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Just have two or three of the speakers identify as female.

In the days where we casually check the validity of every friend request, how did they think they'd get away with speakers who do not exist? It isn't the 1980s anymore.

One would think that, in the course of a lawsuit, the unsafe and understaffed conditions would come to light. It seems like such clauses might be a bluff.

I dunno, workers have to admit some responsibility for working for them in the first place.

I thought all the HP printers had been recycled by now.

Do people still buy them?

I am a heavy user of Adobe Creative Cloud, and many components use GPU for acceleration, so having reasonably current hardware is important. That said, the video cards commonly available now are more than what the software can use. So I'm good with anything substantial made after 2014 or so. My current workstation, a Dell T3610, was introduced in 2013. The video is a gforce 2060, which is overqualified for Lightroom and Photoshop.

The point being, anything better than Intel built-in graphics and anything better than 2 cores, 16 GB memory or above, and I'm good. That's pretty generic these days. So an OS supporting cutting edge technology doesn't help me. I'm not a gamer, so gaming level tech doesn't help me. There's really no reason to upgrade the OS, because the new OS doesn't support anything I need. The only reason I'm even running Windows 11 is that I had to go with a high end laptop to get a "real" GPU that Photoshop could use, and it came with Windows 11. Shrug. But the experience has been ok so far.

I would dearly love to ditch Windows. I have a couple of older laptops running Linux, one Ubuntu and one Mint, and I'm very comfortable with that environment. But Adobe Creative Cloud only runs on (a) Windows and (b) OSX. As I can't justify the cost of Mac, that leaves me with Windows. The moment Adobe ports to ANY version of Linux, on ANY Linux desktop, I'll dump windows and never look back. Adobe's typical answer, that the Linux community is too fragmented, is a crap answer. Just pick a version, any version, and we will come to you.

If I understand what you're saying, I'm not proposing upgrading an existing machine to 11. That doesn't make any sense at all. Just use it as is to the end of its lifespan. The laptop running 11 is a new laptop that came with 11, and presumably has enough resources. Just sayin', 11 doesn't appear to be the disaster that was 8.

I guess I should have said, my desktop runs 10 and will probably run 10 for the rest of its life. If I decide to keep it in service after 10 is no longer viable, I'll switch it to Linux. Probably Mint.

Hm. Maybe. I have 11 running on a laptop on which I do regular work, and it's ok. They made some silly changes, but it's not the earth shattering stupidity that was 8. I think it's more likely that people are sticking with 10 because they were burned so badly by 8, just as they stuck with XP after being burned by Vista. I can get behind that sentiment. (And if I'm just restating what you meant, my apologies.)

Is there a way to turn it the hell off?

What worked for us was joining a consortium, a group of high tech professionals and artists who combined forces to teach our children. It wasn't a "commune" or anything like that, just a bunch of people, a nuclear engineer who taught math and physics, an IT professional that maintained the computers, network and printers, a chemist who taught chemistry and biology, a professional musician who led the small band and taught music theory, and so forth. We all taught or contributed what we knew best.

The homeschool group had regular field trips, a once a month trip to the municipal pool, regular trips to museums, occasional trips to parks and wildlife preserves. Our kids were not isolated individuals, they learned and interacted as a group.

I learned of the group by happenstance. I was relating to a friend in a restaurant my struggles with the school system, and a woman at the next table told me about the consortium where she taught, and it turned out to be a good fit for my child.

Now that I know what to look for, it's something I recommend to parents who are in a bad situation with their local school system but don't have the cycles or expertise to do it all themselves.

I understand it's difficult to find every possible way of breaking into the service but maybe Microsoft should consider creating a honey pot and then observe how it's attacked.

Or, maybe, Azure is the honey pot.

Do I get a rebate?

Very good point. So a smart person would either read the signs and leave before the lockdown, or figure out a way through the cordon.