Everything you said is correct and I'd recommend the same. I wanted to expand on this, though:

This is windows triggering how the computer is restarted - and that has been a problem since the days of Windows 7 where a "reboot" was not as rebootish as the name implied.

The behavior you're describing and working around with arguments to the shutdown command is typically caused by the confusingly-named fast startup (not to be confused with UEFI fast boot, which might also cause irregularities in the boot process but is controlled by the system firmware/UEFI and not Windows). It can (and IMO always should be) disabled with ctrl+r > control > hardware & sound > power options > change what the power buttons do/change what closing the lid does > uncheck "turn on fast startup." It causes way more headaches than the few seconds it saves on each boot and as there are no other benefits; I always disable it.

It's normally only a problem with a shutdown, though, not a restart; doing a restart from within Windows' UI is already supposed to bypass it, which is why we'd always tell our users to restart their PCs once a week. But, if you're on a computer with fast startup on *and* want to do a shutdown *and* bypass fast startup, simply doing shutdown /s will disable it for the next boot.

Also, I think shutdown /fw might need to be combined with an active option like /r /s or /g in order to actually function.

No. That's fucking stupid. Nobody needs to hear about politics when they go shopping for groceries or take a walk or go to the bathroom. There's a place and time for political discussion. The place is not "everywhere" and the time is not "always." Sane individuals do not want political bullshit invading every single moment of their waking life. Have some goddamn restraint.

I use catbox.moe which will store anything up to 200mb. They also have litterbox.catbox.moe which has a customizable expire timer. The anime girls on the front page may be a deal breaker for people who don't like that sort of thing, though, and for the same reason it's probably not good to use in a professional setting.

Alternatively, if you use Discord at all, it's fairly easy to create a server* for yourself and just upload and link pictures from that. There's a fairly small filesize limit and I think they do expire eventually, but it works well if you already use Discord. If you pay for Nitro, I believe you can upload much larger files. (*this is Discord's term for a private group hub, don't blame me if you don't like them using the name "server" for that). Honestly, you could probably do something similar on other social platforms.

Failing that, you can always use any of the big name free cloud platforms and just cull whatever you upload every week so it doesn't take up your allotment. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive (I hate everything about the desktop version and how it tries to take over your computer, but their web interface is usable), etc.

I strongly disagree with the direction the Republicans are going but your complaint here is about basic human nature. Most people prioritize themselves and their families. The argument should not be "you are a bad person for only caring about you and your own." Pragmatically speaking, that is not going to win votes. The argument should be "you care about you and your own, so here is why what the Republicans are doing is bad for you and your own."

The Democrats used to be the party of everyone. Healthcare, corporate greed and exploitation, pollution, trade... these are all issues that ultimately affect everyone in some fashion. Saying "the Republicans only really care about the upper 1%" is a strong argument because (a) there's a lot of truth to it and (b) it puts Democrats on the side of the 99%. Democrats have moved away from that message (I'll leave the "why" as a thought exercise for you, dear reader). Now, Democrats complain about the selfishness of a different 99% while saying that we should all be focusing on the issues of the 1% they claim suffer the most... even if you think that's true, pragmatically speaking, how does that win you votes?

Posts like yours feel good but get us nowhere. Why the Republicans are bad for the average person becomes more evident every day but the Democrats continue to fail to capitalize on this. This insanity isn't going to end until the Democrats come back down to earth and stop complaining that basic human nature isn't good enough. We all need to work within the constraints we are given. If you want to help the fringes, you need to help everyone; that ALSO helps the fringes, and when everyone is in a relatively better position, they're often more willing to talk about fringe issues.

Presumably because it's free and can be viewed from home. I don't understand what you aren't understanding.

My coworker has been going absolutely insane trying to figure out why one of our printers has been doing this. He's going to be pretty pissed off when he realizes it was all due to a Windows Update.

This is one of those questions where I feel like if you need to ask, the answer is just "no" because you lack the finesse needed for a more complex answer.

People who are very emotionally invested into political issues frequently believe their issue is of such utmost importance that everyone should be thinking about it all the time (and thinking it about it in a way they approve of). Maybe that's even true for issues like climate change, considering the potential consequences... but the reality is that approaching it that way ignores human psychology. If you are constantly preaching to people about something all the time and invading their hobbies with your preaching, they're going to tune you out or become hostile. That's just how people work. If you are trying to actually reach people and motivate them, to win them over to your side, you need nuance, finesse, subtlety. Repeatedly bashing them over the head with your beliefs is just not going to be effective. And the people who might be inclined to ask the question "Should Climate Change Be Acknowledged In Movies" generally do not strike me as the kind of people capable of the finesse required to effectively convey their message without making a nuisance of themselves to the people they are trying to reach.

