I am assuming dialup is still a thing in parts of the country

Fun (sad?) fact: AOL will soon shut down dial up on September 30th 2025: https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued

Yes, of course. That always assumes a lack of good choice (i.e. no choice also being a bad option).

In various technical contexts

You probably do this all the time without thinking much about it. For example, updating mains-powered devices without UPS. There’s a chance the power goes out and something gets screwed up.

Or in a VM

Problem is, some of this software may likely be made to specifically not run in a VM, since it is supposed to keep track of everything the student is doing during exams.

I just realized I sound way too paranoid but it’s an interesting question

Nope. Not paranoid enough. If school/work requires such software, that goes onto a separate device only for those purposes, which will then be considered untrustworthy environment like any public computer.

Although perhaps in a sense it is paranoid compared to what others do. Recently I’ve had to get something printed without having own printer. I’ve found out people have no problem logging into their Google or Microsoft account on public PCs.
I brought the PDF on a CD.
There’s a certain small chance that something malicious could be written to a USB, and I don’t know about all the possible vulnerabilities. If mounted, perhaps the automatic media thumbnail generator could be exploited. That is probably paranoid, worrying about random software installed on your own computer is certainly not.

As always, a difference. That’s it. That’s all. Needs no logic. A difference from main crowd. If just color of the skin is enough, then logic clearly isn’t needed in these cases.

If someone wants to find the justification for themselves, they will.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of NSFW that’s not porn that I do want to see. Typically just some text.

On the other hand, spam bots seem to always mark their posts NSFW for some reason.

How are you doing it?

I only tried X11 forwarding over SSH. It was slow and ate up a Gigabit.

And I thought otter was referring to the specie of their fursona.

Oh well.

“I donated money to them so I am going to use it.”

Although not much, just 20 EUR. Not sure how much the bundled Windows license costs, but surely Microsoft has other ways to earn from spyware.

I am not alone!

At first I installed Arch because I got an Arch sticker, and if I put it on my laptop that felt like the only appropriate solution.

Arch. After every update I check what broke. And then discover things I forgot to check.

I am still not sure if it’s already safe to upgrade VirtualBox and iio-sensor-proxy, but I am too lazy to just downgrade them yet again.

So I just…

IgnorePkg   = iio-sensor-proxy # Issues in Wayland after suspend
IgnorePkg   = virtualbox virtualbox-host-modules-lts virtualbox-host-dkms virtualbox-guest-iso # Segfault in 7.2.x, reverted to 7.1.8 - see sys-management-log.txt entry 2025-08-29

If you’re curious about the log entries:

2025-07-06:
        downgraded iio-sensor-proxy to 3.6-1 as 3.7 caused issues after suspending
        added iio-sensor-proxy to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf

2025-08-29:
        downgraded virtualbox packages to 7.1.8 as 7.2.x was broken (segfault)
        installed linux-lts-headers as the downgraded virtualbox suddenly wanted that
        removed and reinstalled related packages a couple of times (virtualbox-host-modules-lts, virtualbox-host-modules-arch, virtualbox-host-dkms), as well as switching between linux-lts and linux. Hopefully that didn't create any brand new funny business.
        I want to die
        added IgnorePkg   = virtualbox virtualbox-host-modules-lts virtualbox-host-dkms virtualbox-guest-iso to /etc/pacman.conf

I recommend writing some documentation about your system. My Manjaro install became a total unknown mess after a while. I know I had to create some symlinks at some point to fix something, something something custom “XDG_CONFIG_HOME” dir with separate theme to un-break Cisco Packet Tracer on dark theme, edited startup script for Packet Tracer.
On one Ubuntu VM I edited a bunch of config files that I didn’t remember so it was just don’t touch it while it works.

But hey, I feel better after knowing that during high school our internet was down for weeks because something broke on main proxy server and nobody had documentation for the 2 decades old backup server, including the password, so it just ended up running in a “don’t touch it” mode, except that it also limited download speed on unknown PCs (based on MAC) to something like 32Kbps, which after 20 years meant nearly any PC so the solution was to copy MACs from basically ewaste.

Anyway… write documentation for what you do.

Either that or Linux, PostmarketOS seems most interesting to me. Not perfectly daily drivable yet it seems, but that’s what Android is destined to become for me as well, just likely even worse.

Honestly, I kind of even just like the idea of saying “I don’t have a supported smartphone” when someone pushes me to download some stupid app, but would you look at that, it’s not some ancient device.

Although it seems there’s no way to access SIM Toolkit on Linux, which I kinda need.

When the abuser is an attractive blonde, too many people celebrate it. “Boys should be grateful,” they say.

Yeah, unfortunately I’ve even seen my father say something of that sort. An underage student (male) reported a teacher (female) for raping him. My father noted how stupid he was, and that he should have just been happy and consider himself lucky.
Unfortunately I felt like I had no right to respond to that as I was the same age as that student at the time.

Using language correctly is important when trying to convey a message without it being misunderstood, which is why it’s necessary to specify the difference

If used correctly, it is rather useful to point out that not all child rapists are necessarily pedophiles, meaning there’s some other risk-factors. This could be useful for example during testing for high-risk positions like teachers, if those are being done.

The best way to go in my opinion is terms like “child predator” and “child rapist”, similarly to how you wouldn’t call rapist of an adult a “teleiophile”, a term for people attracted to adults. 100% accurate.

If they just straight up advertised the weekends I’d take it. Especially night shifts on weekends. More pay, I don’t care about the day title, and more places open whenI have my weekend equivalent.

Better get an IP ban on CG-NATed network.

How would I know that?

We need reboot of N900. Although it lost support long time ago as it was launched in 2009, you can still install latest PostmarketOS onto it: https://postmarketos.org/install/

A commercial Linux phone with backing from some larger company could succeed.