It really has. I had always tried to use Linux in the past, but gaming was always a fight, and the OS just never felt like it behaved reliable for daily usage for me, was always some little annoyance or bug or issue I'd run into and inevitably switch back to Windows for the sake of things just working without having to spend hours and days and weeks trying to fix issues. That was 10+ years ago. I finally decided to give it a go again, using an Arch based OS. I figured it's been a while, try something other than debian or SLES that I've been used to. Honestly, I kinda don't notice much difference in overall day to day use between gaming and day to day use on Linux versus previously being on Windows just a month ago. Everything kinda just works. The one thing I do notice is I use significantly less RAM, I seldom exceed 32gb as where I was regularly 40gb+ on Windows, and everything runs much better while I do the same day to day stuff as I always have. It's not a huge performance difference, but if I'm paying attention, yeah, I do notice my games tend to run better, and everything within the OS is far more responsive.
As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.
My rambling is really just to say: Yeah, linux has come a long way, especially for gaming and day to day use. The work Valve and others have done to make stuff just run and work is astonishing.
My only tip isn't really useful. Just avoid going to that hostile country for now. Unless there's a specific necessity. And if that's the case, then change all your social media accounts info, change the name, change birthdates, missmatch as much info as possible. Delete photos of yourself/family. Then for 'burner' accounts, make them on a different social network, like bluesky, myspace (they're still around), and then use an AI to generate ideas for posts and just make those as posts for the next while. The problem will be making a realistic timeline/history for new accounts. Alternatively "your kids aren't allowed to use social media", and that clears up a lot of work. But honestly just avoid the risk of traveling there in the first place, is it worth the risk of being detained?
Vivaldi is what I use. uBlock works fine with it. I have no issues with content loading or anything weird. I just describe it as "chrome, but if someone actually cared about the UI and functionality", and the mouse gestures are super nice.
I went to it from Firefox ages ago and haven't looked back or missed Firefox and all its issues even once.
I can't say your experience with it will be as good as mine or not, but it is a browser with adblock, which is also built in, but I prefer the plugin version.
Genuine question here: what's the actual benefits of blocking icmp?
Not asking "Why should I leave it on", I'm specifically asking for legitimate valid use cases for disabling it.
I really can only think of one, abd that's if your server just gets a relentless amount of pings that it takes up a significant portion of your bandwidth. (There was a news article about a news site in Australia, I think, that had that happen)
Same for me, I've entirely abandoned google's search engine. It's become rapidly more useless to the point where it's just become a search engine for their ad servers, to browse what ads and garbage is in their database instead of providing relevant information from the web about search terms.
You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until these comments. Just right click, block element, preview before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended parts of the pages.
As someone with decades of search engine experience, it's mainly knowing key words and exact phrases to use as well as excludes to filter out garbage. It's a bit hard to teach/explain in a single post, but if you search basted turkey and get results of "turkey baster", then quote the key phrase "basted turkey" -shopping -sale -price, try and remove results from shopping websites with excludes. Understand most search engines will drop most 1-3 letter words from your search. Like searching for 'fire in the house' will only look for results most relevant to the words fire and house, because 'in' and 'the' are just common everywhere. So if you want that exact phrase, then quote it. Searching used to be something you had to learn how to do.
I use a variety of mostly search engines that get me an answer much faster. Google/Bing frequently point to sites/articles written by AI anyway. Using a LLM directly often gives too much garbage and doesn't often stick to just answering my question, so it becomes as useless as a modern google search. I prefer old style searching of just using key words and refining my query opposed to having it (miss)interpreted.
I enjoy traveling a lot. Specifically traveling. Not arriving and staying somewhere, not vacationing, not sight seeing. Traveling has always been a fun experience to me. The road trip, the adventure part of a vacation. Spend a day or two to drive as far as possible, stop by places to rest and relax, then get back to it. Find an interesting road, where does that lead? People dismiss the adventure of traveling and just rush to the destination. Like quick travel in a game, if you walk to the destination, sometimes you find cool stuff, sometimes not, and sometimes you distract and detour so hard that you end up with a new destination instead. I don't consider flying to be traveling though, it's just flying to me, a rush of getting to a destination.
