That's fine. Those are the plugins you chose to install for your particular tastes and these are very important options to have available to the user should he choose to use them. That's not what I meant by "smart" features.

What I don't want is my browser with built-in modern equivalents of Bonzi Buddy that you can't remove.

I see a web browser like a TV screen. An I need it to do is display the internet with nothing in the way. Any attempt to add built-in "smart" features to it will make it worse. If I want something else added to it, I'll plug it in myself.

But Russia can target Kyiv anytime they want.

Read the whole post. I acknowledged them already and am expressing my doubts over the true motivations that drive Microsoft to force a tech like this upon all their users and express my concerns over the real use they will make of this technology.

Don't you try to change the meaning of my post just so you can have a cause to white knight over. This isn't Reddit.

An image is worth a thousand words. How is reading a text describing what is on the screen going to be better than just looking at the screen yourself, something you'll need to do to read the description anyway? Aside from accessibility for the blind, the practicality such a technology is questionable.

The motivation behind this is obviously to facilitate the collection and reporting user profiling data. Accessibility for the blind is only a side effect. Tech companies have been doing it with automated audio transcriptions for years already, now they're after what you look at on your screen.

Looks a lot like there was a past history between them and that the modes of transportation have nothing to do with it.

To be fair speed cameras are a terrible way to address the problem of speeding. The solution isn't speed limit enforcement, it is road design. If you build a wide straight open road that feels like you're driving on a highway, drivers will naturally tend to drive on it at highway speeds. Slapping a low speed limit on a road like that will make following said speed limit extremely uncomfortable and drivers will naturally tend to go too fast the moment they stop monitoring their speedometer. Hiding a speed camera on a road like that is essentially tricking people into paying an extra tax and speed cameras are often being blatantly used in that way.

The real solution to keeping speeds low is narrowing the street and also if possible making it windy. Use the space to add trees and protected bike lanes. Suddenly drivers will feel comfortable driving a slower speed without the need for a speeding camera. As a bonus it improves the safety for cyclists and pedestrians far more than a stupid speed camera ever would, and it makes the road far more enjoyable to use for everyone, including the car drivers.

I had to have a double take to check that TheDailyBeast hadn't become a satire news outlet.

Anyone else saw how he had to be ushered to the back of the crowd during the trophy presentation? He really believed the cheers were for him.

Every single ones of those who enabled Trump to perform his autocratic rise in power for their own personal profit should be rounded up and charged accordingly for corruption and/or treason. They need to be made an example to any future wannabe dictator enablers.

For example: Whoever is running Trump's money laundering cryptocurrency scheme. There is no way Trump has any idea of how cryptocurrency works or even what it even really is. This is the same Trump who was confused by the screens in a Tesla car. It is obvious that someone approached him and sold it to him as a way to launder bribe money and is probably doing it for a percentage fee that is earning him millions. That person is knowingly enabling corruption at the highest level of the country.

There is an entire team of morally bankrupt assholes who are profiting off of enabling Trump's dictatorship.

As for healing the country's mental sanity as a whole, or should I even say connection with reality, it will at least require figuring out a way to get rid of Russia's hybrid warfare's social media influence with their troll farms spewing polarizing disinformation memes. It is no coincidence that most the anti-mask and anti-vax propaganda outlets suddenly pivoted to pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine propaganda as soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is also no coincidence that a lot of the pro-Trump have suddenly turned pro-Russia as well. They are consuming their propaganda without knowing it.

Other than that, the US should REALLY invest in its education system. None of this would have gotten this bad had the people been better educated and informed. You have a terrifying amount of people who can barely spell their own names who trust some random sketchy article or meme they saw on the internet more than the words of educated professionals who spent decades studying the field in question.

Because we can poke a hole in it just before we leave. And maybe a hole in Trump as well so the blood attracts sharks.

My banking app. It has been years since I last checked if it works, maybe it works now but I don't care. I just use the browser to do my banking.

Can we take away Trump's citizenship?

If no country wants to have him, I'm OK with dumping him in international waters on a raft.

