Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

To evade taxes of course.

Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?

It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?

It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.

I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.

I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.

But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.

Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.

I’m not talking about the poor: as you say, they’re tired and the assaults of ultra-capitalism are relentless.

I’m talking about the middle class which, in the eyes of the ultra-rich, is just as insignificant as the ultra-poor, and is really only a few paychecks away from the same fate.

Middle class people happily ignores the fate of their fellow man in the street, bow their head and say nothing, believing if they don’t make too much fuss, the ultra-rich will maintain the status quo and they won’t do too badly.

That’s us. WE should pick up the pitchfork. We have the energy and we have a good reason, because really, we’re just slightly better than the poor and we pay a lot more taxes than the ultra-billionnaire sumbitches. But we don’t.

And poor people still die homeless in the street.

You’d think pitchforks would sell well. But apathy seems incurable, as people appear to have internalized staggering levels of inequality as a fact of normal life.

Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.

No device made to kill a human is humane

Yes but some are more inhumane than others. That’s why the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons exists, which lists the following protocols:

1. Non-detectable fragments: weapons specially designed to shatter into tiny pieces, which aren’t detectable in the human body. Examples are fragmented bullets or projectiles filled with broken glass.
2. Mines, booby traps, and other devices: This includes anti-personnel mines, which are mines specially designed to target humans rather than tanks.
3. Incendiary weapons: Weapons that cause fires aren’t permitted for use on on civilian populations or in forested areas.
4. Blinding lasers: Laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness.
5. Explosive remnants of war: Parties that have used cluster bombs in combat are required to help clear any unexploded remains.

Thermite is a protocol 3 weapon. So again, while I understand that Ukraine is desperate to defend itself, using that stuff is not great.

I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.

Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.

I hate Putin and any Russian war sympathizer as much as the next guy, but…

My grandfather got a white phosphorus burn during WW2. He told me it was the most terrible pain he ever felt in his entire life, you can’t extinguish it, and he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy. I heard the same kind of stories from people who got napalm burns in Vietnam.

I’m pretty sure thermite munitions are in the same category of basically inhumane weapons regardless of the circumstances, right up there with NBCs, mines, napalm and white phosphorus, and I can’t say I fully side with the Ukrainians on this one. I mean I understand why they do it, but I also remember my grandfather’s leg and the horror of what he told me.

Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.

MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:

• What do I care looking at the source code of a Google Play Services replacement when Google still holds my cellphone by the balls for certain critical functions?
• Why do I need permission from Google for apps to function properly on my cellphone?

I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.

MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.

I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.

Google Play Services

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I’m a kid of the cold war.

It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.

And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