Well, there was a famous case, over DC I think, where fighter pilots thought a stationary balloon was performing all sorts of crazy maneuvers as they flew in circles around it. I always have that in mind.

But too many of the reports precede the drone technology needed for what you describe, which may still not be there (they'd have to be too small to have the battery life to get in place). A similar effect could be achieved with clouds of chaff, perhaps created by exploding cannisters on parachutes dropped by a cargo plane - or radios, or your drones. But the Navy would have noticed if a Chinese plane was flying overhead before the sighting. Clouds of charged particles surging along magnetic fields seems likely to me. Throwing chunks of metal through magnetic fields creates a charge, and what's a plane but a chunk of metal flying through a magnetic field?

I knew a German speaking Swiss guy who had moved to the US and opened a restaurant. One day, while distracted by a pretty girl in the parking lot, I hit it with my delivery truck.

Learn to read, troll.

Yeah, no email is a serious drawback that doesn't support the design goal. Email isn't doomscrolling. Not unless you're signed up for every gloomy newsletter out there.

For ethics in games journalism.

Moto phones bought direct have no unremovable crapware.

The European Commission is the EU's civil service. Petitioning it was always a long shot, because for them to act you have to convince them that there is a good case within existing EU rules. They aren't there to make new rules, they are there to enforce the existing ones.

They have effectively said that existing consumer protection rules don't extend far enough to force publishers to make offline patches and server code available, but in their opinion do offer some of the things being asked for already and so the petitioners should contact their state consumer rights body.

To get a change in the rules, it needs to go through the European Parliament and the elected MEPs. That's how democracy works. Elected officials make the rules, civil servants enforce them.

On Windows you can also use a package manager like Winget or Chocolatey. To disable auto updates, go to Firefox's preferences and search for "update", it's right there as a toggle.

There is also Librewolf that is a Firefox fork, or really more of a version with the default settings changed for maximum privacy, as I don't think there is much change to the code itself.

FF on Android doesn't crash for me. It used to, but it's come a long way. The main issue at the moment is the crappy UI for tab handling.

Obviously they didn't make this phone, it's rebadged. There are lots of flip phones you can buy direct from China if you want that form factor. Software wise, Android lets you uninstall or disable even built in apps, or install your own OS.

Like their FPGA based C64, you are paying for convenience and having a common platform with support. It's like how there are cheaper SBCs than the Raspberry Pi, but it's very well supported and understood by the community.

Dude hipsters don't exist anymore. The kind of young hip dude or dudette that would qualify as a hipster is so thoroughly beaten down these days they've just faded into nothing. They're busy putting 60 hours a week in at Uber for just enough gas money to do it another week.

The core market for this is neurodivergent people who are being actively harmed by.. I don't want to call it social media because it's not. We need a new word to describe the kind of nastiness that Twitter and Facebook do where they actively keep you in a state of panic and fear and misery for the purposes of engagement so they can serve up advertisements and slurp up your data.

It's like how we tend to call right-wing extremists "conservative". When somebody's going to do something really awful they make sure that they pick a word to describe it or a phrase to describe it that is the exact opposite of what they're actually doing. Otherwise they couldn't get away with it because well, it's like you wouldn't buy a bouquet of dog shit would you?

It's not the approach that substandard it's the quality of the phone. It's a $500 device that you can buy the equivalent without the blockages for about 150 bucks.

I mentioned Twitter and Facebook has the kind of places that someone who is having trouble with doomscrolling wants to avoid and therefore wants a device that refuses to install those apps. That's presumably the selling point here you can't install the kind of apps that you would use to Doom scroll with. You're not searching Twitter you're wasting time on it while it makes you angrier and angrier and more frightened and more upset. You're not enjoying yourself but you can't stop because the algorithm has trapped you and you know this and you know you ought to just uninstall the app but you find yourself uninstalling it and then going back to it for another hit off the pipe.

The point is that sites like Twitter and Facebook use complex algorithms to take advantage of people with a variety of problems. It would be one thing if they were offering them something positive and good but all they give a shit about is the next engagement and the next opportunity to serve up and advertisement or the slurp up some data they can resell. They are more than happy to help you feel horrified and miserable as long as you're generating revenue for them in some capacity.

There's a bunch of neurodivergent people out there who know that they're being manipulated and they would be interested in a device like this because it makes it harder for them to fall off the wagon and reinstall the app. But the app shouldn't be allowed to be that addictive and destructive in the first place.

It's literally one group of ghouls profiting off of people's misery and another group of ghouls selling a potential solution to the first group. That's what sucks. And that's why it's peak capitalism

I just buy my phones directly and throw a Sim in them so I can uninstall anything I want.

I remember years ago I had one of the old Huawei ascend phones which was the first really cheap Android. It could just barely run angry birds and that was a big selling point. I didn't care about angry birds but it was nice to have a cheap Android phone back then but it barely had enough storage to run the operating system and I remember being pretty pissed off that some stupid bubble bubble clone was marked as a system app and could not be uninstalled. So I couldn't remove it to save space.

It has been for some time. That's why I said Chrome is the default.

From what I can tell Chrome will use less ram if you are someone who uses 1 to 10 tabs. The kind of lunatics around here the keep 100+ tabs open at all times are going to benefit from Firefox. It's a difference in design philosophy. Chrome is catering to the more average user that isn't going to keep a shitload of tabs open. I don't understand why people keep all this tabs open you can't possibly use them all and 90% of websites are going to figure out that you haven't been on that tab in a while and reloaded anyway. But I guess you do you. I know it really bothers people to have their tabs fucked with

You know that the industry is hurting.