I run GrapheneOS because it gives me full control over what my phone does and gives me the ability to restrict access to anything on all applications or uninstall any application I don't want on my phone even if it causes some functionalities to break.

This is how all devices should be by default.

Had lawmakers gotten their heads out of their asses and made actually having control over a device that you own like this a legal requirement for all devices, I wouldn't need to be using GrapheneOS.

I've just learned that the latest Trixie version of Debian runs Plasma 6 as well. Another route to explore depending how new your hardware is.

It is also to be noted that this means that Plasma 6 support will likely trickle down to Linux Mint through Linux Mint Debian Edition 7. Eventually, maybe. If that happens, it will become a solid package for users who want a very stable, approachable and easy to use distro that is compatible with KDE Plasma 6. It might not come pre-packaged with KDE Plasma, but it should be relatively simple and quick to follow a walkthrough to install it after since at its core it will be compatible with it.

I recommend BTRFS with snapper for anyone who isn't an expert, which includes myself.

With BTRFS with Snapper, should something break your install short of breaking your bootloader, it makes recovery completely idiot proof.

It is literally a matter of scrolling through a menu that appears for 3 seconds at startup to select an option in the lines of "boot from snapshot", pick a snapshot in the list that is time stamped to a time/date when your install still worked, let it boot up, make sure your OS started up fine, go in the console and enter the command "sudo snapper rollback" (which will tell the system to make the snapshot you are currently running the default one), enter your password and then reboot. Bam, you've just rolled back your OS to a point before it got broken. You don't even need to understand what broke it to begin with.

It saved my ass a few times already. Trying to recover a broken operating system without this tool requires a whole lot more knowledge than I have.

The problem with writing smart characters who solve problems using their wits is that you need smart and hardworking writers to pull it off.

Otherwise you end up with shitty cop-outs like having the character invent and build some impossible contraption that wouldn't even believably work or relying on an incredibly unlikely sequence of events to happen for their plan to work.

I think what matters more for a beginner is the desktop environment (DE). For someone coming from Windows I recommend using KDE Plasma for a DE. Ever since Plasma 6 it has become one of the best DE out there.

I've used:

• Mint : Solid, easy, but runs Cinnamon as a DE, which is OK and looks nice but lacks functionality for multiple displays. You can switch it to KDE Plasma but it is unofficially supported and can only run Plasma 5 which is was not a mature version IMO. It is glitchy and lacks the functionalities that makes Plasma 6 complete. Ultimately if you are using a single monitor Mint is a great choice, just stick to Cinnamon.

• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed : It runs Plasma 6 out of the box. It also allows you to easily set up BTRFS Snapshot (a solid and easy to use recovery mode should something break your install) and encryption right at the install setup. If I remember well, Mint also has that support. It was remarkably stable for a rolling release distribution but I did have to use the Snapshot rollback a few times, mostly because NVidia kept messing up its driver updates. It is also a slightly oddball distro so you might sometimes encounter something that needs a minor workaround or require slightly different commands to work, something I always found a solution to with a quick internet search. The rolling release also means there are tons of updates coming out almost every day, which gets annoying after a while. Their package manager (zypper) is also relatively slow, not supporting parallel downloads yet. They are currently testing a Slow Release version (as opposed to Tumbleweed which is the rolling release version) that would tame it down but it's not officially released yet.

• I'm now running Fedora KDE and I'm happy with it. It is easy to install and it just works. It is relatively mainstream so things work better. It is also very stable. The caveat being that the installation process doesn't include any support for easily setting up BTRFS snapshots and encrypted home folder. There is however a very solid step by step instructions video on YouTube on how to set it up and explaining what and why you are doing at every step that I used to set it up for myself. It is quite the process however and the installer has changed slightly since the video was made so there was a bit of hunting around.

They all work relatively easily with their own pros and cons.

I haven't tried it personally, but I think that Kububtu could also be an option for you . It is the KDE Plasma version of the most popular Linux distribution.

IMO as long as you don't pick something like Arch and don't mind doing a few quick web searches when you have questions it should be fine.

Such a tragedy that Trump doesn't sunbathe though.

Coming up next week: Captchas where you have to click on all the pictures containing non-white people