I mean, what are they gonna do? Mess with the atomic clocks and throw off everyone’s ability to geolocate? Probably not, since then everyone would just move to the still-accurate signals from the European and Chinese equivalents.

…or do you just not understand how GPS works?

They don’t have a monopoly. Full stop. Just off the top of my head, we have Epic Games Store, GOG, and Itch.io, which may not be as popular as Steam, but are absolutely viable alternatives if Steam ever goes completely to shit.

A real monopoly is like how, in my city in the US, there is exactly ONE company you can buy electricity and gas from. It’s a subsidiary of Avangrid, which is a Swedish corporation, not even on the same continent. They’ve been doing incredibly fucky shit with billing customers for years now and they have the mayor in their pocket, so if you want electricity, you have no choice other than to pay up. There are no alternatives unless you have the money to pay up front for a full off-grid solar install.

It could just be your DNS, I’ve had problems with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 and Catbox but I think they actually have a list of ISPs and DNS providers that give them issues. I don’t think you can manually specify a DNS server on cellular (without some weird workaround), but if you have issues on other networks you can try changing your DNS and see what happens.

I believe both Firefox and Chromium support JXL now, although they probably need to be enabled as an experimental setting.

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Cause there’s no user data stored on EFI, and saying “almost-full-disk-except-for-the-EFI-partition-encryption” is a bit cumbersome and, obviously, pedantic.

Anything marketed as a PC Bluetooth/Wifi antenna will work. They’re basically just fancy pieces of wire cut to a precise length with a connector on one end (you can get more complicated ones, but there’s usually no reason to).

Anything that looks similar to this will work fine. Just make sure it says somewhere that it has an “RP-SMA” connector.

Using a few anti-static bags inside one another doesn’t block 100% of signals but it cuts range down by a lot. But also, if you’re looking for this high of a security level, wouldn’t it be easier to just find a phone with a removable battery?

Sure, but if no one can afford to buy artificially inflated real meat prices, that’s a good reason to sell fake beef at a price where people can afford it… And THEN you start to increase the price of that too, but only once a Democrat is president so people can freak out like they did with egg prices

I had Invisalign for 3 years, my partner had braces for 5. We both agree that the pain was far worse in the beginning when they’re really wrenching your teeth into place, and then gets a lot better once they start doing the more precise movements, which take up a good chunk of the total time.

Like all medical procedures though, it can be different for everybody.

Not sure where you’re located, but at least in the USA it’s definitely illegal for an employer to discriminate against a medical diagnosis like that. They aren’t even allowed to ask you private medical questions during the hiring process.

Do you have a static IP address? CG-NAT has done a really great job of hindering torrents, since my understanding is that at least one side of the connection needs to have an open port. So, if you don’t, then only the few people who do are able to download from you, which can make it seem like no one wants your stuff.

Tails is a bit overkill, even for this. It’s not just privacy focused, it’s for the same people who need to use TOR (Tails even routes all traffic through TOR by default IIRC, no?), i.e. those who are sharing classified government intel or running large darknet drug markets. Unless OP is that paranoid, they can probably start off with a basic Debian or something, which is already leagues ahead of Windows in terms of privacy.

I would not bother archiving the mainstream releases that can already be found on many torrent sites (like, you don’t need to archive Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) and focus on the bootleg disks first. You just need any standard DVD drive, then use Handbreak to rip the disks to a video file. For official releases, many of them have forms of copy protection, but 15 minutes on Google should tell you how to get around any you come across.

Also, for reference, “burning” a DVD is writing data to a disk, so the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

If you tried to get your newborn daughter a labiaplasty so that she would be “more appealing to boys once she’s old enough”, you would rightfully be scolded and kicked out of every respectable medical practice you asked at. It’s fucking gross to be sexualizing a literal newborn like that, and yet I used to regularly see people on Reddit use that as a good reason to circumcise your son.

And any “hygiene” justification is just grasping at straws. Do we cut off people’s ears so they don’t have to spend 30 seconds cleaning them every day? No. Just teach your kids how to clean themselves and it’s a non-issue.

Sorry, Microsoft might make crappy software, but they aren’t actively trying to invalidate my existence as a person. Absolutely not comparable.

Why would you need to block apps installing from non-Play Store sources? You shouldn’t be plugging your phone into mysterious USB ports, and the OS should always prompt you before installing a local .apk file. If you’re savvy enough to use F-Droid, you’re savvy enough to not need that hand-holding “safety” feature.

You mean the scientist who, as the article says, “represented cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds in negotiations with the Department of Health and Human Services about cigarette additives, according to a 1984 corporate memo”? Yeah, I’m sure this guy is completely unbiased towards corporate interests.

I’m guessing that all mods will more or less need to be remade from scratch (apart from assets)

I did! I remember it being fun, but not my favorite of the Lego board games.

Side note: I really love the Lego dice pieces, I’m glad I got some.