A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.

Depends on whether you want to convince people of your position, or you’re just explaining your own choice. The latter is fine, but the former won’t happen without better sources.

I’m not particularly horrified about the availability of AI features, but I’d rather see Mozilla focus most of its resources on core competencies. Firefox lags behind Chrome in web standards feature support, e.g. the browser scores on https://caniuse.com/. It’s also prone to making my laptop fan spin more than Chromium browser do, and people often complain about speed.

They should make the core browser better, and maybe task a couple developers to build some LLM support as an extension.

Without taking a position on the claim itself, this is a bad citation. It makes a variety of claims that either don’t hold up to basic scrutiny, or aren’t evidence that iOS has a security advantage. Here are some examples:

Open-source platform increases vulnerability surface area

This is perhaps one of the most thoroughly debunked pieces of FUD in the entire tech industry.

[Various claims about inconsistency between devices]

These are mostly true but largely irrelevant. You’re not buying an aggregate of all Android devices that exist, but a specific device with specific traits. The Android phone you should actually buy will have a security chip and many years of updates just like an iPhone.

The rigorous app review process and mandatory App Store distribution (except in EU) virtually eliminate malicious app threats for average users.

This might be a benefit when the user has no clue how to use a computer, but I expect people posting in this community are past that stage. It’s a big disadvantage for those who want to use something like Firefox (real Firefox, not a skin on Safari) with potential security and privacy upsides.

There is actually a current Chromium-based browser for Android with Manifest v2 extension support and uBlock Origin.

Waterfox is available for Android.

I imagine you could wire your own mechanical switch to that steering wheel. Fuck them for doing that though.

Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.

I have a five year old Pixel 4A running LineageOS. I limit battery charge with AccA to ensure it doesn’t wear out.

The phone reports its battery capacity at 93%. I have no plans to replace it unless I break it,

It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.

I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.

IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.

KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn’t have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.

The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.

As I understand it, the practice remains common in the USA. Verizon, the carrier in the article agreed to limitations, but other carriers routinely finance phones and lock them until they’re paid off.

You could get a €2000 euro phone for €500, pay that up front, and walk to the local guy with a serial cable who unlocked your phone for €20.

A world in which telecoms can’t use SIM locking to offer financing on ultra-expensive phones to people who would otherwise be bad credit risks sounds like an improvement to me. Most people who can’t pay cash for a 2000€ phone are better off not buying one at all.

people like this make phone deals worse for the rest of us.

Verizon can get exactly the same amount out of most customers by either:

• Charging more for the phone and less for the service
• Unbundling the phone financing from the phone service

People… don’t care about being able to switch phone carriers while keeping their phone? I think you’re quite mistaken.

Even if few people actually do that, they certainly care about the effect of the resulting competitive pressure on the market.

That is a separate issue. This is a lock to prevent use with other service providers,