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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I’m calling it now: Putin has abandoned Trump.

    Since Kamala has come along and and stole all his thunder by being… normal, Trump has lost the plot, but the last two weeks are on a whole new level.

    I believe that Putin is cutting his losses and has walked away from this dumpster fire. This is what’s causing Trump’s (even more) unusual behavior. Sure, he’s old and demented but the stress of losing his backing force has been weighing on him.

    He’s stressed about what happens to him now. Without the backing of Daddy, if he loses, there is a good chance he’s finally held to account for his crimes. If he’s not, does Putin finally wield what he’s got over Trump to destroy him as punishment for failing?

    But, don’t consider this job done. Trump still pulled it out in 2016 after being written-off in the polls. The only chance you crazy, freedom-loving Americans have is to vote. Vote like there is no tomorrow because imagine what terrible revenge Trump would be capable of, if he does get into power now after being so badly burnt!




  • I heard from a reliable source that “they” also have a functional gender-swap ray gun - it was actually a happy accident they stumbled upon when they were trying to develop the weather control gun.

    It’s quick, effective and eliminates the need for messy surgery and hormones that magas can ban.

    They have already targeted the majority of the right wing figureheads in the media and the maga party. Jones, Hannity, MTG, Shapiro, Musk and many, many more. They’ve all been gender swapped and are desperately trying to keep this hidden from their supporters.

    If you see strange behavior, nonsensical ramblings or angry tirades, this is one of the side-effects as their mind struggles with the sudden gender change.



  • Good on you! I’ve found the best thing to do with upset babies is try to engage with the kid - ask the parents first(!) but babies are fascinated by new people in a way that parents can’t fulfill.

    Story time: I had a crying 6mth old next to me earlier this year so I pulled out the safety sheet (asked the mum if I can show him this), channeled my inner Wiggles and kick-started it with a big, excited interruption to his crying: “wow, look at the plane!” The unexpected, strange interaction short circuits their focus on being upset and he just stopped and started at me like “wtf is this dude on?”. Once I had his attention I started pointing and describing all the pictures, then gave him the page. This turned into a 10min game of point at the picture, say the word or a story then hand it back. My names and descriptions for the people on the page got more crazy each time - after all, his were nonsensical too! I even got a few giggles as I kept it animated with hand gestures and big smiles. That turned into pointing out the windows or different things in the cabin.

    The kid eventually got bored of the games after about 15-20 mins but had already forgotten he was upset and then peacefully interacted with his mum again for the rest of the flight. I got back to my book while he had the sky mag to read along like me and would still point out different pictures to me or check my book, puzzled why they were no pictures!

    I even scored a tiny-dude high five as they were leaving which everyone knows are the best high fives.

    Best flight I’ve had all year!



  • At this point, what benefit is there of doing nothing and “following the rules”?

    If Biden wins, then what? It doesn’t fix any of the BS the supreme Court has created it just buys a couple more years until Trump tries again or the next Rep maga agent comes along. Looking at the state of the Republican party, this would be almost any of them at this point then the US is in the exact same position.

    They can’t hold off the Republicans forever.

    Of course if he does reset the court, jails or executes Trump then that plays directly into the hands of the crazies too “SEE! We told you he’s trying to take over democracy!!”



  • In not familiar with exactly what happened that night but just an uneducated guess:

    All of the threats that Kyle encountered was in response to the fact that he was playing Timmy Toughguy and actively strolling around with a gun

    If he was just wandering around being an unarmed cunt then the chance of being swung at is still not zero but pretty damn close to it.

    If at any point he ran - and kept running, or dropped the gun and ran, fully retreating from the crowd I doubt he would have been chased too far and the need to shoot would have been eliminated

    In the same way he (correctly) saw others as a threat, the primary reason he was being threatened was because everyone else saw a random civilian with an assault rifle that was a 50x larger threat well before they threatened him. Even if he intended to do nothing with it, he knew he was sending a threatening message just being there with it and he then seemed shocked when people started responding to that threat - of course they would try and disarm him at a bare minimum.

    The threat to Kyle at this point was genuinely high because most adults in the US - or anywhere - instantly recognise what a random civilian in public with an assault rifle means - mass shooting. This is exactly the message Kyle intended to send in order to scare rioters off. If he wasn’t there just to scare people off then he was there to actively murder people. At this point I could put it down to a dumb kid making a really stupid mistake. Maybe worth a few years in jail for gun charges or inciting violence?

    But he didn’t retreat as he was being threatened - a fraction of what he was threatening others. He chose to attack instead and it’s at this point he deserves to spend the rest of his days rotting in jail. He tried to send a message, that message wasn’t received so he murdered those who were fearing for, and attempting to protect their own lives.

    Kyle choose to be the aggressor - and much greater threat to anyone there - from the start. He wasn’t protecting his own family, house or neighbourhood, he crossed state lines to be an aggressor. Kyle continued to act as the aggressor at every stage of the encounter.

    Fuck Kyle.


  • Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

    Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

    Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

    Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.


  • Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

    Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

    Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

    Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

    RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

    Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

    File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

    Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.




  • I’m not sure about this one - it’s definately not my experience but yours could be very different.

    The system definitely reports data back to MS but I’ve never seen a box have issues because we denied it the ability to dial home or update. Unless the PC is online and the user is actively trying to prevent the updates installing? I’ve seen users pull the plug on a PC that started/midway though updates hoping to stop them and it would often make a mess of things.

    We had a small handful of XP then Win7 boxes that were completely off the grid/standalone as SCADA access points/controllers? for several years without issues.

    Likewise, we had one box where the vendor did not allow any updates despite it being networked and online. They had disabled win updates completely without our input. It ran just fine for a few years until it was picked up in a security audit. We didn’t understand why updates were disabled at that time so we switched them back on and updated. The PC ran just fine until it’s eventual retirement.


  • That’s right! I remember those signed drivers where also why early XP (pre SP2) had a bad rep. Not as bad as ME but users were swearing on the graves of dead relatives they would never give up W98 or W2k. Without new or signed drivers, a lot of hardware struggled but by the time SP2 rolled out, hardware vendors had mostly caught up and the OS had matured.

    Vista had similar issues (so, so many issues with Vista) with it’s security changes which made life difficult for badly written/insecure software (wanting admin rights to run or write access to system folders/reg keys). Those changes in Vista paved the way for Win7 to be so much better at launch since most software had caught up by then.

    I think the issue with disabling components is 90% how users remove them. Pulling them out via “official” methods hasn’t ever caused me issues - DISM is really handy - particularly for permanently removing the default apps. Those deeply connected functions can be a pain!


  • My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

    After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

    I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

    Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.