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* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

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Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Stevie
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Re: When you get older your fingers become less conductive.

Well I'm in my sixties and while fiddling with some net-type fairy lights in the front garden last night I located a bare wire with the pad of my ring finger.

A few seconds hopping around the lawn shouting "aggle-aggle-aggle" have given me the encouraging sign that the old fingers are pretty much as conductive as they used to be.

True, the net lights were torn from the deck rails and dragged around the lawn before being ripped out of the supply outlet in a contra-indicated manner, all to the cruel laughter of the neighbors, but the lights were faulty anyway, the neighbors are gits & can suck my manservant and you can't have everything.

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Stevie
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Re: By the way, what happened to Ask Jeeves?

Dunno. Why don't you do a GOPHER search for it?

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Boeing CEO takes aim at Musk’s Starman-in-a-Tesla stunt

Stevie
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they've made landing a rocket from the edge of space on a robot barge seem routine.

Well, as Meatloaf once bellowed; Two Out of Three Ain't Bad.

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Stevie
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Musk should use the next test flight

All this pro-Musk talk ignores the inconvenient fact that Musk's shots derive their funding from NASA (i.e. taxpayers) just like Boeing's do.

Musk can't go to the moon on NASA's dime because, well, it costs more than the said dime.

I reckon NASA might usefully examine a model wherin they run the launch facilities and provide a telemetry consultancy for private firms who get the chance to belly up to the bar and do what they claim to be able to do - make spaceflight a reality via the private sector and it's money.

The taxpayers can lease space on said flights just like Musk and Co want right now, but the expensive R&D should be funded privately or these buggers should shut the fuck up about "private industry vs government projects". If I'm helping pay for it it ain't private industry that is getting the job done, it is a partnership that too many "entrepreneurs" don't acknowledge openly or often enough.

Something along the lines of "With our expertise and the vital funding from taxpayers hard-earned money, we can make this a reality".

No, I'm not holding my breath. Then again, I'll never float in the vacuum of space, so notwithstanding the same companies paying for the dismantlement of the EPA and the deterioration of the "free as in" air I probably won't have to.

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Donkey Wrong: Arcade legend Billy Mitchell booted from record books amid MAME row

Stevie

Bah!

Check his glasses for cheat codes.

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A developer always pays their technical debts – oh, every penny... but never a groat more

Stevie

Bah!

So, no-one writes specs any more?

Maybe that's the problem right there.

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'Our way or the highway' warranty scams shot down by US watchdog: It's OK to use unofficial parts to repair your gear

Stevie

Bah!

Oh dear, Kieren McCarthy has suggested that Apple charges more money just because it can. The so-called "Apple Tax" is a fiction. The extra cost is due to all the Quality infusing whatever it is. Apple have spent years telling people so, and you can't deny facts like that.

The answer for the angst is obvious: people should stop buying the stuff that costs too much. For a little more than the $199 extended warranty I can buy a behind-the-bleeding-edge Samsung in my local AT&T store. Just did a few weeks ago in fact.

I'll admit my music app (neutron) has required more fiddling to get working properly with my earbuds, car etc than my iPod did, but Apple no longer make the iPod I like (mostly - the controls are still over-converged) so that is immaterial. I slapped a 256 gig card in the phone and now I can carry all my music around and still have more memory available for pix than I could afford in an iDevice.

I would like to put in a word for iClever. They offer a two-port, 2.4 amp per port charger that works great on my iPad air and phone and cost about a third of what the official charger does. I also use third party cables to connect it to the iPad (Made by "Aonlink", a daily special from Amazon) that cost half (for three cables) what a single cable from Apple cost. None of these products have failed to work, burst into flame or given off vile and/or toxic fumes when in use. Just thought I'd mensh, if you're looking.

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White House: Is it OK to hijack, shoot down, or snoop on drones? Er ... asking for a friend

Stevie

Bah!

I guess the reason that congress wants to talk about this but NOT about the Autonomous Car Hacked & Re-Tasked As A Low Speed Nap-Of-Earth Cruise Missile is that you can't shoot a car down with a gun.

Oh Well. I'm glad they have their eyes firmly on the prize.

You know, as a snowflake liberal I'd be happy to support conservative ideas if they didn't always seem to start out by declaring the whole thing must be done in secret or that it should contravene the provisions of the law sans penalties or that anyone involved should be granted immunity before they start. I never saw a bunch of people so loud about making America Great Again while simultaneously turning off all the bits that made it work in the first place.

