That is something I left out of my post. In another reply where I said a similar thing I was clear to specify *fiction* books. I still do have my college textbooks as well. They (along with other older books) still make for great reference material. I will likely gift a portion of them on when I retire, but for me they aren't even in a milk crate, they are on my shelf in my office.

If you are unable to read you may say that. Did you read to the end of my post?

Why would she have, did you start reading from the beginning of my post?

Seriously you read something, my entire post clearly, but neither one of your points could logically exist if you understood my entire post, only if you read each sentence in complete isolation like an idiot. Try not doing that in future.

Why would I sue you? It's clear that I have been living rent free in your head for 3 years now. Maybe if you raised the rent... that said there's nothing but mold and rubbish in here.

Nothing makes me happier than to see a truly stupid person have someone get under their skin. Seriously man, u dum!

Option is not the correct word. I think it would be better so I had the "illusion of choice". Much like Apple's iPhone repair kit where they will send you a screen and 40kg of equipment they expect you to haul back to the post office when you're done, the choice ceases being a choice when there is a more viable path of lease resistance.

It's one thing provide spare parts and options, but quite another to put it in a price or complexity category that is beyond the reach of any straight thinking consumer. If I priced every single component of the WD5 from the repair shop individually I'd be looking at a vacuum cleaner some 10x the cost of RRP, and that's before we even start discussing the accessories that are normally included.

I agree John Deer is next level toxic with actual cryptographic lockdown of certain parts of their systems, but do you accept the status quo of insanely difficult to repair laptops? Phones where a battery swap requires hours of work and specialised equipment? Those are options. Burnt out RAM on a GPU? technically you have the option of fixing that yourself as well.

We still have modems. They are used to connect to the internet. You know what doesn't exist? Leased lines. I was part of a project that was literally forced to replace such a leased line with an internet connection. We still used a modem.

Point to Point networks are insanely rare these days.

But since you're living in the past, an old leased line and modem can't even keep up with the data requirements of a remote pumping station, let alone the data requirements of a larger facility. An old leased line and modem can't even handle the overhead of the DNP3 protocol reliably, let alone send any data over it.

Yes they were. They used to run poorly. They used to have quality issues. They used to incidents. They used to respond slowly to disturbances. Just like the internet enabled faster online communication it also enabled faster better and tighter control of industrial facilities.

Only a racist cares about "ethnic replacement". Because only a racist is compelled to classify people living in the same social environment into different ethnicities, and he completely ignores people from different backgrounds having children together, because in his mind, this is an abomination and shall not happen[tm].

There is no left in America, they moved to the right.

The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.

If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.

Except none of that actually happened.

Or maybe too early?

Yeah, sorry for reminding you of that.

Back when "Broadcom" meant "Henry Nicholas doing all the drugs" it was at least crooked in an entertaining sort of way.

After Avago took over and used them as a namesake and skin suit it was all downhill.

Is there some aspect of this grinder that anyone thinks is actually encouraging us to toss more meat into it?

While the pattern is the same the world has in fact changed a bit. Consumers generally expect things integrated. OSes need to include browsers, it's expected cloud storage to be included (an Apple innovation with iCloud closely followed by Google with Drive), and lets face it Microsoft was completely late to the party for any attempt to integrate an assistant at an OS level, they just slapped AI on it.

I suspect courts would not find these things anti-competitive in today's world. It's the unexpected bullshit that gets found anticompetitive, like Teams bundling with Office. Actually this has been explicitly tried in Europe, where a complaint to the EU commission directed at OneDrive bundling was eventually withdrawn in 2025 after the commission collectively yawned, ... and then proceeded to issue a ruling against Microsoft on Teams.

The EFF is probably the most important advocacy organization that educates and acts on behalf of normal people's digital rights, freedoms, and privacy. The legal actions they take in support of these are meaningful. Now that the CFPB has been dismantled and the FCC and FTC had their teeth and spines removed, groups like EFF are the only thing we have in the US pushing back against millions of dollars of corporate lobbying money.

I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding RMS. Aside from the open letter they published after he was re-elected to the FSF board, which is fine to disagree with (I do), I don't think EFF did anything to him. Plenty of people pointed angry fingers at him in 2019 but AFAIK his resignation from the FSF was his own decision.

As much as it disgusts me to even imply my support of the Orange Blight on Society, I don't think this statement is entirely accurate. From what I understand this particular brag wasn't about a Miss Teen USA Pageant. It was referencing the Miss USA Pageant, which requires the women to be 18+. I only bring this up because I used the same example to prove how much of a colossal creep the POTUS is, and got corrected. So he's not a colossal creep bragging about ogling minors, just a monumental creep bragging about ogling 18 year olds.

Two notes: 1) The POTUS is still a monumental shitbag. 2) I'd be happy to be corrected with proof of him actually claiming to be in a Miss Teen USA dressing room.