You’re gonna snag all of Pennsylvania? You, uh, really sure you want to do that?

“Just printing money” to cover a government’s operational expenses is an express ticket to rampant hyperinflation that devalues said currency very quickly. Various cut-rate regimes all over the world have tried that tactic many times throughout history and it’s always wound up with the same result.

So needless to say, as insane as the current monetary policy in the US may or may not be, that’s certainly not how it works now.

https://massgrave.dev/

If you have to do it legitimately for corporate liability purposes then yes, actually buying licenses will not be cost effective. But activating the LTSC versions is otherwise trivially easy.

I am explicitly using LTSC.

You don’t need a license if you know about massgrave.dev. I’m only using this because our warehouse software requires Windows and the latter is already bought and paid for. Otherwise, Microsoft can bite me.

Ooh, a Celeron N4000. I will see you, and raise you this piece of shit we have at work:

My boss bought this as one of those Black Friday “deals” for about $99 USD. The sticker on the bottom doesn’t seem to reveal its manufacturing date but I believe this model was released in 2018. Really, it’s just a netbook in all but name.

We use this specifically to drive a walk-around barcode scanner in our warehouse and the software we have to use on it is Windows only. It’s tiny and still somehow gets stellar battery life, and it’s deliberately so cheap as to be disposable so when the day inevitably comes that it gets smashed, no one will care.

With Win10 IoT on it the thing actually runs tolerably for our intended use case, which is the aforementioned barcode bleeping and nothing else. And at least yours there has a 1080p display; this one is only 1366 x 768 so doing practically anything else on it is excruciating anyway. What amuses me the most about it is that with only 29 gigs of usable storage there literally isn’t enough left over to run Windows updates. I have this thing as ruthlessly pared down as I can get without creating a custom Windows installation or something and for the big updates, you have to attach an external USB drive to it.

I can’t fathom trying to run Windows 11 on it. Fuck all that noise.

People do understand what the midterms are, right?

…Right?

Neither Trump nor Vance are up for election in 2026. But quite a few of their GOP cronies are, in the house and senate. All of the house is up for election and roughly one third of the senate. This will most likely be our last chance to oust at least some of Trump’s enablers in congress.

Down here (this was in October of last year, I think) it wasn’t. Basically it was only visible through a camera with a long-ish exposure. Otherwise with the naked eye you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just ordinary light pollution, as we have causing our skies to noticeably glow any old night of the year.

It probably does. And in e.g. such a headless system, it makes sense as the default. Or more likely, whoever set that system up set it up in the way they want it to behave, hand-editing config files be damned because that certainly wouldn’t have been the only config file they had to edit.

From a home desktop computer perspective, however, it’s baffling. At minimum that should be one of the questions in the graphical installer: “Would you like Debian to make your routine installation of software updates annoying? Yes/no. You cannot change your choice on this later without doing a bunch of scary commandline shit.”

Debian in its GUI (at least KDE, which I’m using at the moment) demanding the root password to install the updates it’s blinking at me about in the tray all the time. In this context, demanding a password at all is rather silly (Windows doesn’t require your password to install updates in a single user environment, and it doesn’t even pop up a UAC prompt) and this is going to be yet another one of those things that prior Windows users will moan about, declaring that “Linux is complicated and hard” and drive them back to the comfort of the devil they know when they feel like their own computer is actively trying to stymie them at seemingly every turn.

My user account is a sudoer so there is absolutely no technical reason my own password shouldn’t work. And, in fact, if I run updates via apt in a terminal it does. But allowing updates to install from the desktop environment, something ostensibly ought to be a routine userspace kind of operation, requires everyone using the system who might want to do this to know the system-wide root password. This is a monumentally stupid idea.

I am well aware there are myriad ways around this but they all involve hand-editing config files and come with stern warnings about “this may break your system so proceed ‘carefully,’” as if anyone who is not already an experienced Linux nerd will know just what the hell “proceeding carefully” is supposed to look like.

The inevitable XKCD comic succinctly sums this up:

The UNIX permissions and administration model may have made great sense on glass teletypes in the '70s and when nobody knew any better, but it’s certainly long outmoded now. It’s going to make a lot of people very angry to read this, but that’s actually one of the few things that Windows does much better, at least starting from NT onwards.

He may be deranged, and he probably is, but Trump does not want Greenland for spurious reasons. Pretending that this whole situation is unfolding just because he’s Ol’ Mr. Sillypants is exceedingly dangerous. Trump wants Greenland because Putin wants Trump to take it, and the inevitable fallout will also lead to the US withdrawing from NATO. As it stands now, Putin cannot pass his navy through into the north Atlantic without it easily being blockaded by NATO from the coast of Greenland to the coast of Norway.

Having half of that stretch of ocean conveniently occupied by nearby US ships instead which is conveniently currently nonagressive with Russia would be very beneficial for Putin.

20mm isn’t wide enough… Well, I’m out of the running. The widest lens I have right now is 24.

I managed to get a broadly legible pic of the last aurora that was visible down here with my phone, of all things. I had to use my little 3D printed clamp to affix it to a tripod, though. It still wasn’t very impressive.

I was wondering where OP’s story was about renting a helicopter.

“Look, kid. Let me tell you the secret of show business. Step one is to find someone with a great act. And step two, steal it!”

For instance, this classic.

Hey, I like my 3D TV. Every once in a while I manage to find a pirated video that’s in 3D and it’s pretty neat. And unlike the current avalanche of generative/LLM bullshit, I can turn the 3D off, and when I do it works just fine as a perfectly ordinary TV, and in no way does it nag me incessantly to turn it back on.

…Well, that was an amusing spend of 90 seconds.

Well, which do we think would annoy nerds more: Lego bricks changing so that they or some combination thereof achieve a truly cubic aspect ratio (currently they’re not and they never have been; a 1x1x1 Lego brick is taller than it is wide or deep, and no approved combination of stock Lego parts can produce a truly cubic 1x1 piece) or Minecraft blocks suddenly changing to be vertically elongated to match Lego?

Ah, the old “unauthorized tampering with school computer equipment which Could Cause Irreparable Damage,” but is actually just a tacit admission that whoever is in charge of the computer lab doesn’t have the first clue about what they’re doing.

I had several of those throughout my school career.

Hey, Deluxe Paint was pretty alright, too. Amiga or DOS version, your choice.

The loser or one of his friends probably tattled. Most schools have policies similar to this, ostensibly to “prevent it from being brought to school” but in reality because school administrators wish they could exert control over kids’ lives 100% of the time but can’t, and they’re salty about it.