I have been saying for decades now that the F-1 (student) visa should be able to convert to a resident visa upon graduation.

The whole idea of it not being a resident visa was a cold war notion that after graduating, the international student would return to their country and spread the gospel of how wonderful the United States was, and how their local country needed to oppose the Soviets. I doubt that ever really happened.

Today, weâ(TM)re just training people and then at best turning them into indentured servants for a few oligarchs, or even worse (and now the policy of the Trump administration), throwing them out so theyâ(TM)ll build up some other competing country, while weakening our own.

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

>Has about the same importance as smart tech in a fridge for me.

I live in the desert, you insensitive clod! :_)

but seriously we doohave many days of 115-117F most summers. Self-replenishing ice is *important*.

it's not why we bought it, but our LG actually has two ice makers; one in the refrigerator door, which you can actually clean out, and another for larger square tubes in the upper freezer drawer (which we turn off for the cooler half of the year)

>A fridge will last for a decade or more,

you would *think* that, but my prior fridge was a Samsung.

The ice maker died of its own buildup just out of warranty, the drip tray for the water dispenser caused rust lines through the paint below it, and the whole thing failed at 4 or 5 years--we came out one morning and it was at 50.

Compare to the Samsung dryers whose stainless steel barrels tend to crack and go out of round, wanting a $400 replacement!

The refurbisher who came out with our temporary dryer told us that from his experience (primarily washers & dryers), Samsung had the highest failure rate, while the other Korean brand, lg,had the lowest, with everything else in between.

>Agree, and don't even allow my TStat's to connect to wifi.

Have you *read* the license on those?

I brought home a wifi thermostat, thinking it would be nice to be able to change it half an hour out when coming home, and then read the terms.

It was like a parody of the terms you find offered sarcastically around here.

Pretty much, "you agree that we can send armed goons into your house, torture your dog, rape your cat, and sell your children into slavery. We may do anything we want with your data, and even more so if someone is willing to pay us for it."

It went back.

They tried that, briefly.

Then they gave up . . .

I just stick the installation DVD or USB in the drive, it go BRRRRRRRR, computer now Linux.
Once I needed to do a web search on a bios setting for a system I inherited from a 'secure' environment.
The hardest one I ever did was Batocera on a 2006 iMac, and that was still only a day of fiddling around while I drank beer and marathon-ed Bobs Burgers in the background.

I'm a janitor. IT's not that hard if you put your mind to it.

Sorry, forgot the /s at the end of that.

Dude, I'm a janitor. I taught myself how to do it in a weekend.

Corporations and businesses can keep using Windows on the newest systems.

Your average schmoo can get by with Linux on the last years refurbs. All the non Microsoft owned games are going to switch to running natively on Linux/Mac/Windows because that gives the largest market. When developers make their engines scalable to run the games in low-rez on older boxes they will have even more market share.

Most peoples lives and work are in the browser. Requiring Windows for your work software is no different then needing an endless supply of 10mm sockets.

Anyone smart enough to install Linux on their own box is smart enough not to do it for someone else.
Unless they have a maintenance and support contract already in place.

When I say 'serious gamer' I don't mean someone chasing the bleeding edge of released games.

I mean someone that has build a system, that supports a large number of games that they have curated over time, but might not have the time to play so much that they will exhaust their collection before the hardware fails. They want to play all those games through, they work on that system, so they have no need to get a new one.

If I can run my current collection of indy, Steam and Epic games on the system I have without it dyeing I will likely die of old age before I finish them. FFS I'm finally restarting Morrowind after my halfway done save got borked 20 years ago.

Got a college diploma for 'Computer Programming' 25 years ago; I did so poorly it was basically a pity diploma to make me go away.

Did some A/V work for a decade then for the past 16 years I've been a janitor.

Taught myself to use Linux in a weekend because Win11 keeps trying to sell me shit and copy everything into the cloud.

Has so much fun I converted every old system I had to Linux. 2 Thinkcentres (had to do some interesting bios fuckery there), a Thinkpad, a 2006 iMac got Batocera and became an arcade for my local bar. I have a decade old HP laptop a dedicated Minecraft box for the kids. The Win10 primary gameing box will get a 1 TB drive and a good gaming fork this winter - need to find one to support my Oculus S.

It's not that hard.

Just have to want to do it and read some web pages.

It takes an hour or two to reimage most systems to run a modern Linux distro that will run FOOS versions of most software, all the browser based stuff, and more and more games every day (many games are running BETTER under Linux then Windows 11).

It's free, easy, and unchains people from Microsoft and Apple.

It just takes people making the plunge to install it as a dual boot option on their system until they no longer requires the Windows installation.

Melancholy Elephants
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/...