It’d be great if California’s consumer privacy protections could be applied at the federal level, but as long as the Republicans retain the presidency, either house of congress, or the Supreme Court, it would either never get passed or simply get struck down and returned to the state regulatory level.
Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series and New Funky Mode
Stremio comes with a few addons for content navigation by default, but to actually watch most things within Stremio itself, the unofficial Torrentio addon is needed. There’s other content addons too, but Torrentio seems to work the best.
Torrentio itself needs a debrid service API key to function, with Real-Debrid being the cheapest at about $3 a month.
While I too find Linux, Arch Linux in my case due to the Steam Deck, to often be overly complicated, with operating system settings not nearly as streamlined via GUIs as on Windows, the forced switch to the enshittified Windows 11 has motivated me to set up the Steam Deck as similarly to my Windows 10 laptop as possible.
While most Windows 10 programs should work on Windows 11, I’d rather go through the hassle of switching to an OS I can trust and configure to my liking, rather than one where configuration via the Windows registry can have unintended side effects.
If program compatibility is a worry in your switch to Linux, proton, and wine as a whole, can usually let you use Windows programs on Linux; it’s how most games are able to run on the Steam Deck in the first place.
In terms of Firefox, while there’s a couple things I miss from my switch away from Chrome, such as network media playback support and built-in web-app functionality, better adblocking support via Manifest V2 add-ons and less to worry about in terms of data privacy make putting up with the hassle of configuring it to my liking more than worthwhile. Via the browser’s chrome.css GUI configuration capabilities, I disabled several menu options and context menu items to make it more like what I had been used to in using Chrome.
While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
Also have to make sure that the public WiFi network one’s device is connected to doesn’t block VPN connections, as was the case at at least one Walmart I tried using the WiFi at.
The worst culprits though are the EAs and Paradoxes of the world that sell dozens of DLCs for games that cumulatively cost far more than the base game itself.
Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.
If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.
It’s $3 a month and called RealDebrid + Stremio
If a homebrew game is popular enough, such as Micro Mages, you can sometimes find them in romsets. Unfortunately some cartridge-only and less popular ROMs take a while to get uploaded; took me a year to find a specific Genesis ROM that was cartridge-only.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
Perhaps more like what fridge companies do via incessant water filter replacement reminders: Enjoying your Super Deluxe CoolPlus™ Fridge? Don’t forget to check out the CoolPlus™ Fridge Magnetic Spice Rack and CoolPlus™ Fridge Juice Dispenser Add-on!
There isn’t a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing’s API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one’s search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google’s efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I’d be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.
Isn’t it only source available, and not open source, due to a restriction on reusing the code?
A success does not include leaving a victim of failed experimental medicine with a non-functional implant. In contrast to how animal subjects are used as test subjects (often conducted with less oversight than there should be), using experimental medicine on volunteering patients should be done not just to collect better data than the chimps before them supplied, but with the genuine expectation that the product in question will benefit the patient beyond their usefulness as a test subject for continued product development.
As with corporate mediators though, wouldn’t such investigation companies have a financial incentive to favor their clients, so as to improve the odds of being rehired?
It doesn’t seem like the suggestion would be to destroy cultural landmarks, or even the majority of commercial ones, just the key components of the island’s chipmaking industry that would incentivize an invasion by mainland China. It’s an outcome that no one wants, but remains sufficiently feasible so as to be effective in preventing such an invasion in the first place. If the current CCP is bad, one that directly controls the majority of the world’s chipmaking industry would be far worse.
The difference is that most of that content lasted for at least a few decades, if not centuries before being lost to time. As content on the internet is ‘destroyed’ if no one hosts it any more, a lot of valuable content is being lost in just a few years after being created. Archiving needs to be more widespread and better supported if the resources and culture of the internet as it has evolved over time are to be preserved for posterity.
They probably made more than $20 million from kids buying loot boxes without parental consent, making the fine just a cost of doing business…