Anything will be fine. I’d try a xfce/lxqt desktop, but even on old dual cores the newest kde is good.

Everyone says mint, but suse has a huge German community because it’s from Germany.

Another person said you should upgrade to ssd and maybe add more ram, and I agree with them. Usually I spend $40 to do that to laptops and it makes real dogs run great.

Post the model numbers on the bottom of the laptops and I can give some pre-gifting upgrade advice with actionable links. Both seem to take 2.5” sata ssds so that’s good and cheap, but there’s different models of the aspire es-15 which take different memory sizes.

If you do take the cheap ssd replacement route, give them one of those usb hdd enclosures with the old big rotational hdd in there. They’re like seven bucks and it means they have a place to hold a backup of their data if the gift laptop dies.

You don’t think the nationwide protests and international reaction to the killing of Michael brown had any effect.

Would you say there was any effect when politicians and police in areas outside furgeson had to make statements in response to the protests in their regions?

Do you think catapulting blm to the national level and international recognition had any effect?

Since you said a local protest means nothing if the issue is international do you think that the various anti war protests throughout Americas 20th and 21st centuries have meant anything?

There’s a lot of people saying not to pay for windows or not to use eBay or to download from Microsoft directly or to use massgrave instead but there are very few possibly no responses explaining why that’s a better option than buying from eBay.

First things first, and I know this is gonna get some people responding with the ol’ “nuh-uh”, but there’s compromised counterfeit install media for sale. You most likely don’t know how to tell the good from the bad. The bad can also look very, very good.

If you want to know you’re getting the good stuff straight from Microsoft, use uupdump to create an updated install media for whatever sku(version of windows) you want and use rufus to make the usb installer (you’ll need to be inside a windows vm or on your old version of windows). The reason I say use Rufus is because it gives you the opportunity to turn off some stuff like requiring a Microsoft account in the 11 install process.

Once that’s done and installed, you can activate however you like, either with massgrave or with a key for your sku purchased from Microsoft directly.

No, fireworks are cool and fun and people enjoy them.

Jokes on you, not thinking!

Good.

People need to view out of channel software with a hairy eyeball.

Hell, I run Debian all over and it’s absurd that the main repositories don’t do checksums on downloaded packages!

Heck of a bluff. I don’t see how the us government can expect to sell the threat of expanding an unpopular foreign war in an election year.

Wait, is that 9/11s music I hear?

I have to do this on both macOS and windows…

You can turn it off but you probably shouldn’t.

i'll bite:

i went to the media bias fact check page for radio free asia, pushed control-f and typed "cia". there were three hits, as part of the words "politicians", "appreciate" and "social".

radio free asia was literally founded by the cia as an anticommunist us propaganda mouthpiece.

well, maybe they don't exactly use those words but they might basically say the same thing... what does mbfc's rfa history section look like?

Founded in 1951, Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a private, nonprofit international broadcasting agency of the United States government that broadcasts and publishes online news, information, and commentary to listeners in East Asia while “advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy.” RFA distributes content in nine Asian languages for audiences in six countries. In the past, RFA served as an anti-communist propaganda operation. Today they continue to promote USA interests with a less direct propaganda approach.

well, that's glossing over and avoiding some important points, but at least they're admitting it's promoting "USA interests with a less direct propaganda approach". lets see how they score a source they described as literal government propaganda mouthpiece:

Overall, we rate Radio Free Asia as Left-Center Biased based on story selection and editorial positions that slightly favor the left. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record. (11/28/2016) (Updated D. Van Zandt 09/03/2023)

oh, the US government propaganda outfit serving "content in nine Asian languages for audiences in six countries" is left-center and highly factual! Who would have known!

the thing that makes media bias fact check a bad source is that it relies on a one dimensional left-right bias continuum and another one dimensional veracity continuum.

anyone with their head screwed on straight, no matter their personal politics or country of origin can tell without a shadow of a doubt that rfa isn't a good source because it's a propaganda arm of the us government. when evaluated on the metrics of leftness or rightness under the rubric of mbfc though, it shows up as "left-center" and when put to the test of authenticity by mbfc it is determined to be highly factual.

media bias fact check is a bad source. it cannot, by design, communicate the reality of a source's bias because the way it evaluates bias is constrained by and i'd say warped into only what fits it's highschool-in-1999-ass rubric of bias and accuracy!

The only thing in the article that has to do with wireless headphones is watching for devices in discoverable mode and using that to physically track movements.

Most (all that I know of, but I’m a be generous here!) Bluetooth headphones have to be made discoverable temporarily and turn it off after they’re paired, so this is more like you could be tracked locally by an array of bt receivers if you’re walking around with the button on your headphones held down.

The other thing in the article that applies to all people with phones or computers or whatever is the relatively old news that cops buy data from data brokers instead of doing investigations.

How long till they start setting other people on fire over it?

A gallon throughout the course of a day will not harm an adult.