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Stevie
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Re: Law of unintended (but expected) consequences

Oh gawd, don't give military snoops hints to links like this or we will be on the black budget hook for a long gun.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a terrible leak of drone buyers' data

Stevie
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Re: Next time try Saskatoon

Nice try.

Went to Saskatoon a few years ago for my niece’s wedding.

“Eh” city.

But she took me to The Berry Barn. Big saskatoon (small s) fan, me. I had saskatoon hot wings, saskatoon pie and saskatoon ice-cream, and saskatoon lemonade.

She is the best niece in the whole world.

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Stevie
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Re: Not all Canadians compulsively say "Eh!"

yY'know, I said that when my wife opined the opposite while we were on a plane on our way to visit me mum and dad in Grande Prairie Alberta.

For the next week EVERYONE who spoke added "eh" to the end of their sentences, including my mum and dad - and they were raised and lived for 60-odd years in the Midlands of the UK. There was no living with my wife after two days. By the end of the trip she was stuck in smugface mode.

So maybe not *all* Canadians say "eh" but the ones who don't are either part of a statistically insignificant sample or are speaking French, in which case they probably say "hien".

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Stevie
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But now my wife can eat her words.

Why? Are you planning on telling her you nearly had your credit card displayed flanges-out for all to see, or is the "extra 350 quids" the bit you are proud of?

'Cause both would run the risk of making you the target of some ballistic iron kitchenware in my neck o' the woods.

It just occurred to me that one million people a week could avail themselves of an ASDA drone instead of the cheaper Canadian Haxxor Invitational product thanks to Brexit. I wonder if there's a form one can fill in to gain access to the dosh?

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Stevie

Bah!

So, by "north American" you meant "north-north American" and neglected to mention the fact that he ended every sentence with "eh?", leading me to expect another tale of perfidious yankee perfidy, when what I got was typical Canadian lacksadasical procrastinating around the bush.

Why so protective of the Canadians Mr Corfield? Eh? Eh? Inquiring minds want to know! Tomorrow is OK. Or Monday, eh?

3 5

'Disappearing' data under ZFS on Linux sparks small swift tweak

Stevie

Bah!

I assume Linus Torvalds' usual acerbic commentary on crap commits was lost due to the ZFS bug.

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Fear the Reaper: Man hospitalised after eating red hot chilli pepper

Stevie

Bah!

I have never understood the attraction of food so heavily spiced that all one can taste is the spice. As for the utility of these super-hot peppers, well, most of their uses would seem to contravene either local laws or in extreme cases the Geneva accords on chemical weapon use.

Idiotic.

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'Extreme, unnecessary, overheated': US judge slams Oracle salvo in HPE Solaris squabble

Stevie
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Re: Oracle?

"I've always assumed that ludicrously overblown rhetoric was standard practice in US court submissions"

Really? You should take a gander at Magna Carta some time. Oft-cited as the wellspring of all civilized law* (most recently in these very e-pages) it reads like income tax instructions and waffles on about the most idiotic drivel, like the construction of fish weirs.

* If you were a baron, that is. Serfs, waifs, beggars and other riff-raff could still be headed-offed for an askance look or made to carry red-hot iron bars to prove innocence or guilt.

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Stevie

Bah!

But your honor ... OPOTUS does it all the time ...

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My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

Stevie
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Re: Facetimers

Oh gawd, remember those asinine push-to-talk devices (with their shrill and annoying roger beep) and the asinine people who used them (with their shrill and annoying screamy-voice?)

Volume up to 11 so it's so loud you have to hold it at arm's length: check.

Now have to scream to be heard through naff little mic on the device: check

BEEP!

I used to have one twat from the network group who walked around our cube farm doing the push-to-scream thing. I would disrupt whatever he was trying to scream by yelling BREAKER ONE-NINE! BREAKER ONE-NINE! WHISKY ALPHA LIMA LIMA YANKEE ON DECK! ANYONE GOT THEIR EARS ON? LOOKS LIKE WE GOT OURSELVES A CONVOY! and so on until he went away.

One day he stormed up to my desk and shouted that he was trying to do his job. I yelled back that by an odd coincidence so were the seventy or so people surrounding him and could he please take his idiotic beepy-box into the elevator foyer to do his yodelling and hog-calling.

Scattered applause from hidden colleagues and that was the last we heard from him.

