I disagree that phones and tablets are both good enough and affordable.

On their own, phones and tablets are not good enough because they run phone operating systems. These trade off flexibility for reliability, in part because people expect a phone to be their primary way of reaching emergency services (1-1-2, 9-1-1, 9-9-9, etc.). Phone operating systems are locked down with strict W^X in such a way that makes them not very capable, for example, for lightweight programming projects. Change my mind.

One can circumvent the lockdown by using the tablet as a remote terminal for running applications elsewhere. This requires adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private server, or adding a mobile data subscription and a virtual private network (like Tailscale or Hamachi) to connect to your home computer behind an ISP-managed firewall. That adds a recurring fee in the tens of dollars per month or hundreds of dollars per year.

The practical problem with Chromebooks at the time was that for several years, between the debut of Chromebooks in 2011 and widespread support for Crostini (a GNU/Linux virtual machine) in 2019, a Chromebook couldn't do anything other than browse the web without threatening to wipe all your data (because "OS verification is OFF") every time you turned it on. That isn't very conducive to offline use while (say) riding a bus. I had been using my netbook for lightweight hobby programming projects.

The disadvantage of a bigger laptop is that a bigger laptop is less convenient to use in a cramped space, such as on a bus commute to and from your day job. It's also less convenient to pack in a cramped space, such as your tiny personal locker at your day job. A 10.1" laptop fit in (say) a locker in the back of a Walmart Supercenter, and a 11.6" laptop did not. That's part of why I was so disappointed that manufacturers suddenly discontinued 10.1" laptops at the end of 2012. I remember recommending that people affected by this discontinuation buy a cellular iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard case, a VPS, and an expensive data plan, and use the iPad to remote desktop to the VPS. I rejected that workaround as cost prohibitive at the time.

YES! Many happy users of Proton on Steam Deck will answer in the affirmative for many games. This is what Valve's 30 percent cut of Steam sales pays for.

As if Windows 11 doesn't have its own host of "config issues that require an hour of reading to fix."

One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.

The <figure> element might help with that.

I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?

Most User-agent strings that don't contain "bot" nor "Mozilla/" were in Anubis's allowlist last I checked.

Yet. Because Anubis is free software, and because its hash happens to be the same as the proof of work of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, someone could modify Anubis to tie the SHA-256 puzzle to the Bitcoin block that a mining pool is working on.

Until someone writes a browser extension to offload solving the hashcash to WebGPU.

Laptops tend to have an always-on CPU spike monitor: the exhaust fan. So do phones and tablets: they get warm. So do older, less expensive, or small-form-factor desktop computers: they get stuck on the interstitial for up to a minute.

This already exists. Use an extension to make script-in-the-browser opt-in per domain, such as the Firefox extension "Javascript Control" by Erwan Ameil.

I seem to remember a service called Coinhive that offered a script to make the viewer's device mine the cryptocurrency Monero in the background. I forget if it had an option to hide the article until a particular amount was mined. (Coinhive shut down when too many intruders started installing its script on other people's websites.)

In a balanced budget, taxation exceeds spending, like it did at the end of the Clinton administration and just before George W. Bush went to war. The highest federal income tax bracket at the time was about 40 percent. What broke the budget was a misguided attempt to stimulate private business by cutting income tax on the richest American taxpayers.

That created a problem for dial-up users and laptop users back in the day. That was solved in two ways. First, Valve fixed the bug in early Steam that was causing it to fail to store purchase receipts for offline mode. (Users at the time were experiencing this as a need to be online for switching to offline mode to work.) Second, the home Internet market as a whole phased out dial-up, and even in areas not served by fiber, cable, or DSL, dial-up users largely switched to satellite Internet.

Unless it's something like DuckTales Remastered that gets delisted from Steam after a couple years on the market. This particular game was an adaptation of a Disney product identity, and Capcom's license from Disney had expired.

Other than that new versions of mainstream operating systems and web browsers make it harder for the owner of a device to trust the root certificate of a particular private CA. I seem to remember, for example, that iOS and Android put a scary warning on the lock screen if one or more user-trusted root certificates is installed, and Android application developers have to opt into user-trusted root certificates through a "Network Security Config".

Different machines can respond to the same IP address as seen from the Internet vs. from a coffee shop's guest WLAN. Let's Encrypt sees only the former when evaluating an http-01 challenge. If you associate to a guest WLAN and connect to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2F42.42.42.42%2F and it offers a certificate issued by Let's Encrypt, that means you're seeing the same server that Let's Encrypt saw through the Internet, not a server on the guest WLAN that's intercepting your connection.