Most of that money gone from angry young men who couldn't really afford to lose it. There is a damn good reason we heavily regulate gambling. It's known to be addictive. But sure let's have millions of young men with poor job prospects and in debt up to their ears from gambling. I'm sure that won't cause any problems for the rest of us.

Like I told the other guy, not the same thing. A loot box is not a known commodity. When I'm doing futures trading I am trading and known commodities and the only question is how much they will be worth in the future.

If I buy a loot box then that is literally random chance or it's supposed to be.

I'm assuming that you've picked up a bunch of nonsense propaganda from the gambling houses. It's also possible that they are so pervasive that they are starting to show up here. Either the way this is nonsense. We know what gambling is. It is putting up money with the goal of a specific outcome with the understanding that you have an agreement that if that outcome happens you will be paid back more than you put up.

Sometimes that outcome is completely random and sometimes it is predicated on a series of other outcomes but at the end of the day you aren't making a purchase of a commodity or good that you intend to resell you are making at Best in educated guess

Just because you are making a purchase based on an expectation does not mean you're gambling. At the end of the day when you purchase a future you're still purchasing something of tangible value. You might lose money because you overestimate the value of that thing but the amount of money you can lose is limited somewhat because there is still a tangible asset backing your purchase.

What makes gambling gambling is that you are putting up money with the expectation that given a certain outcome you will get paid more money than you put up if that outcome happens and you will lose all of your money if that outcome does not happen. There's no tangible asset whatsoever you're just making a guess on an outcome.

There is a reason why we have different words to describe gambling and futures trading instead of just using the same words. They are different things.

Of course after decades of right wing lunatics being put on the courts so that they will sign off on whatever the Epstein class wants the rule of law no longer applies.

There will be consequences for you personally. Even if you don't Gamble the tens of billions of dollars lost will drag down the overall economy and help take you with it.

There is a concept called at chesterton's fence. The idea is don't take offense down unless you know why it was put up. You are in the process of taking down a fence without realizing why it was put up

Erases 2,000 years of human civilization.

Is you have a bunch of alien races that aren't peaceful and create conflict but the core federation and the core of humanity has moved beyond conflict. Even for the handful of things where you have a federation special forces they don't exist to act against or on members of the federation they exist to deal with the less advanced alien races and still engage in conflict.

And that's the core thing. Engaging in conflict is a sign that your race is less advanced. It's why the Q are always fucking with the federation but not so much with the Klingons. They're more interested in advanced races that are close to taking the next step towards what they are.

It's a core part of the theme of the show. If you start mixing in right wing politics it's not a shortcut to introduce conflict, you already have an easy way to do that, it's just the people at the top forcing it on the writers or firing any writer that doesn't tow the line.

When you do that you eliminate everything that makes Star Trek Star Trek and frankly everything that makes anything interesting. Right wing media is never interesting or fun or cool. It's something you use to deal with being afraid of the world and the things in it. It's A coping mechanism and its propaganda for billionaires. That's never fun.

The last Star Trek had all sorts of weird right of Center bullshit mixed into it the turn people off. Star Trek doesn't work like that. That's not what anyone comes to Star Trek for.

Nobody wants to see 2000s style anti-terrorism propaganda in their sci-fi. If you're watching Syfy it's because you want to see a world past all that bullshit. I can watch it dystopia for a movie maybe get through a book like that but I'm not sitting through multiple seasons of dystopia. And worse I'm not going to pretend that a right-wing future is anything but dystopia. Everyone knows the future of the right wing is bad news it's just at most if you're on the right wing you think it's better than the alternatives.

That's kind of the thing about the right wing. They don't think good things can ever happen to everybody. They firmly believe some people have to suffer horribly as long as it's not them. That's why right wing science fiction never works in the long run. Sci-fi is about the future and making it better. And the right wing doesn't believe that better things can happen. Whatever they have in their life right now is as good as it gets. It's a really depressing world view

Star Trek can't survive. Star Trek is a fundamentally progressive and left-wing franchise. It doesn't work if you start injecting culture War bullshit. And under the new ownership anything that's not culture War bullshit is out.

I haven't seen the very newest stuff but from what I understand they started to try and get away from the good old woke Star Trek plots a little and it went over about as well as you would expect. The ratings were pretty much shit and nobody's going to spend the money to make a science fiction show like that.

