There have been press investigations on these spam/scam call centers. Undercover journalists even managed to get a job as a telemarketer. There are groups calling out of low-cost Morocco trying to score monthly subscriptions under 50â, and there are high-stake high-return groups calling directly from France trying to sell investment, bundled with 5000â hidden assurance fees. A single family controls a large portion of these, everybody knows who they are, but the police is, as usual, busier running after kids smoking a joint or homeless people sleeping under a bridge.

You may be able to keep running the game after GOG goes bankrupt, but since most of their games only have Window version, without Wine/Proton (financed by Valve) you would have to run it on that dumpster fire of spyware that is Windows 11. Also note that it is perfectly possible to run Steam games without Steam and even offline, on Linux via Lutris launcher, on Android with Gamenative or Gamehub.

Even if GOG finally released the Linux client today, and it had feature parity with the Windows one, it is because of Valve money that Linux has become such a great gaming platform.

I'll keep buying my games on Steam, at least for now: it is not just a matter of market dominance, but supporting a corporation that is giving back to my community.

The doctrine at the border is that your phone is luggage and your data is the luggage content, and that you must open your luggage when they ask. If your an American citizen and you refuse, you will get in but your device will be confiscated. If you're foreigner, you will be sent back and denied entry for life.

Flatpak is just a software, I guess you may refer to the Flathub repository. And even then did not ban "AI" just submissions generated by AI. This is a very sensible policy, as they have to review each submission to guarantee a minimum level of safety and quality for the end user, they cannot afford to be flooded but AI slop.

Also this ban does not prevent anybody from setting up an alternative Flatpak repository with all the AI slop they wish, if there is request for this type of software, they'll be undoubtedly successful.

I would really prefer the other way around, invoking Windows containers for the few Windows apps that I am stuck running.

You have been able to do it for ages. Two relatively streamlined recent options are Winapps and Winboat. However, there is little interest and not much community support on these solutions, and although one could in principle have everything, they require some tinkering to have GPU passthrough. Also, you need to have a window system running, which gobs up a lot of RAM just by itself.

The main problem is that Linux can be easily reduced to a really minimal setup, while even minimal Windows is bloated

I'm not a massive fun of systemd, I find that the unit files myriad of options difficult to remember and despite the documentation it is often hard to find what one wants to do.

However, I also remember the situation before systemd. Every service had its one bash script to start/stop/status, maybe written initially from a template but each with its own bugs and idiosyncrasies. Many were hundred of lines long, and included several other files. Now, once a bug has been corrected in systemd, all the services benefit from it.

It also took 3 minutes to boot a desktop system. SSD do play a huge part in how fast boot has become, but the ability of systemd to transparently parallelize services startup also plays a significant role.

Sure, if a service is failing to start I need to find out why, instead of hacking a couple of "sleep" in the startup script and hoping for the best.

The USA was already planning a coup in Italy in 1964 in case the people would have elected a left wing party.

I've noticed in a British channel dedicated to public transport that "tube" (UK English for underground train) was consistently being transcribed as "Jew". With borderline libellous results such as "can you beat the Jew?"

Lenovo and HP have an exclusive contract with French public institutions to provide desktop and laptop computers, it is a contract valued in the hundred of millions of euros. Still, the option to have Windows 11 pro preinstalled is charged around 100 euros.

Yes, Collabora is one of the largests (they say THE largests) upstream contributors of LibreOffice

There is already modern euro-centric rework of LibreOffice, it is Collabora. It used to be just a rebranded fork of LibreOffice, but it then evolved in an online suite, which integrates with Nextcloud. And most recently, a completely new interface, based on LibreOffice but (if I understand correctly) written in python and with all the java legacy code stripped off. The first public version was only released a couple of months ago, it is still a bit unstable and missing some features, but completely usable.

I'm pretty sure you cannot copyright an UI interface design, except for the graphics on the buttons. However, they may have had some specific patent on the ribbon design.

Every time I see my mother in law, she's a list of " I don't know what fo do" problems with her phone. The solution is always the same: I read out loud what is written on the screen, then I ask her if she want it or not, and I click yes or no accordingly.