So the short answer to the question is simply "no." But if that's insufficient and you really feel strongly about the topic, then at the very least tell a story where climate change is the focus, don't try to wedge it into something unrelated. Like with Unix, entertainment media and art benefit from "doing one thing and doing it well." Focus is important; by losing focus, you dilute what you are trying to achieve. Trying to account for everything doesn't leave sufficient room to effectively address anything. So, if climate change is what matters most to you, put your heart into making something compelling that illustrates how you feel about it, so that you can craft a really compelling narrative about that topic and how you see it. And just maybe, if you do a really good job, people might begin to understand why you see things that way.

I pay for an individual subscription to ChatGPT. I use it several times a week and it has saved me a large amount of work at least once. I could probably micromanage my subscription if I wanted to save some money but I'm comfortable with keeping it active considering I do find it useful. If they raised the price substantially or enshittified it, I'd probably look toward doing that.

As I see it, there are three separate issues here.

First, does the First Amendment or any other law guarantee free speech rights against private entities? As it stands now, my understanding is there is no such guarantee. The legislature may change that or the courts may decide to drastically reinterpret the First Amendment, but barring that, this will probably remain the state of affairs going into the future.

Second, should there be such a guarantee? I think this is a more interesting question. I don't think the people who came up with the First Amendment had "a vast amount of public discourse will take place on corporate-moderated spaces" on their 1776 bingo card. I think there are valid arguments as to why maybe such spaces, when sufficiently large, might be best regulated as utilities or some other similar classification (I'm not a legal scholar) wherein people do have guarantees of free speech. I think it's important that people be able to speak their notion of truth even if it's unpopular or uncomfortable so that such ideas can be argued and iterated on and we can collectively come to a better understanding of the world. And I think when so much discourse is locked up on these platforms, maybe there's an argument for regulating them that way. I'll admit it's not something I've fully explored, but it certainly holds some appeal to me.

Third, should we trust the intent of the Republican Party in this situation? My answer to that is FUCK no. As others have very rightly pointed out, the Trumpsphere has very frequently demonstrated that they are only interested in their ability to say what they want, not anyone else's. Leftist thought gets banned very frequently on conservative platforms and spaces. While this isn't a problem unique to the GOP, it is a problem that they very obviously do have. I'd love to have someone actually championing free speech rights online, I just don't buy that it's the GOP. I'll continue to maintain my skepticism until I see reason to believe otherwise.

Presumably you do not want the country to vote for someone like Trump based on the content of your post. So, let me ask: do you think sentiments like yours advance that goal? What exactly are you hoping to accomplish by throwing insult soup at Republicans on a website where most commenters skew left anyway?

For the record, I voted for Harris. I'm one of the only people in my extended friend and family group that did. Do I think 95% of my family and friends are "fascist traitors to their country?" No, and even if I did, saying so wouldn't serve any useful purpose besides antagonizing them. Like it or not, you live in a country where essentially half of the voting public supports Trump. You can either insult and antagonize them and accomplish no useful purpose while shit (often literally) burn down around you, safe in your cloak of "at least I was on the right side," or you can try to find common ground as individuals who share the same space and many of the same problems.

Part of living in a democratic society is occasionally being on the losing side and being ruled over by people who, at the very least, you do not believe to have your best interests at heart. Part of being an adult is learning to get past your differences with people you disagree with and getting useful work done anyway. If you want to improve the situation of the country, then have discussions, make friends, find common ground, and break down walls. Trump voters aren't martians, it's inevitable you will have SOME common ground with them. So focus on what you CAN fix and while you're doing so, be patient and discuss the problems they don't see so that they may have sufficient context to come to a more sane conclusion next time. The difficult work of politics isn't being on the "right side," it's the slow work of building relationships and illuminating other people to your point of view so that something better can be built up over time.

I specifically mentioned mid to late 2000s as a start point; that's when Steam first started taking off and allowing you to register keys to your account. This is a good timeframe for comparison because in the mid to late 2000s, you could (and would need to for Nintendo WFC) create an account with Nintendo. Game key registration with Nintendo was also a thing back then; it's how I got my GCN Zelda Collector's edition, I registered a bunch of GCN games online and they sent me it as a promotional thing. So they had accounts and game key registration at this point in time like Steam.

