“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.

the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.

Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away

the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’

and this is why i refused to give you my social back when i lived in your service area and had a land line installed.

apple does ‘support’ their hw better, it’s just that it’s a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better–much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they’re far more important than users or the planet.

i do edit photos and video on a 15 year old desktop. yea, it’s not as fast. it even still only has mechanical hdd. it works. i really don’t give a shit how long it takes to encode. it can sw encode hd h264 in ‘real time’ (sw giving better quality output and at a smaller file size than the faster gpu encoding), that’s good enough for me. it does everything the much newer system i’ve been able to use recently at the office can do–it’s just slower at some things.

that’s great. most of us are more than a billion dollars short of a billion.

system disk encryption is possible, yes.

i have a flipper, there are no ‘apps’. i don’t even text on it.

i never willingly gave them anything, and never had an account, but i’m sure they have a ton of data anyway despite always using ad and tracker blockers everywhere, and never having a device with their apps… just from mentions and tags on peoples’ pages and what they can assemble from that and other data they get their mitts on.

and like they haven’t been reading all the data from day one anyway.

knowing when an account is created, down to the month and year seems to me to be an unrealistic requirement for a password reset.

i wouldn’t know the answer to that for any account, anywhere.

openoffice is an asf project (apache. same organization that does the apache web server and many other projects); the code and project was donated to them by oracle. it still exists, its development cycle is just a tad slower than most would like.

libreoffice was forked off of openoffice when it was still an oracle project (they having acquired it when they bought sun microsystems).

without activation or a subscription, your current office installation will continue to read and view the files just fine, you just won’t be able to edit and re-save them or create new ones.

there are a number of ‘free’ or open source alternative to several of the microsoft office applications (word, excel, and ppt), such as onlyoffice, libreoffice, softmaker, etc. set the default save format back to microsoft office format (docx, xlsx, pptx) for a more seamless transition. if your online drive is mounted in your os, any of these would be able to read/write to it like any other installed application.

older versions of microsoft office (2010 and earlier) may be ‘out of date’ and unsupported, but they still work and can be bought second-hand for cheap.

there is also free-to-use online versions of microsoft office and google docs (their respective online account required–and their anti-privacy policies apply). these would by default use their respective online storage.

if you are in university, you may be able to get a low-cost or even free microsoft office key or subscription from your school. check with your student i.t. help desk or school-run campus bookstore.

if you work for a larger company or institution that uses volume licenses of microsoft software, they may have a ‘workplace discount’ for a microsoft 365 sub, it’s about $20-30 off per year (the more reasonable ‘home use program’ does not exist anymore).

concept is ‘workable’ in an open, but small, tight-knit community.

but in general, if google can’t read it–few eyeballs will ever see it.

frequency of ‘spam’ calls should have significant gone down with the implementation of cid verification (stir/shaken). it has on all our lines; home and office–cellular and pots.

there’s enough ways around charges of ‘discriminating’ based on the disallowed criteria of household income or race, that it will still be ‘business as usual’ for providers. they’ll use other excuses, such as differences in local market (competition) and population/customer density, or the ‘extreme’ costs of upgrading aging infrastructure in previously-“avoided” areas, which would be ‘allowed’.

there’s nothing stopping the company from discontinuing the sale of new ‘lifetime’ plans should there ever be a concern about the ‘costs’ to serve those who already have it. as it is now, they have a fairly high price on a very modest amount of space, and it appears to me that they’re covering their ass here wrt future servicing costs.

at €300 per 2tb? that’s like 10x the current cost of storage. sounds like a reasonable price to provide what is really just a modest quota, indefinitely, so long as there isn’t a wave of ‘fires’ across southeast asia that puts every hdd and most nand facilities out of commission and storage costs skyrocket to prices never before seen.

you ‘heard’ wrong.

i encounter the same problems there, and at ecosia, whenever i don’t connect directly and with some of my addons disabled.

“guess we’ll have to insert a totally-irrelevant ad every now and then to throw 'em off. good thing we get all this user data to know what that will be.”
-zuck, in the not-so-distant future

thirty years from now, old friends and family gathered for something. one suddenly interjects, ‘remember that weird video jah348 had on his phone’ yeah.. :;quiet chuckles:: awkward pause. conversation continues where it left off.

i run with scripts disabled unless explicitly whitelisted. this one is annoying af,. so many sites use client scripts to display static content and navigation elements that absolutely didn’t need to–at all. right underneath these idiots is the morons that load the entirety of jquery in a bazillion different external files… and for what? a fucking hover effect over their menus or links or something equally ridiculous.

it’s not the irs’ fault the “system” is as it is. they’re limited to what congressional actions (laws and budget) allow.

i also still file through the mail because with no assets or investments and a low income, they’re simple af to do. it rarely changes year-to-year except the figures from the tables.

made me remember this old classic:
http://www.mslinux.org/

ecosia started blocking me after like two page views because my firefox blocks or alters ‘too much’.

so the ip and the search are still both sent to microsoft?

just because they aren’t sent to the ‘same server’ doesn’t mean that microsoft can’t reassemble the data.

republicans: “hold my beer”

that’s only newer hardware that meets specific requirements.

without a master password, firefox just uses a simple scheme it can reverse. if you use a master password, though, then that password is needed.

chromium browsers now use windows credentials, if you have no password on a local windows account, then none is needed to extract the passwords from the browser. .

the thing must phone home to check license status, and they were able to match your systems to the same entity via ip or network or something. but with a minimum buy of 100, i’d tell 'em to fuck off if the total seats using the pack was less than that, regardless of commercial/personal use status.

this is a very sensible alternative to actually going all-in on self-hosting mail, which is a total pain in the ass.

they are claiming that you have to be signed into chrome, the browser, in order to open an incognito window.

yea, it sounds a little crazy. i don’t use chrome, so i can’t confirm that’s the case. i haven’t run into any articles claiming this either, just this post and one other elsewhere awhile back that does.

that ship sailed about two decades ago.

i have ad and script blocking, plus a few other things. if a site doesn’t work. big deal, i’ll go elsewhere.

certain news sites in particular don’t seem to understand that they are not the only one with ‘the scoop’. lock an article behind a paywall, i’ll just click and drag that headline, then right-click and search. boom a dozen other non-paywalled sources for coverage of the same story, some with your exact article, even.

my tv is less than a year old. four firmware updates (allowed through the pihole to try to fix an audio bug… but no luck there yet) so far and now the ‘smart’ bits are laggy and slow. the one app that i started to actually like over its web site can’t handle more than a few hours now without freezing up (the tv needs to be restarted to ‘fix’). it was fast and fine and could run for days on end before. at the rate its performance is deteriorating, it’ll be unusable before its 2 year warranty is up.

which is all by design, i’m sure. yea, you might ‘force’ me into another tv, but you can’t make me buy another one of your pieces of shit.

if it gets any worse, the tv is getting factory reset and never touching the net again. i might be able to salvage a few years out of it as a monitor before some cheap sub-component inside dies.

it got mine wrong because i change default useragent and platform in the browser.

for a little extra creepiness, modify the image-generating script to add geoip location data and http referer to the image.

wonder if that played any part in microsoft’s decision to acquire github. they can scan all the repos now, not just the public ones.

restic or duplicati might be a solution for you for that.