His acting was superb in Oceans Twelve!

(He played “Bruce Willis as himself”.)

Joke (whoosh)

My head

I’m afraid I don’t follow you. Why would you sand down your dice? Wouldn’t that bias them?

issues with the Covid-19 vax

healthy for opposing viewpoints

Vaccine skepticism is not a “healthy viewpoint”, but quite the opposite. Vaccines and inoculations are about as much “proven science” as we have, with hundreds of years behind the science. Spreading anti-vaxxer propaganda kills people.

Side note, I had a couple of high blood pressure readings recently, and was considering using one of the injectable drugs for weight loss. But after talking to a doctor, I thought I’d try watching the food that goes into my “pie hole” first.

That was a few weeks ago when I saw my doctor. Since then, I’ve been eating much fewer processed foods, and more fruits and veggies. I was surprised at the difference of caloric intake and carbs from snack foods compared with regular fruit as a snack. “Tortilla chips: serving size 5 chips!” And eating the processed snack always leaves me wanting more. I also added some moderate walking exercise.

So after 4 weeks I’m down 8.5 pounds, about 3+% of my body weight. I already feel a big difference. Now I’m thinking I don’t need to inject expensive chemicals into my belly. Maybe I can just eat healthier foods and walk a few miles per week.

Thanks. Much appreciated.

I’m convinced it takes a special kind of sociopath to be a CEO.

What data are you referring to?

That anonymizes Google results. It’s Google, all the way down.

If you use Steam quite a bit, check out the ProtonDB Web site. That can tell you the level of compatibility. 90% of my library seemed to be covered, and it’s seamless. I was impressed!

Edit to say: One problem I had was getting my Brother printer to work over WiFi. That was some annoying arcane wizardry, but I finally got it to work.

ProtonMail was a huge disappointment. I was a paying customer.

But I’m happy so far with Tuta.

Brother printers to the rescue. I think they are still untainted by crap bloatware and just do the thing.

I’ve heard “dub-dub-dub”. But yeah, saying the abbreviation is longer than the words it’s abbreviating! 😀

EULA’s are widely honored and established law. However, anyone can push back on anything they put in an agreement.

To fight Microsoft, you have to fight Microsoft’s lawyers, in Microsoft’s jurisdiction. But you can’t sue them, because you already agreed to arbitration. And you’d have to pay lawyers in what would be a long, drawn out process.

If Microsoft demands things that are incredibly weird like what you describe above, there definitely would be a chance it could be appealed to a court and eventually see a judge. I think it would be a long and expensive process for both sides getting there. And Microsoft’s argument would be, “The user has the option to stop using it.”

There are undoubtedly severance clauses in there, so if a court deems a part of a license illegal, then it is stricken, and the rest of the agreement stands.

So, Microsoft’s lawyers only put things in the agreement that they are 99+% sure of wanting and winning. So they probably won’t request your spleen. They don’t want that. They just want your money, your data, and your eyeballs connected to your brain.

It kinda does make it legal. If you don’t agree to the terms of the product, then you are using it illegally. It sucks, but that’s where the law is. I am typing this on a Linux laptop in Firefox, but those have terms and conditions, too!

Yes, but - in many of those contracts (particularly end-user license agreements) you agreed to them changing the terms of the contract. You also have an “out” - not using the product any more.

You’re right though: it’s slimy. Anything slimy thing can be put into a contract!

Source: I’m not a lawyer, but worked in an office with a lot of them, and worked with software license agreements in particular.

1. So what?
2. Damn straight they are locked. Other wise you get Nicole spam on all of them, instead of just a few.
3. So what?

I thank you sincerely for getting back to me on this. I wanted to let you know I just figured it out! I thought I’d document it for the next person to come along.

I had tried all of the options in that screenshot, and none seemed to work.

Investigating further, it was a Brother printer, so I needed to download special drivers: https://support.brother.com/g/b/productsearch.aspx?c=us&lang=en&content=dl

Then, arcane magic needed to be performed on the command line: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfcj4335dw_us_eu&os=128&dlid=dlf006893_000&flang=4&type3=625

I had done all that, but I still had a problem. Digging through the script output, apparently I had a bad “libsane” installed with apt. Also, to add to the problems, apt doesn’t recognize the string “libsane” now. We are to use its new name “libsane1” now in apt! So, I tried to reinstall and then reinstall the brother printer drivers, to no avail. Eventually, I had to completely uninstall libsane, and then reinstall it. And everything magically worked.

It’s so easy! 🤨

One thing to be ready to have is the IP number of the printer, which I was able to get in the WiFi options of the printer.

Whew! Test page printed on my test machine! I feel like this was my last major hurdle before adopting Linux on other machines.

Again, thanks for responding!

to work harder for no reason

I think the reason might be money. There’s very little money in, “Here’s some free salvation for you!”

I was thinking of buying a Synology system. I was actually looking at prices this past week.

That being said, I’ve got an old 2019 desktop running Windows that is coming to the end of its support, that I was considering making a Linux machine.

How complex is making a roll-your-own NAS?