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22
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144
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Everyone wants us to subscribe. This a.m. I listened to some guy on the internet rant about HP shutting down his printer remotely b/c he'd bought a subscription, when he bought the printer (didn't read fine print in contract/TOS--that's another rant), to a certain number of pages/month. His credit card number changed, HP didn't get their tithe, so they remotely disabled his printer. Entertainment moguls suck up all the money in that industry, leaving little for artists--to wit, the strikes--and streaming subscriptions are expensive. Cable prices are ridiculous. Corporate greed and having every subscriber subsidize sports channels probably account for that. Everything costs too much, and my budget is small. Original Star Trek and original Doctor Who were broadcast over the air. In exchange for commercials, we got to watch for free. If I could subscribe to iplayer, that would satisfy my needs. Alas, I don't live in UK, and BBC's arrangements with multinational entertainment corps preclude my subscription. So I pay for a good VPN. That's still more than it used to cost to watch. Tropicana OJ used to have a commercial showing people sticking straws right into an orange to suck its juice. I often feel like the orange. Piracy is ethical.

  • Thanks, everyone!

  • I get far fewer on Yandex than on Google. For me, the Yandex captcha has recently switched from text to putting symbols in order. So far, I get in on the 1st try. Startpage is my default search engine. No captchas whatsoever.

  • Because I'm not knowledgeable enough to make it work. I've managed to install it and figured out that I need to run the restartable version. Lots of text with screenshots or a video(s) would help. I'm not a digital native. This is one of many retirement projects. Listening to more music than I can afford to buy greatly improves the quality of my life.

  • Yandex is good. Sometimes Qwant.com and Metager.org will find things, too. When Google/Bing/Yahoo/Startpage, etc., don't find what you're looking for, just try search engines based in other countries. Russia/Yandex probably cares less about western DRM than Qwant/France and Metager/Germany. Incidentally, if you open a VK (aka Vkontakte, Russian Facebook) account, you can also open a mail.ru (part of VK) account. Don't forget to set the UI language to something you understand :)