http://massgrave.dev/.

Install the LTSC IoT edition of Windows, which comes minus the bloat. It’s sort of an official Microsoft minimal install version. You can activate it with the scripts you find at massgrave.

materially supporting state violence

Dingdingdingdingding.

Here’s the winner, right here. Fascist fucks want to go around pretending that only billy clubs and bullets and bombs count as “violence.” Inflicting mass starvation on people, withholding medical care, stealing workers’ wages they depend upon to survive, and brutalizing minorities and marginalized groups (oftentimes with actual up front physical attacks) is “just doing business.”

So news flash to the chucklefucks: That’s not how it works. State sponsored violence is still violence, and so it follows the oppressed have a right to defend themselves. It sure sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, don’t it?

But it turns out there’s an easy way to defend yourself from that sort of thing. All you have to do is not be an evil and hateful fuck whose policies and actions threaten the lives of others and their right to exist.

Is that what was going on? I noticed a blood moon-eqsue effect the other night but I figured it was just due to it rising through wildfire smoke or whatever, as usual.

Just like how Hydrox are just knockoff Oreos!

I mean, that’s a valid assessment of the yard as well if you’re looking at it from a comedy perspective.

I had a client who wound up with one of those not realizing what it was, which caused him no end of problems until I ultimately figured it out confiscated it from him. He got a regular US inch one in exchange. I had to look it up at the time, too, because the notion of there being a Chinese knockoff inch that’s subtly inaccurate is one of those things that just seems so ridiculous on its face that it simply can’t be true, right? Except it totally is.

None of the above is true, or at least isn’t the full answer for why today a “2x4” is missing an entire half an inch all the way around. The shrinkage due to drying is around 5% (and the real math there is more complicated, as wood shrinks different amounts in different directions relative to the grain), which would only account for 1/10" of difference in the thickness of a 2x4. With some species of pine it’s as low as 2%.

No, the lumber industry has consistently shaved boards in order to fit more into rail cars for transport and make more money and spend less per plank on transportation costs. Various lumber consortiums determined via internal testing that the smaller board sizes are still “sufficient” for their intended purpose vis-a-vis structural integrity of stick framed residential buildings.

Twice.

…And have them able to run on zero consumer devices if the bootloaders are locked, and the manufacturers refuse to sign their ROMs for them. (Hint: they will refuse to sign their ROMs for them.)

https://www.harborfreight.com/momentary-power-foot-switch-57199.html

I have one of these on my big “real” table saw as well, because the location of its power switch is deeply inconvenient.

Psychology aside, when I was a wee waddler working my first retail job, my boss told me that the reason they priced items ending in 99 cents specifically at his store was because the change from a dollar left over was a shortcut to telling the cashier how many items had been rung up. “Rung up” itself being very apt in this case, because when he started his business back in the Lower Cretaceous period, they used mechanical cash registers that went ding and everything, but didn’t have fancy electronic readouts of the running total and items registered so far. If the customer handed you seven items you knew that the pennies end of the change if you rounded up to a dollar should be $XX.93, and you could use that to tell handily if you missed anything or double-rung something.

It seems that the prospect of “losing” a penny in the sense of making a $1 item 99 cents instead was probably a better proposition versus having cashiers let un-rung items walk out the door all the time.

I’ve always resolved that if I get sucked out of an airplane or something, possibly due to Boeing related reasons, one unlucky bastard is going to be the recipient of the most epic elbow drop in history. Hey, if you’re going to hit the ground anyway you may as well make it cool as hell.

And if you go anywhere with your shiny new flash drive, also carry a floppy disk around with you with the damn driver on it. Because you can’t trust anyone else’s computer to already have it installed.

I think Windows 2000 was the high water mark. Compared to the NT based operating systems, the 9x versions were pretty rinky-dink in retrospect and not terribly reliable. 2000 was the best truly modern Windows that supported all the stuff we expect: NTFS, real user accounts, actual security, group policy management, the modern disk management utility that’s still in use today, the management console, native USB support (including 2.0 as of Service Pack 4), native ACPI hibernation support without reliance on janky vendor bullshit, etc.

Yeah, USB support. Everyone forgets that Windows 95 didn’t support USB at all out of the box and 98 barely accomplished it. 95 required the “OSR2 USB Supplement,” and 98 didn’t even support mass storage devices without third party drivers until the “SE” second edition. Those days really were that terrible.

XP was where the bloat really started setting in, but since XP was basically 2000 with extra shit duct taped to it you could still do all the same stuff with it vis-a-vis gaming and DirectX support, and by and large it could still use the same hardware drivers as XP even if vendors didn’t bother to officially support it.

This would become quite a thorny constitutional issue very quickly. The 14th amendment explicitly specifies that one state can’t try to prosecute someone for something done in another state that was legal there but is illegal here. This has further been interpreted to mean that interstate travel as a whole is a protected right, and any form of checkpoint or other hassle-station on a border between states would surely also be a 4th amendment violation.

That’s not to say some idiot won’t try it eventually, especially given the current political climate, but up until now it’s not done as a matter of course.

A state neighboring mine got in big time hot water a decade or so ago for stationing their own cops in our state and tailing people out of liquor store parking lots with the aim of harassing them over the minutiae of the differences in liquor laws between the two. Obviously that didn’t fly, because that state does not have jurisdiction here which means they have no grounds for a stop or search. Likewise, entering another state is not legal grounds for a stop and search unless that state’s law enforcement already has some manner of articulable probable cause.

Major roads have a “welcome to wherever” sign but minor ones won’t. They’re always a clear delineation in the pavement, though, because neither state is going to pave one single molecule of distance further than they have to. And they never seem to be able to arrange it so that there isn’t a noticeable bump at the junction.

One of my neighboring states also has some kind of pathological aversion to putting complete and legible signs for the names of roads at intersections, too. So the disappearance of all useful street signs is therefore usually also a clue.

Counter offer: Be a huge nerd and hang out on Lemmy instead.

You’ll probably be scraped by AI bots anyway, but we have penguins and Star Trek memes. And knives.

Microsoft have been calling discrete computer programs “applications” since at least the Windows 95 era, when Program Manager was replaced with the start menu. They’ve been inconsistently kinda-sorta doing so since even Windows 3.x, maybe even more, but nobody was closely paying attention back then.

It didn’t become the current situation of monkey-see-monkey-do until Apple started using the terminology heavily with the iPhone, as you have observed. But they actually cribbed it from good old M$, much as they’ve cribbed basically everything else they’ve done in the modern era from someone else and simply painted it glossy white.

Related:

“When will [task] be done?”

When I told you it would be done.

“But why isn’t it done now?”

Because it’s not when I told you it would be done yet.

“Well, you need to hurry up and do it faster, because we need it right away.”

Great! But you standing here arguing with me about it is now actively preventing me from getting it done. It will be done when it’s done, which will now be about 20 minutes later than it would have been before you came over here and started shooting your mouth off about it.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve had this conversation with middle management in my various careers, I’d at least be able to afford a Taco Bell combo meal by now.