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Stevie

Bah!

"If I pulled a heap of tourist brochures and an Ordnance Survey map from my backpack, no one would bat an eyelid."

No, but you can bet your life some berk would start addressing the air anywhere but in your direction as to the thoughtlessness of bringing backpacks into such a place, and you'd have at least one person "accidentally" kick it or trip over it to illustrate how ignorant you were being, even if you tucked it under your recently claimed table.

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My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

Stevie
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Re: Apple Mac wireless mice are fun...

Upvoted, but the JREF $10e6 Challenge is no longer offered to psychics, dowsers and other Credulous Saucer Loons.

JREF Status as of Sept 1st, 2015.

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Stevie
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Re: qotw

I will, if you make sure you are loaded up with HE and not paint.

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Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

Stevie
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reap what you sew

Embroidered cushions? Quilts? Monogrammed handkerchiefs?

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Stevie
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Re: Apples with Pitbulls

Citations for all these comparisons, please, jmcc.

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Stevie

Bah!

Of course easy access to a firearm was instrumental in this tragedy, but more to the point was the fact that the shooter, aggrieved (rightly or wrongly) , found it more appropriate to escalate to gun usage rather than to seek satisfaction by legal means.

I'm not sure when the expectation that a free hobby video platform should be available as a source of primary income formed in society, and no doubt Google themselves set the stage for that, but the model is not logical nor self-sustaining.

This incident, along with increasing uneasiness over Google's framing of their corporate indifference to people's privacy concerns as "free speech" and the growing public anger at the e-world in general playing fast and free with their "private" information says to me that the ground is shifting under everyone's feet. A paradigm change is in the wind. Smart operators will already be working behind the scenes to prepare for the upheaval.

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Stevie
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Re: then I would force people to learn empathy.

Can one "learn empathy"?

I've always thought empathy was a capacity one either has or lacks. Sociopaths can learn to fake it, but learn it? I'm not sure that makes any more sense than thinking you can legislate better understanding of [insert your favorite hot-button social issue].

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Intel admits a load of its CPUs have Spectre v2 flaw that can't be fixed

Stevie

Bah!

Never should have moved off big axles full of cogs and planetary gears.

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Danish Navy expert finds no trace of exhaust gas in private submarine

Stevie

Bah!

Okay, given that any number of accidents could have happened and probably will be described as having happened to his unfortunate woman before the gavel falls for the last time, I'm still confused as to the rational for the dismembering of the corpse in the aftermath.

The only one I can come up with is the danger of the corpse rising as a vengeful revenant.

Although anyone who had seen the documentary Below would think twice about continuing to drive a scene-of-death submarine around even after the possibility of walking undead had been eliminated.

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Stevie
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She was a zmobie

She was a non-functional cellular telephone? I'm not sure that theory is any stupider than the ones Cap'n Hacksaw has come up with.

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UK regulator bans slasher-flick parody ad for OnePlus 5 mobe

Stevie

Bah!

What puzzles me (and the content here is apposite) is why I am being bombarded with horror movies on my cable TV at Easter. I expect to have to avoid Rob Zombie and the Hostel crowd at Halloween, but Easter?

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Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Stevie
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Re: Extraterrestrial clouds

Aieeee!

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Stevie
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rendition

Nonononono.

Extraordinary Rendition is when you *start* in America but take someone out of it to where American Law doesn't apply and fingernails are optional.

CLOUD is the reverse. That's where the US drops a legal haywire grenade template over a foreign data center and declares American Law now applies there.

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Stevie
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It's called due process.

But you are forgetting one thing:

AMERICA! F*CK YEAH!

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Stevie

Bah!

Collecting Loads Of Unspecified Data fits better and is more descriptive.

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Badmins: Magento shops brute-forced to scrape card deets and install cryptominers

Stevie

Bah!

Comes to summat when sending the payment details over unencrypted email is safer than using a proper e-commerce payment portal.

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Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

Stevie

Double Bah!

"possibly the most expensive kettle ever to roll off a production line."

Not even close.

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Microsoft patches patch for Meltdown bug patch: Windows 7, Server 2008 rushed an emergency fix

Stevie

Bah!

logged-in users could now access and modify any part of physical RAM

This is exactly how the NRA suggests we fight gun violence in schools.

Large world.

4 9

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

Stevie
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Re: But you need to be careful if you're a potter.

Yes, don't brick them up until you are sure they have a glazed expression.

