wanderingmagus

That's why we should follow the example of the French and do a Revolution every now and then!

Have a UN agency run it?

gestures around Products as a service in general isn't needed, but it's done anyways. Single player games don't need to be always-online and subscription-based. Same with movies. Same with cars. But in the world we live in, everything is becoming X-as-a-service. In this case, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they purposely built in a chip that would disable or otherwise limit the battery unless the ~~purchaser~~ client continued paying the subscription fee.

I've got several actually, but this is the one that's most fleshed out:

The entire "world" is set on an enormous dial, which itself is set on top of a massive mechanism of gears, all supposedly created by a Watchmaker and the Watchmaker's Servitors, which have all disappeared after the mythical War of Shattered Gears. By the time of the story, it has been eons since those mythical times, and anthropomorphic feline Basteti live at peace alongside humans in cities built out of salvaged materials and relics from the Gearworks deep below. However, a shadowy Rustite Cult has emerged with the goal of spreading the eldritch Rust across the entirety of the Mechanism, and have corrupted the Tickbeasts and Clockroaches into horrific abominations. Only a plucky group of adventurers, from sneaky Nimblemitts to powerful Steamguards and eccentric Alchemists will be able to save the world from Rust.

The question is, what fictional setting or story have you imagined or made up, that you have been thinking about for some time?

Awesome! Linux Mint's welcome page should have given you directions to setting up the built in firewall. If you really want an antivirus, ClamAV is a good one for Linux. However, whether you need one on Linux is actually a complicated question: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=358408

Really depends on your use case, at the end of the day. Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions!

It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the *.google.com domains - tweeted about today by Luca Casonato, but the code has been there in the public repo since October 2013 as far as I can tell.

It looks like it's a way to let Google Hangouts (or presumably its modern predecessors) get additional information from the browser, including the current load on the user's CPU. Update: On Hacker News a Googler confirms that the Google Meet "troubleshooting" feature uses this to review CPU utilization

The code doesn't do anything on non-Google domains.

Maybe it's because you tried it on a non Google site? Idk.

Were you ever able to figure this out?

It's apparently built into chromium

Because DoD isn't concerned with the regular internet or unclassified machines as much as with the classified computers - those set up by Information Technician ratings and the Security Managers to handle SIPR and JWICS access. The Admirals, Generals, and O-6s are also often tech illiterate old men, and those just beneath that, and the E-7+ crowd, are often just as tech illiterate. Microsoft also has a lot of multi decade DoD contracts, which they get billions for. Microsoft can't sell the secure version because that just lets foreign adversaries reverse engineer all the possible vulnerabilities. Microsoft only cares about security as far as they get paid for it and can get away with. In the consumer market, that's pretty much zero concern - not profitable enough.

Really depends on your use case. Like @[email protected] said, casual users that use the OS as a browser and email client can use practically any distro. Users that do a bit more, like casual gaming on gold-rated Steam games, generally do fine with something like Pop!_OS or Linux Mint.

It's when you start going towards the more hardcore users, like really hardcore gamers that play obscure titles or have unsupported Windows-specific hardware, artists that need very specific unsupported programs for editing or recording, engineers who need to do CAD specifically in a Windows-specific proprietary software, or a tinkerer that's used to the Windows environment, that "become a sysadmin" starts being a reasonable complaint.

To be fair, the DOD uses a different version of Windows than you, me, or any average company, with a custom set of agreements with Microsoft, a bunch of debloating of Windows-specific apps and the addition of a bunch of military/government apps.