If you're in a Windows-only job and you've got proof that Windows is getting in the way of doing your job you might just be able to convince those who decided to make it a Windows-only workplace to change their stance.
The opened borders, naive international policies, relegation of sovereignty to international organisations, pie-in-the-sky social plans, weird flags being hoisted at embassies, etcetera.
To the downvoters, do you doubt these are the issues which will be Republican targets for complaints - which was the question I answered here? If not, why the downvotes? How about replying instead of knee-jerking - or, given the size of the target and the extremities involved more likely index-finger-jerking - that downvote button? As it stands now it seems you mostly agree with what I posed but are unable to either acknowledge this nor to defend the opened borders, international policies, sovereignty issues, social planning or flag hoisting - which is what Republicans will be complaining about whether you like it or not.
This is supposed to be a site frequented by people of above average intelligence wih the willingness to use that intelligence to create and voice arguments. i.e. hackers. A querulous bunch of which it was said that getting them pointed in the same direction was like herding cats [1]. How can it be that this same bunch has allowed itself to be corralled and branded to moo in the same tone?
It matters because everyone - people, companies, countries - is supposed to be equal in front of the law. Selective application of the law shows this not to be the case and shows that there are other factors in play which decide whether someone - a person, a company, a country - gets to violate some law without legal consequences while someone else is prosecuted for the same violation.
If you now think "they have to start somewhere in prosecuting these violations" you're partly correct but also partly mistaken. Sure they have to start somewhere but they could - and if they are really serious about their claims should - have started prosecuting all those other companies which did this way before TikTok or even its predecessor Musically was a thing. Algorithm-driven endless scroll designs to keep user's eyes glued to the screen have been a thing from very early on in nearly all 'social' app-site-things and the warning signs about addictive behaviour in users have been out for many years without the law being thrown at the proprietors of those entities. As to why this has not happened I'll leave for the reader to decide. There are plenty of other examples to be found in this regard ranging from the apprehension of the Telegram CEO to the sudden fervour in going after X-formerly-known-as-Twitter which seem to point at politics being at play in deciding whether a company gets to violate laws without being prosecuted or not.
So what's the solution you ask? As far as I can see it is to keep these companies from violating user's rights by keeping them in line regardless of who owns or runs the company and regardless of whether those owners or proprietors are cooperative on other fronts. Assuming that these laws were written to stem the negative influence these app-things have on their users they should have gone after many other companies much earlier. Had they done so it might even have led to TikTok realising that their scheme would not work in the EU. They might not have launched here or they might have detuned their algorithmic user trap, they might have done many things to negate the negative effects of their product. They might just have decided to skip the whole EU market altogether like many other companies have done and do. I'd have thought 'good riddance', what you?
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?
We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
How otherwise would you refer to 'The West' which used to be called 'the free world' other than by stating this? Why, then, do you claim I 'speak of the free world'?
History does not change by choosing to ignore it. We in 'The West' used to think of ourselves as 'the free world' and to a large extent there was truth to this claim when comparing 'us' with people behind the Iron Curtain and communist China. Once the wall was broken, the borders opened and the Soviet Union dissolved this ceased to be true. By and large we're still better off than e.g. people in Russia but in many ways it seems like the bad ideas from places like the Soviet Union and China are being implemented at large scale in many countries on the west side of the former Iron Curtain.
So yes, I will keep on referring to these countries in this way, 'used to be called the free world' because this is how those countries did refer to themselves. History matters, it is there to be learned from.
Ads in the URL bar? I have never seen anything like that and I've been using Firefox as my standard browser since before it reached v1.0. What sort of ads, where did you see them?
That was the job description under Mitchell Baker and her successors. Under Brendan Eich it was different, maybe that is why the like of Baker wanted to get rid of him?
It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.
If you're just trying to run Linux you're better off either using one of the many read-made distributions or going with X11 since that works just about everywhere and has done so for decades.
THanks for the encouragement. I'm trying to get Debian Linux to run on a Chromebook and it's been no shortage of frustration, especially because ChromeOS is Linux and ostensibly open source, but just getting the kernel booted was an ordeal and a half. I'm currently stuck at suspend not working because something something EC, for which ChromeOS has a userland program to coax it into working right.
ChromeOS and devices it was made for are not the best start in Linux-land since it is Linux just like Android is, i.e. it is based on a Linux kernel but for the rest quite different from 'standard' (GNU-) Linux distributions like Debian + derivatives, Arch, Fedora etc. Maybe you can get that userland tool from ChromeOS to work in Debian, maybe not.
Even though you're trying to get Debian installed on the thing I'd also refer to the Arch wiki for information on how to get things working right:
Arch being what it is it has attracted a host of knowledgeable users who have collected their information about how to get things working on different systems in an organised and usually comprehensive way on that wiki. Much if not most of what is written there is also applicable to getting non-Arch distributions running on those systems.
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