Honestly that's the problem. Sci-Fi is woke. You are looking towards the future and you're doing it for a mass market so nobody is going to want to sit through episode after episode of right-wing dystopia. And I don't think anyone believes in right wing Utopias because you always have to have an out group in any right-wing fiction and it's kind of hard to have a Utopia when you are explicitly excluding minorities of one kind or another.

Honestly as the Epstein class takes over media more and more it's just going to keep getting worse and worse. Go look up what Ben Shapiro's Media company is going to do and at this rate in 10 years that's what's going to be TV and streaming.

I do wonder what they're going to do when the ratings collapse but I don't think they really care about money anymore it's just about having control. Back in the '70s gay people took over TV not because the people writing were gay or woke or liberal or whatever but because TV had gotten so censored by the right wing that it was intensely boring. So ratings collapsed. They started putting gay people into sitcoms and other TV shows because it was controversial at the time and it got viewers back.

You kind of need progressive ideas to make media interesting because otherwise you're basically just looking back to a fake idealized past ala I'll leave it to Beaver.

Again though when the ratings collapse in the past they would have done something about that to bring viewers back but these days I think they might just let TV suck. Like how Twitter is losing money hand over fist because it's full of Nazis but muskrat doesn't care because it's more useful as a propaganda tool then as a profitable business.

Something I've noticed is lately outside of safe spaces the right wing keeps their damned mouths shut. Every so often one of them will jump in and yell TDS or something but they never actually tried to defend the actions of anyone on their side or any of their policies anymore. Mostly they either avoid conversations outside of safe spaces entirely or they lurk and mod everything they don't like down.

I think the right wing knows this is going to bite them in the ass personally. I mean the rank and file the members of the Epstein class who are actually arranging all this are benefiting from it greatly. But I don't think they can stop because they've given up too many friends and family.

But come on right wingers. By all means defend this. Tell me why it's okay for the administration to go after somebody for some Reddit posts. Explain to me why you think it'll never happen to you.

Most people don't care. They don'tb understand Linux, they don't understand Windows either.

The only "training" they ever need is someone to tell them where to find their LibreOffice icon this tine. If it's obvious, youbcan skip yhe training and they'll cope.

And yes, I did this professionally -- switch an entire company end device system from Windows to Linux, in my role as head of IT, and deal with the (latgely nonexistent) support "fallout".

If the idea is to get more INdependent of tech giants, then Google Docs isn't goong to be the replacement.

How do you know it's a linux issue, and not a different issue with your printing setup?

Pretty much any printer I've seen the past years "just works" in linux. Not even setup required, it just pops up in your list of printers if it's attached anywhere in your network.

It's not the ones we like it's the ones that will let our Epstein class have the countries banana reserves.

Trump made this completely different. This isn't France trying to get a better deal from Microsoft like usual. America can no longer be trusted.

Donald Trump has a giant list of reasons why he never should have been president once let alone twice. It's so bad I'm not even going to waste time listing the points out here.

And somehow he is still rocking a 35 to 40% approval rating.

America is completely insane. You cannot rely on us anymore and you absolutely cannot have critical infrastructure dependent on america. Software is critical infrastructure.

Under normal circumstances every single American software company would be freaking the fuck out right now because they are about to get frozen out of Europe. But because everything is owned by a handful of billionaires and those billionaires are going to make out like bandits no matter what that's not happening.

If you're American you need to come to terms with the idea that the system is designed to protect you have completely broken down and that 35 to 40% of the country can drag you down with them.

That said I have no idea what the hell you do about that.

And remember it's not just Trump it's that 35 to 40% who saw their grocery bills skyrocket and gas shoot up a dollar a gallon and somehow blamed Joe Biden for it. That level of insanity is something that you have to address head on.

Yes. It is

Which is a funny question given the issue. First off, it's a problem caused by 3rd party software, corrected by having a separate control to have Outlook keep using Edge after someone else's software broke the file associations. So, Microsoft made sure Microsoft software continued to work with Microsoft software despite Google or Mozilla breaking it.

See, those other browsers don't just take the default association for .htm and .html, they change other registry values in those keys, and don't change them back once uninstalled. Instead of "htmlfile", it becomes "ChromeHTML" or "FireFoxHTML", and if you remove Chrome (or FF), those values stick around. Most things don't care, because the extension and content type haven't changed, but a few things do care, and Outlook is one of them.

Don't believe me? https://community.spiceworks.c...