reddit dies a little more. This is like a death of a thousand cuts.

404media does some cool stuff from time to time, but most of their stuff is crap. Like this article here...

I made this Slashdot account 20 years ago when signing up for anything pretty much guaranteed you'd be spammed to Hell and back. I merely presumed Slashdot would do the same thing.

VPNSecure.

I too bought a "lifetime" VPN from them through Slashdot deals. Started off great, then one by one they shut down their nodes til only 5 eyes locations remained. By that point I'd switched to something else, but they sent out a long "woe is us" e.mail explaining why lifetime didn't mean that and if you'd be so kind as to buy it again at ~20$/year, we'd be ever so grateful.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

That's pretty bad that my 1985 Alfa Romeo GTV6 lasted longer than your Ford. I got 250k before it needed major work.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

Our gov't windows 11 images, provided by an outside private company, will BSoD if you look at them sideways. Not Windows 11 fault to be clear, but a bad image (and the company is slow to admit fault, much less fix this issue) and it's a daily issue here.

Very frustrating.

Dunno, but trying to delete the built-in apps (again, Chess comes readily to mind) can't be done and it wouldn't even let me move them, I could create an alias all day long, but the original icon/program? No go.

Point of correction, speaking as an ex-Industrial Hygienist here, *some* asbestos fibers are dangerous, because they are the right size (3-5um in length) to evade the body's natural filters and penetrate the lung sacs or other areas.
Then once in the lungs, the white blood cells start to impale themselves on the invaders, causing scarring etc.

I bought a 2013 Mac Pro (the trash can) and replaced the internal drive with an m.2 one with adapter. After re-installing MacOS, I wanted to test the speed. Black Magic makes a nice application for that, that is only available on the Apple store, to which I don't have an account.
  Nowhere online could I find a link to a DMG that wasn't on the Apple store. Very frustrating.
I tried to remove all the built-in programs that Apple thoughtfully decided I needed, like Chess (as but one example) and they cannot be removed. Ok, so I'll just make a folder and move them all there where they can be ignored.
Nope, they can't even be moved from the "applications" folder.

Very frustrating.

So yes, I've tried to use MacOS. Fortunately the 2013 Mac Pro is x86, so I installed a different OS on it instead.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?