Malware and porn banners are going to make this a feature always turned off.

They have a few legacy things working in their favor. Hardware compatibility is one, but seems to be a thing of the past now when people don’t care. Application compatibility is another, and that is with Windows, not with NT.

And they don’t have to change the core parts, because NT is fine. Windows is not, it’s a heap of legacy, but it’s not realistically replaceable.

Unless they develop from scratch a new subsystem, like Embrasures or Walls or Bars, and gradually deprecate Windows. Doesn’t seem very realistic too, but if they still were a software company and not a malware company, they’d probably start doing this sometime about now.

Well, was spyware-ridden Kazaa malware?

I mean, I agree.

It remained in the OS business to the extent that is required for the malware business.

Also NT is not a bad OS (except for being closed, proprietary and probably messy by now). The Windows subsystem over it would suck just as bad if it would run on something Unix.

Those mass disinformation campaigns are being done by (sometimes “almost”) nation state level actors. Governments are going to counter only some of them.

As for my own opinion - in 2020 during Artsakh war there were a few Turkish immigrant events in European countries where they’d march, yell Turkish neo-Nazi stuff, yell that they are looking for Armenians and so on. I don’t remember governments of those countries (who are already in charge of regulating fascists on their streets) doing anything about that.

I think this is going to be the same here - a regulation is a price tag in disguise. Smaller actors will be barred from doing those disinformation campaigns, bigger ones or friendly with the right governments will not be.

Killing and splitting corporations is better, but the previous part about price tag is the exact reason they are not doing this. Those governments want to have bot campaigns of their own, to manufacture consent, to see what people are saying, to control the public discourse. They just don’t want others to do it too.

This is a toad fucking a viper, as they say in Russian.

I guess his PoV is that Xitter is his property, thus when he does whatever there, it’s not censorship, but when state demands from him to do whatever there, it is.

But his position would be easier to defend were he not Elon Musk.

Most of all about neo-colonial politics. Many actions presented as the opposite of that are in fact neo-colonial. Such as the kind of governments and forces and “recognized borders” all European and related countries (including USA and Russia) support very firmly (as in - helping suppress every movement contrarian to them with any amount of cruelty being allowed).

Well, thx, but I already have a couple of noname Chinese cables with braided cover (to avoid breaking) which seem to be as good as anything else I’ve touched, and were kinda cheap.

No strategy was involved in buying them, though, so I’ll remember you advice.

“This shit” was said in the context of a society exactly opposite to anglosphere, where being “poor” is an indulgence for violating every moral rule, every promise, every obligation and every law.

More than that, it was said about the exact people who are, relatively speaking, not poor, rather almost privileged, but are hateful and envious of everyone actually doing useful work, and consider corruption good because in their opinion a bureaucracy worker stealing something entrusted to them is “a respected in the society person collecting rent from their position” or something like that.

The profession of a schoolteacher in Russia pays shit, which is why 3 kinds of people want that - those who are too dumb for other work, those who are idealistic, and those who want to feel that they are important and powerful (power over children) even more than to be paid well.

There are more people of the 2nd kind than you think, but those were of the 3rd undoubtedly. 1st kind is almost extinct - it’s not hard to find a job that pays better, if you don’t want power over children.

I think it’s clear how the 3rd kind intersects with sympathies to sociopathic behavior, and sympathies for corruption and organized crime.

EDIT: Oh, I just realized you thought they were bootlickers and hateful of poor people in this memory of mine. No, they considered that BS to be good for poor people. Basically hateful of capitalism most when it’s many small businesses honestly competing, but thinking oligopoly and state capitalism would be better. They considered me to be on the side of some “rich” people who hurt the poor. While big company owners and such were not, because they are apparently doing lots of charity etc and are respected people. So the “rich” they’d hate would be the “middle class”, not the “boss class”.

I mean, Australians won’t care a lot after Europeans have scraped their continent

OK, where I live the price difference is not the same.

and you know it will charge your phone at the fastest speed it’s capable of

Are you really advocating for buying an Apple-branded USB-C cable?

It’s just hard to trust them. So - buying an Apple laptop to install Linux there? Doesn’t seem to make much sense, though Linus Torvalds seems to be of a different opinion.

I don’t get why even use their “blessed” hardware.

When I was at school, a few things made me want it:

1. Apple was still kinda fine back then, playing nice with FOSS community;

2. I had good memories from using QuickTime under Windows 2000;

3. I’ve been Jobswashed by a few books for kids saying how innovative he was;

4. I had a PSP, it was really cool to use for listening to music, playing games, reading books in the Web (over wi-fi) and even Skype, and I thought iPhones seem kinda similar;

5. I was possessed by imitated (was bored, wanted to feel something real and heroic) romantic feelings and real (bright hair, greenish-gray eyes, warm smile, subtle voice, and at that moment she seemed intelligent and nice ; turned out not as honest though) sexual desire of one girl who had an iPhone, a perfect product placement, one can say;

6. Apple’s UIs back then seemed very usable, only later I actually tried them and realized that even Windows makes me less furious;

7. It still wasn’t today’s Apple, they seemed trustworthy.

None of this applies today.

OK, punch tape it is then.

It’s baffling, you can do a lot of tasks with a compact version of PDP-11 (there were two Soviet clones, I don’t remember which of them is which - one was a proper one, and could be used as a terminal server too, another had the monitor board simplified, IIRC, making it more of a normal PC of that time, just with PDP-11 CSA and the OS was RTX-11 in essence, but reverse-engineered and localized and with hardware drivers for those machines).

(I know it’s a different period and they had floppies.)

Why do we need such enormously complex fragile things? We rely on them so much that if, say, a “global thermonuclear war” really happens, with following hunger, movements of population, rapid climate changes, - our civilization is profoundly fucked.

Magnetic tape?

Tape backups, baby.

No, I don’t have a library of those. I don’t even have a tape drive.

Russia, the social group - eh, schoolteachers

Their views were in general along the lines that there are poor people and there are rich people. Poor people owe nobody nothing (including respect to property rights, personal space, privacy and so on), and are owed everything. Rich people vice versa, it’s them paying with rights for their asocial riches.

Now who’s poor is not absolute, it’s who owns less than deserved, and what’s deserved is big for their friends and similar-minded people. And who’s rich is the same, but owning more than deserved, and if they don’t like you, you deserve less.

It’s the kind of people who love Stalin.

Oh, we are being enthusiastic about the state boot again.

I mean, since corps are already using it to their ends, then it’d be probably a good thing to stomp them right back with that boot.

But I’d like a clean humanist solution more.

That’d involve, for example, commissioning a FOSS P2P post-Web system which would replace Google’s and Facebook’s and others’ services. A few dozens of nation states, not poorest on Earth, could do that.

That system would be simpler and cheaper than their missiles and jet planes and drones, while so tremendously useful to kill once and for all this particular threat.

Like those Locutus and ghost keys things, which are not a working thing yet, but very promising.