Someology

Desperation is often the cause of stupidity. Walking into an invading army while unarmed is never a wise survival strategy. Show me one single time in History where this went well for most of the people involved.

Buy DRM free music instead of streaming it.

"‘I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement… we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God,’ Majd El-Aqqad said. "

That was a phenomenally stupid thing to decide to just walk into an invading army based on gossip. Predictably horrible outcome.

Nowhere did OP say anything about a desktop. I thought they meant “what’s the current laptop equivalent to a Thinkpad back in the day?” If they meant a desktop, they should have used the word desktop. “PC” is not exactly specific.

Convenience.

I have a loved one with permanent nerve damage from chemo. We’re very happy the chemo was successful, but imagine a combo of numbness and constant pain for the rest of your life in all your fingers, which becomes dramatically more severe with exposure to cold. It makes make simple daily life tasks from driving, to cooking, etc. far more difficult. They do not tell patients in advance they are going to continue the treatments until the point where permanent damage happens. You only realize after going through it that this was the plan all along. It makes medical talk about informed consent feel ridiculous. The severity fluctuates, but it has already been like 7 years, and this is never going away. It is not for “a while”.

Gotta say that it boosts my confidence in the Hugo Awards to see Babel NOT get nominated. This has zero to do with the author’s nationality and ethnicity and everything to do with Babel being a poorly written novel (with the ending obvious a long way off) and horrific character development. It would be shameful to award a novel where all characters are stand in caricatures of their cultures of origin instead of actual individuals. It just comes across as racist in itself, promoting stereotypes, instead of merely showing the reader that racism existed.

One of the first things I do on a new Samsung phone is disable Chrome and install Firefox. You’ve just saved me from ever buying a Redmi.

Lucky you, to live where there is a passenger train.

This sounds like it should be the premise of a Doctor Who episode.

Every generation before Gen X was conceived without The Pill being available. The fact that it did not exist has nothing to do with why there were more Boomers than there were Greatest Generation or Silent Generation.

I also get a button along with those to continue in my browser (on mobile). I just tap to continue on Firefox, and it works (at least on any subs that are not NSFW).

Call them on the telephone, and tell a human you would like to make a reservation. Telephone voice calls still work at every restaurant in my region. Also, get this, you can place take out orders that way at most places! It’s an amazing technology!

It saves me $10 per month, and that $120 per year is more than worth it. Plus, my home network is none of their business, and using your own equipment is your only means of privacy and control within your own network. I understand that not everyone cares, but consumers should be educated.

Do not use their router. You are not required to. I have xfinity, and I use my own modem and my own router. No monthly rental fee. Just takes a little research before purchase.

Most districts don’t own a cloud system. They subscribe to one from a big vendor, and that vendor is scraping that sweet sweet data (aggregated and anonymity of course, because, kids), but still.

That was a great little mp3 app. It worked better on a low-resource, low-memory system than all the competition at the time (late 1990s). This is instead referring to the chat protocol that Google Talk ran on. It was formerly called Jabber.

Yes, I do think they are, but by choosing a Samsung smartphone, I’ve already decided to be OK with that on some level. I turn off features that connect to outside companies for the most part, and I’ve chosen to believe that Samsung does what it claims with the settings that users have available to them on the phone. It doesn’t mean that I’m just fine with handing everything over to any other random company. Samsung states that they use Branch for searches inside their Galaxy Store. Some claims have been made that Branch powers the Finder (search) function on Samsung phones (althugh I can’t find confirmation), but this Finder Customization Service is a feature you can disable on a Samsung Galaxy phone. You can also turn off search suggestions for Finder and disable it’s ability to open links. You can disable Google and Samsung’s browsers and Internet searches as well.I am the sort of user who checks permissions of apps before downloading them (and disables everything I don’t use), and I don’t want my launcher (which I paid for) on a device I paid a not small sum of money for, to send every single tap back to a marketing firm directly.

:( I used Nova Prime for many years, and I don’t like this one bit. I hope that the devs got a good payout, and best wishes to them, but it makes me uncomfortable. Luckily, while it’s definitely no Nova, Samsung’s launcher has finally on the most recent version gotten to a point of usability. Everything is more awkward to do, and you have to install extra Samsung apps (Good Lock with applets) for a lot of the customization, but most of my favorite features from Nova are finally there. So, for the first time in many years, I’m running the Samsung default OneUI 5.1.