the service fee.

I have never had my debit card compromised. Ever. The fact that it's a direct line is what makes it not usable to buy things online, etc (generally). But it's very nice to use in person - I like that when I spend money, I'm actually spending it and not creating debt. (Don't get me wrong, I always pay off my credit card bills every month, which are not trivial sums .. but I'm only using them because they're the only things you can use online.)

Credit cards, on the other hand - we all pay for the insurance. It's not really the banks problem, its a problem that you have protection for because you pay for it.

"Just give me 1% in cash"

That's still money that comes from somewhere. Like .. from you.

"An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators' workloads rather than lightening them."

Fine, but there's *tons* of them. This is a drip in an ocean. The opposite, settings you need to turn on are also fucking huge depending on the corperate environment it's used in. I mean, fiddling over one setting on a product with a user base as huge and diverse as Windows is nitpicking imo.

Places that have to deal with this are setup to be proactive about the larger problem set.

I e-genuflect to thy digits.

The warnings then were of course unheeded by the public.

yeah, damnit, we can't charge you X so we can give X - some amount back to you and call it a reward

fucking reward schemes suck

MSFT self-evidently prefers free market chumming to locking down registration thus driving away legitimate users.

That makes sense as exemplified by early Windows and Office 97 which killed off competition by the choice not to seriously control activation.

Now that Windows pwns the market Redmond had to change hardware requirements to coerce users away from Windows 10 which for the vast majority of users needed no major changes. No need to make registration onerous when the goal is data mining and sales are so easy to coerce by breaking what works.

Internet privacy is a contradiction in terms.

Do nothing on the web you'd greatly mind the world knowing.
Trust nothing and no one to be other than self-serving.
Have the least practical info on every networked device. If it's not airgapped it may as well be posted to 4chan.

https://www.theregister.com/de...

Boot a suitable live OS and you're ready for it without spinning rust.

You can boot off one drive and run applications from another.

I recently dug out my CD/DVD backups from the early oughts and they all read fine so far (about forty but I've a couple hundred remaining to inspect). I'll burn backups to the few that still matter of course.

Besides distro-sampling I used to burn many bootable live WinPE-ish CD in the BartPE era which booted much more reliably than discs written at higher RPM. I always burned at slowest available speed to reduce mechanically-induced errors, mostly using CDRWIN trial version as I had zero need for faster write speeds.
I mostly used Taiyo Yuden media which were the go-to for quality in those days.

I stored them in the same cool, dark room most were written in to keep them out of the sun which is not kind to plastic (see brittle auto interiors for what outgassing does over time). I keep a USB DVD writer handy to extract contents which I usually place on a server so no need for multiple drives (which of course I have anyway since being only one-deep on hardware is too close to no-deep on hardware.).

I also saved a few live BartPE and Linux discs in case I wanted to live boot a PC that doesn't reliably boot from USB. They were my go-to tool kit for troubleshooting and data rescue in that ancient era. I saved boot floppy images to live CD so I could rewrite or replace corrupted boot floppies. Today most use live USB fobs for similar tasks.
As with USB fobs you can connect more than one external CD/DVD drive to boot from one and write to the other.

....a Slashdot "editors" are at picking content.