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.

>Big announcements were made for sub-10kg laptops (22lbs).

I had a backlit Macintosh Portable (actually, I still have it, but it needs recapping). In its carrying case, and with power supply and spare battery, it came to 26 pounds.

Which was the same weight as the desktop Macs of the time.

I actually hurt my shoulder lugging it through an airport once.

I think it was the powerbook 180 that replaced it on which I had a problem with airport security--they wanted to see a C: prompt. I think it was finally a manager that told him to let me through.

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.

better yet, set an activation time at which a few weeks worth of drones will simultaneously activate and attack a range of Russian sites . . .

uhm . . .. let's see . . . "In soviet Russia, the data backs *you* up!" ?

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.)

rat and roach, I see. what are the others?

yeah, don't do that.

I find most food too disgusting eat even a second time, let alone every day. At best, it would be wilted. Probably at least soggy, and, well . . .

cats & dogs have a different notion of how many times to eat the same food, though.