So the problem I have is, if I made a purchase (sometimes as recently as the Wii U era in the mid 2010s) for which they have a record, why am I being asked to re-purchase that game? I can still play games I bought nearly 20 years ago on Steam.

But yes, the situation with games older than ~18-20 years is a bit more iffy and it'd probably be harder to create a system to recognize those purchases.

My first Steam game was Counter-Strike: Source, which I believe my parents purchased back in 2006 or 2007 and I registered on Steam around that time. I can still download and play that game today through Steam. Meanwhile, I have dozens and dozens of physical Nintendo games from my childhood that I can only play on original hardware. Nintendo's policy has been to make you re-buy those games through Virtual Console or, more recently, pay a subscription to access them on Nintendo Switch Online (NSO). I do not believe they have ever produced a console that supported more than one generation of backwards-compatibility with titles you already purchased. I have no interest in buying anything Nintendo for any other reason than to hack it until they have some form of buy once, available always that they can guarantee going forward more than just one generation.

Massive shout-outs to the console hackers, homebrew developers, and emulation developers for making it trivial to route around Nintendo's anti-consumer strategies, htough. My hacked 3DS is one of my all-time favorite gaming machines, I want to go on a little side journey to explain why. I can play 3DS games with discontinued network services online via Pretendo (other projects exist to revive other dead services like Miiverse). There are a couple revival projects for Nintendo WFC that enable original DS online play and thanks to the efforts of TwilightMenu++ I can play both digital dumps of DS titles as well as DSiware. The 3DS even has built-in firmware for playing GBA games that Nintendo only minimally made use of for their Ambassador program (basically, if you purchased the 3DS before the price drop, you could pick from a small selection of GBA titles to play on your 3DS); the community has made this much more broadly usable via programs like open_agb_firm and NSUI. Universal-Updater serves as both a library of homebrew and a convenient way to update it, with tons of emulators available, some neat community-developed games and utilities, and even source ports of games (like Diablo 1 via devilution-x).

It's crazy just how much use I've gotten out of a system that I barely used at all until the community cracked it open. Meanwhile, when I watch the video on the Switch 2, the only thing that comes to mind is "what does that asterisk next to backwards compatibility mean?" If I can play games I bought nearly 20 years ago on Steam, why can't I do the same on a Nintendo platform? Why would I want to pay more for a worse experience?

I don't think the immigrants themselves are the cause of the problem. People in general are just trying to get by in their own way. The core problem is that immigration is allowed to happen in an uncontrolled manner. There are often inadequate resources and planning to help them assimilate into the local culture. By "assimilate," I do not mean completely give up their own culture and take up the local culture, but rather a gradual mixing of the two. You have communities of immigrants in the US that feel isolated and simply try to recreate their home in the US; that's obviously going to bring them into conflict with the locals because they may have vastly different ideas around ethics, fairness, rights, etc.

Nobody is twirling their mustache here. People are just trying to get by -- both the locals and the immigrants. The fundamental problem is inadequate planning that isolates both sides and leads to distrust and hostility. Speaking to US political parties, on this issue (and not necessarily any others), I don't think either has it right. Many Democrats seem to be overly dismissive of the very real problems locals face in these sorts of crises; the racism they point to is, in my opinion, a result of the hostility between the two groups, not typically its cause. And as for the Republicans, I think they're overly eager to lay the blame squarely on immigrants being inherently bad, which is ridiculous; they're just people like you and me, trying to make it through the day.

uBlock Origin's main developer says you are wrong. Here, in his words, is a list of functionality that cannot be ported to Manifest v3 due to inherent limitations in it. These limitations are why uBlock Origin Lite exists and why it is named the way it is.

The situation with Halo is not salvageable. The root of the rot was 343, which was openly hostile toward Bungie, its employees, and its way of making games. You can find many examples but the one I remember that came out somewhat recently was that a Bungie dev who did substantial work on Halo applied at 343 and was told to wait outside for several hours before someone finally came out and told him "sorry, we don't hire Bungie people."

It's a classic case of the "new guys" thinking they're better than the legends even though they've never in their life made anything that even remotely measured up to what the legends did (this is becoming increasingly common in gaming and seemingly elsewhere too). There's no respect for the original work or what went into making it great, they're just a bunch of self-absorbed pricks who spit on the legacy of the greats. Renaming the studio and moving it to UE5 isn't going to fix the root of the rot.