I love how McAfee, once -- a long time ago -- a credible virus scanner, became one of the sleaziest dogshit brands in tech.

I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.

The concept here is that if the NSA had done this in the United States, there would have been a court case and the courts would likely have sided with newspapers, invoking the First Amendment.

But once again since this is overseas, the government is pushing for things that would never be legal here; it is curious that they tried to pressure the British though.

We know during war things happen that would never be legal on this soil; it'd be interesting to see a full accounting of what the US gets away with, or tries to, when it is out of the reach of the Bill of Rights.

I am sure they'd talk to me like a child if I brought this up: I just don't understand the threats we face, and the countermeasures and surveillance we need to keep up with them, and that the only reason I can even talk like this is because guys like them do "what has to be done" to keep the US safe.

Whenever this sort of thing is justified, it is nearly always an external threat; and it probably overlaps with the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse they always invoke to justify kneecapping encryption.

But they always start mid-thought. They don't want to talk about why there's a nuclear arms race, or why so many people are angry at us. They just want to start with "they are," and therefore authoritarian policies and programs are justified.

We know a lot of this is about industry. It takes two to tango, though. We buy what they make.

At least there are nachos.

*THREE MONTHS!?* THREE - AND NOT ONE. You're saying like around NINETY DAYS OF SWEET SPOTIFY ACTION before I can pay Spotify to rip off artists?

Holy shit, someone grab my axe and merkin, I'm gonna climb up the nearest hill, rip off the merkin, and windmill my shit in this gleaming, numinous, glorious dawn.

THREE MONTHS. MY GOD YOU'VE LOST YOUR MINDS.

I want to see web sites stop popping up their crappy interstitial pages I have to click through to get to contact, almost all of which implore me to subscribe to their stupid e-mail lists (not happening, ever, specifically because of how they pushed).

I want to see websites stop forcing me through "OMG LOOK AT ALL OUR NEW FEATURES" slides every time I log in.

Put a lil.

A lil.

Flashing thing on the side or something. But get the fuck out of my face.

ALL autoplay bullshit must end (fuck you cnn.com. I mean fuck you for about a hundred other reasons but especially fuck you for that.)

The sheer number of browser extensions I install to try to protect what is left of my privacy and stop apeshit web developers from engaging in screen bukkake has become absurd.

This is not what the Web was supposed to be.

And *yes*, I would be fine with about 2/3rds of the damn Web collapsing for want of ad revenue if what was left was clean and user-friendly. I have reached that point.

I'M MAD PEOPLE.

A CRAZY, MAD, WILD-EYED, BIG-BOTTOMED ANARCHIST.

I WAS HERE EARLY AND YOU WILL HEAR ME.

(they will not hear me. no need to point that out.)

Why do people think things like the Bechdel test are worth more than a fart in the breeze

A test is just providing some objective information about something.

What you do with that is your business.

The Bechdel test was presumably invented to identify movies that fail the Bechdel test as deficient, problematic, etc.

But the test can just as easily be interpreted the other way. Netflix might someday soon come up with a category called "Bechdel Failures" and learn that it is extremely popular with men.

I think it would be great if there was some kind of logo or something that indicated if a movie passed or failed the Bechdel test; feminists could look for passing films, and I could look for failing films.

Can you show me which quote of Trump's mentions race? I quickly scanned your link and did not come across any mention of any races.

I don't have any evidence of Trump naming or implying any race at any time with any of his various immigration comments.

His focus has been on
- stopping _illegal_ immigration
- stopping the legal immigration of people that are at an increased risk of becoming terrorists
- reducing immigration that appears to have a negative effect on American jobs

There is a tremendous amount of racial confirmation bias about Trump, in part because that's what the left always resorts to, and because he hasn't adopted SJW phrases and talking points.

Contrastingly, there is historical evidence of him breaking _down_ racial and other bigotry barriers in his personal and business life.

Perhaps Mrs. Clinton has observed that discussing any aspect of immigration in a negative way makes her more like Donald Trump -- a man whom she very often implies is pretty much the worst thing ever.

It's a bit interesting that when Mrs. Clinton talks negatively about immigration, she's described as empathetic for Americans.

Contrastingly, when Donald Trump talks about immigration, he's described as a racist.

