Not the person you replied to, but…

What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?

To move out of the least-worst option position.

Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.

And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.

I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.

Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.

I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.

A switchback is to a hiking trail what a hairpin curve is to a mountain road.

If people want to intentionally pour some chlorine into their gene pool, I’d say let them.

It’s a sad fact that the fastest-breeding segment of the human population is the lowest quartile on the intelligence bell curve, with the next-lowest quartile coming in at a close second.

The litmus test of determining if there is bigotry involved is to change the terms in contention. If it is bigoted in one direction, it is fundamentally bigoted in both.

You hit the nail on the head when you posited “if this was a guy doing it to his girlfriend” it would be toxic, manipulative, and abusive.

Let’s make misandry as unacceptable as misogyny. Because true equality will be impossible until we do.

1. Find a pair of vehicle radiators that are as close to a box fan in size as possible.
2. Zip tie them to either side of the box fan. As the fan blows: it will draw air in through the “second radiator” and blow it out through the “first radiator”.
3. Hook the out of the first radiator to the in of the second using flexible hoses. Cheap garden hoses might even fit.
4. Hook other hoses to the in of the first radiator and the out of the second.
5. Run water on through the first radiator, out of the second. This makes the most efficient heat transfer possible.

Washington State has a digital braille library

And since it’s a blue state, this library is unlikely to be viciously defunded or be legally/legislatively attacked by regressives.

8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.

If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.

VW really dropped the ball on software

Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

Depends on when it was produced.

My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.

If the punishment for a crime is a set fine, then it is a law that targets only the poor; the wealthy will just pay that fine with the spare pennies at the bottom of their pocket as “a cost of doing business” and move on like nothing ever happened.

Antibiotics.

Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.

Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.

In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.

Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.

And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.

I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.

Many modern routers have this exact capability - to take a USB-only printer and serve it up over the network. Even some ISP modem/router combo units are set up to do this. Check to see if your router has any USB ports on the back.

Any drug made with even a penny of taxpayer money (grants, funding, etc.) should be priced to taxpayer-affordability levels, with any corporation making it beholden to production SLA’s that severely ding them (far more than they could ever make off of the drug) if they cannot meet 100% of market demand.

Plus, set up a government company whose sole purpose is to serve the public by producing drugs at cost for anything that isn’t meeting market demand. As in, massively undercut the Parasites.

Then make this retroactive to all drugs, all the way back, no matter when they were developed.

If a drug company wants to suckle at any teat other than 100% self-funded, they would have to put 100% of their own money towards developing that drug. As it is, there are ZERO DRUGS that haven’t been developed on the taxpayer dime, either in part or in whole.

What is the difference between forced intervention and whatever Portugal did when it decriminalized hard drugs?

Portugal treats it as a mental illness health issue, and provides counselling. Only large non-personal amounts are treated as distribution, and therefore, criminal.

Only mental heath professionals can assign intervention, and typically only in cases where the user is a viable threat to themselves or others (imminent danger of harm through violence). This means that the vast majority of users are not coerced at all - they enter into counselling willingly, and with an intent to come clean.

The reason why things have backslid in the last little while has been due to funding cuts, and nothing else. Which is the same as any public service – funding determines effectiveness.

running it in an ssd is it can speed it up

Let me be absolutely clear: due to the finite write capabilities of solid-state technology, using SpinRite on an SSD is materially harmful to that SSD, and WILL shorten it’s operational lifespan by a non-trivial amount.

This is why SSDs have wear-levelling technology: to limit the number of writes that any one data cell will receive. By using a program that conducts intensive read/write operations on sectors, you are wearing your SSD out at a much higher rate than normal, dramatically speeding up any failures in the future.