My goal of the cameras, which my neighbours know about, is not protecting me. It's protecting us.
I point cameras at their houses, at their doors & driveways from my property. Why? Because they can't install a camera on my house, but I can. Nobody has a problem. There's no distrust. There's cameras pointed right back at my home, too. We watch each other, because having more than one camera point of view creates a better security for all of us. I also have them watching at my door, specifically so I can see who is at the door, when mail gets delivered, or when packages get dropped off.
None of us have the delusion that we're all spying on each other. We're watching out for each other.
It should always show its current state. If a button is doubling as a status display, it needs to display current status, that's the entire point of a button doubling as displaying information.
Would you flip a breaker to the "ON" position in order to turn it off, or would you expect the breaker to display its current state of being ON/OFF?
That isn't my interpretation, nor did I ever make that statement. That IS infact a valid definition of copyright infringement. The source material is copyrighted and you're making a literal copy of it via photocopier. I don't know how you twisted the logic on that to conclude that would not be infringement.
However, it does also depend what you do with the photocopies, merely photocopying a book and keeping it privately is on par with copying a music CD as a backup. The infringement occurs when you're reusing it as your own, such as selling, publishing, or broadcasting the copyrighted material.
What I stated is that generated art such as images/music/photos that are by a non human cannot be copyrighted. A photocopier isn't generating anything, it's a copy, it's replication and it isn't generating a new thing.
My personal opinion is that AI generated artwork should be treated as equal to fanart when generating copyright influenced material.
Because if I can rewrite my printer to not intentionally be a total piece of shit, the company gets less money by intentionally expiring or wasting ink, DRM locking ink cartridge brands, or "service needed" bricking the device after a period of time.
There's also the matter of lawsuits. If you get a device, they're not supporting updates, so you go get a 3rd party update and it ruins the device, the RMA costs the manufacture, but worse, the customer(s) may file a (class action) lawsuit against the company over the problem of being unable to find the official firmware/driver updates, causing people to ruin their hardware, get RMA rejections, or not even being aware of an RMA process and simply buying another one.
Personally, I'd rather there be open source drivers/firmware for everything from day one, but to look at both sides, I fully understand the liability and why that's something that only exists in the hobbiest world.
I'm not sure how it'll hold up in law to claim copyright violations against something that wasn't created by a person. It'll really depend on the lawyers and judge's interpretation of written law. But I'm curious to see what comes of this.
They won't admit it's static, but it is. I've had the same IP for three years since moving into this house. In that time, I've had power outages lasting for days, IP was still the same. I've replaced my router and the assigned IP didn't change. The only way it can change is if they replace their media converter "fiber jack" or you call or go to their store to ask them to change your IP.
Most pet owners are well aware of the info in these articles. It's obvious my cat can think, learn, remember, and recall. When she wants attention, she comes to me, pats her paw against me for my attention, and then hops into my lap or awaits me to pick her up. She doesn't go to the couch and expect attention. It's easy to see that she wanted attention, and consciously sought me out, and socially interacted with me to get my attention. No cat owner would think that to be an autonomous or subconscious/thoughtless behaviour.
However, as an owner, none of my interactions with my cat are scientific, recorded research, or anything that helps to prove things. Again, anyone who has taken care of animals knows they make friends, enemies, socialize, think, and even love. But research in the field is still relatively new, these articles are relatively "no shit" to pet owners, but they're saying that there's now scientific research about these behaviours.
I don't know what Windows 11 Pro version has bitlocker on by default, but none of the systems I have at home enabled it as a default setting. Whether upgrading from 10 or complete nuke the drive and install fresh, I haven't seen it be a default setting.