I think people are wise to be suspicious of anyone running for public office. But, of Clinton, Johnson, and Trump, Trump is the only one that has ever said he wants to limit and reform immigration for the benefit of Americans who are seeking American jobs. He's also the one talking about punishing American companies who engage in behaviors that subvert American workers and jobs so replace them with foreign workers and jobs.

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

If you are upset with companies abusing immigration law to the detriment of American workers, and you wish someone would finally do something about it, Trump would seem like your candidate.

This election promises to be another "hold your nose" affair, but there do seem to be legitimate differences in what the candidates want to accomplish and how they want to do it.

How does $2k USD strike you?

http://www.jetcatusa.com/rc-tu...

example in use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

my post isn't really a new or novel idea:
http://www.interestingprojects...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It occurred to me that you could adapt the airframe and application from cruise missile (the blog post), to ultra-low cost, man-deployable SAM.

A 350mph SAM isn't going to go very high, or chase down aircraft that have flown past. It won't work like a big expensive fixed SAM installation.

The current US application of airpower is flying low, slow, over and over, in repeatable patterns, because total air superiority is assumed.

And so if you watch US airpower fly over your burnt-out city, and then you see them turning to make another pass, you pull out your low-buck SAM, get it fired up, and, when the aircraft has heading back towards you, you fire at it, head on, from a field or building rooftop or whatever.

A 350mph object coming straight at an aircraft that is used to assuming air space dominance, and which is giving off no radar emissions, is going to catch at least a few super-power aircraft off guard and take them down.

This only needs to succeed once or twice. That will cause a significant change in the use of theater air-power..

There has been very little air-to-air combat in a long time. The majority of combat has been developed super powers against 2nd or 3rd world states, or against entities that aren't even states at all.

The only fighter air power requirement is a few hours of work to make sure that there is total airspace superiority, and then every other attack/recon aircraft in the super-power's arsenal loiters over its targets unopposed.

The software & silicon revolution is going to throw a wrench in all of this very soon.

Suppose you are ISIS. You cannot build all the infrastructure to have an airbase with fighter jets and trained humans to operate and maintain them, etc, and even if you could, the super powers would just stroll by and put a crater in your runway.

So what you need is an assymetric response to air power.

In the Soviet/Afghan war, the US funneled stinger missiles and other man-launched AA and AT weapons to the jihadists, and they were able to cripple the Soviet war machine.

The folks in the middle east are already plenty good at making IEDs - they have the "warhead" part figured out.

What's to stop them from putting ArduoPlane brains inside of RC powered jets and putting IEDs on them, and then using optical seekers (e.g. no active emissions, so the big jets never know its coming), and then shooting down low flying aircraft of all types and configurations?

The per-unit cost for something like this would be under $10k per copy. The impact of shooting down just one super-powers aircraft would be tremendous. It would cause an operational re-think and might even change the balance of air-power in the theater.

The Superpowers are going to need to stop playing the manned-aircraft one-ups-man-ship game, and embrace low cost swarms.

For each ISIS fighter that launches a home-made SAM, the super-power will need to respond with a swarm of airbone hunter/killer drones... already nearby, on station.

I think battles between various super-powers competing 5th gen manned fighters are unlikely and will hopefully never happen. I desperately want to avoid a shooting war with Russia or China...

I'd be interested in learning more about the compatibility problems you're having with real apps and .net framework versions.

We know that there are ocassionally compat issues because we have large customers we work with to try and mitigate them.

There are already mechanisms built into .net for rebinding apps to use specific framework and assembly versions, e.g. the .exe.config file that you can modify without access to the application's source code.

In general, .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 are the two separate runtimes that you would currently need to have installed. .NET 3.5 is the newest iteration of the .net 2.0 runtime, and .NET 4.6.x is the newest iteration of the 4.0 runtime.

If you're trying to install an app and it says "i need .net 4", and you don't have .net 4 yet, I think that's working as intended. If updates to .net are breaking your apps, that's something we'd like to know about and help with.

If you have problems of the latter sort - .net updates are breaking your apps, feel free to contact me at this address and I'll see about putting you in touch with someone who can help.

Give us some credit for taking baby steps...

A few years ago, this would have been called "Microsoft Active Developer Conference 2016 with Bing.com and VisualStudio.com"

Surely you agree that "Connect();" is an improvement ?