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No Falcon Way: NASA to stick with SLS, SpaceX more like space ex

Stevie
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Re: See also:

There is that but also the fact that zero-g engineering is much harder to do than the sort we do on the ground, which translates into longer times, unforeseen "drop-dead" (until the next launch) problems and much more expense.

"The first is that the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway is still very much on the drawing board, so there is no reason why it could not be designed to be launched in smaller pieces."

This can only be taken at face value in a 1940s-era Robert Heinlein story.

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Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

Stevie

"This is what OVER-regulation looks like! #ditchcalifornia."

This is what letting companies self-regulate looks like.

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What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Stevie

Bah!

Still okay to skype while using an AK47 I take it?

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Skip-wrecked! Boat full o' rubbish scuppered in Brit residential street

Stevie
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Re: Fly-tipping

I was just wondering how long it would be before we read about a shortage of skips/dumpsters due to people stealing them in order to sail around the world in them.

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Stevie
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Re: Recycling tyres

Likewise childrens play areas

Ye Gods! What about the razor-sharp steely beltees?

Wait ... as you were.

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Stevie
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Re: @phuzz

"Engine oil and car batteries can be profitably recycled whereas tyres are a fucking expensive nightmare to get rid of without causing some serious pollution."

Can't you just hang them off the gunwales of your boat?

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Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Stevie

Bah!

This is the UK version of the look on the Congresspersons' faces when, having scrapped the 30-year old and hence obsolete space shuttle launch platform and confined the US Manned Space Effort to lifting in 44 year old and hence state-of-the-art Soyuz vehicles, they were told the Russians were going to react to a spate of negativity from the USA by taking their space ball home.

Classic, and bleeding obvious to everyone but those at the helm.

Co-incidentally, AMC ran "A Night To Remember" last night. I'm now envisioning the UK Govt standing on a capsized collapsible lifeboat with the PM standing at the front yelling which way for everyone to lean so they don't all end up cold, wet and dead.

In this vision, Farage is the one dressed in a fur coat sitting some miles away in a lifeboat, safe and sound, listening to the screams of the drowning steerage passengers.

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Stevie
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Re: Being positive

But I wouldn't put money on it.

You already did. 350 megaquids a week. Or so I'm told.

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Stevie
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Re: I wonder if the leader of the Opposition will dare say something about this ar PMQ's?

Neville Swinebucket, Member for Much-Widdling-in-the-Cut:"When will the prime minister next visit her constituency?"

PM:"I refer my honorable colleague to the answer I gave previously."

Swinebucket:"I have a follow-up question: Regarding Project Galileo. WTF???!!!???"

Cries of "Shame! Shame!" from the opposition back bench.

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UK Court of Appeal settles reseller's question: Is software a good?

Stevie
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Re: So.... [Dr Mouse]

"In fact, it only deprives anyone of anything if you would otherwise have bought the movie/music/whatever. If not, nobody has lost anything."

Still stealing.You stole it so you don't have to fork out to experience it.

If you download it, by definition you want to experience it. If there's a cost involved in that transaction normally, bypassing that is still theft.

By the same line of thinking I could wardrive your WiFi and hijack it for my own downloading and streaming needs, and I wouldn't have stolen from you because I would never have bought bandwidth from your provider (data throttling and overage charges notwithstanding).

The "only if I would have bought it" argument is bankrupt and obvious to everyone.

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Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

Stevie

Bah!

So now, even though I've never used Arsebook, all my data are belong to them because you did?

If I understand correctly, decisions made by people I don't know affect me adversely no matter what I do.

Hmm. Facebook == Illegally Dumped Toxic Waste then.

About what I expected.

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2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3... Nvidia's Titan V GPUs spit out 'wrong answers' in scientific simulations

Stevie

Bah!

So some sort of run-time optimizer is picking an intermediate data type that is unhelpful?

That would be my guess.

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BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

Stevie
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FAIL

Re: Facebook here next year?

"Few people are forced to deal with mainframes and COBOL and rarely anyone does so voluntarily; those subjecting themselves Microsoft and Facebook are far greater in number."

No one is *forced* to use either Facebook or Microsoft.

I've managed to be Facebook free since it was invented and haven't suffered an\y significant angst because of that.

As for Microsoft, even I have Linux and OpenOffice. You might make a case for gaming, but that world has moved solidly toward consoles anyway. Turnkey consoles are bought for game selection, not underlying O/S.

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