Cash for clunkers harmed buyers in the used car market, especially the poor.

SOPA/PIPA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

That bill would have completely destroyed the internet. Democrats and republicans alongside Hollywood faught the American people and lost. It’s the only time I’ve seen the people actually win, and pretty much every individual regardless of their other politics was united against it. It’s debatable if we could have done it without Google and the rest of big tech helping though. But still, it sent a clear message across the entire political spectrum that there was a line they couldn’t cross.

We also briefly won Net Neutrality ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality ), and although it’s no longer in effect, the ISPs would have probably done a lot worse if they didn’t know we cared and are watching.

Honestly though, I don’t know if stopping things from getting a lot worse should even count as an “improvement”.

I don’t think she meant it. She probably said it in the heat of the moment and then forgot she even said it later.

Mint.

I switched a friend from Ubuntu to Fedora specifically because the partition setup during Fedora install is so good. (It was during a new build)

You can donate to Mozilla, and I do. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/

A lot of people will have to donate a lot to equal the amount they are getting from Google though, and if Google pulls that money I feel that Firefox would end before people donate enough to make up the shortfall.

Try a wireless trackball or Gyro mouse if the laptop mouse is bothering you. They require less space than a normal mouse and are still better than the trackpad. A wireless mouse is also an option for extendeing the range on your desktop.

My autistic friend loves her Loops. After getting the Loops she realised that she doesn’t actually hate large social gatherings, it’s just that hearing hundreds of simultaneous conversations is exhausting. After getting Loops, she is totally fine in sports bars, county fairs, Octoberfest, etc.

That’s HP’s fault and isn’t Linux specific.

Only if you never update at all. You can still update manually on your schedule, and control when the reboot happens.

Discord?

I think fundamentally Mastodon can’t work. The entire point of Twitter is for celebrities, brands and governments to have a single place to be able to send out a public message and for that message to be seen by everyone, especially those who opt in to it by following. Decentralized alternatives by definition can’t do that. Centralization is the entire point of Twitter.

Decentralization does work for Reddit/Lemmy though, because they are content centric, not person centric. I don’t care who posts content to the subreddits I follow, just that the content exists, can be easily viewed (RIP third party Reddit apps, hello Lemmy!), and is interesting. Lemmy doesn’t need hundreds of millions of people in a single place to create enough content that is interesting, and in fact having fewer people makes the content that is posted more interesting and focused. Lemmy’s decentralization is a strength because if this instance doesn’t have the interesting content I want, I can just go elsewhere.