The car dealer isn't looking to get you into the right car for you, they're looking to get you into the right for them. And they're a business, you expect that. The traditional issue is that car salesmen have zero shame about using every social engineering trick in the book to pressure you into spending more than you care to.

An AI kiosk won't be able to do that to anywhere near the same degree - the dealer will save on commissions but lose on sales.

If you want to present yourself as a friendly social media platform so you can digitally rape 'suckers' and monetize their data, this may not be a legal issue of free speech, but it is a PR issue of free speech.

If it works, you're showing people your platform's ability and willingness to control the message. If it doesn't, you're showing your weakness.

It's been a bought rag for some time.

Hahahahaha.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Being an outlaw didn't work both ways - it's the law withdrawing its protection from you, not its wrath.

You have a choice - unfettered anonymity with free speech or proven identity with responsibility. We always try (to varying degrees) to have it both ways, but it is not possible. They are mutually exclusive.

If you don't have proof of identity, you get disinformation, propaganda, and fraud. If you do, you have the government and businesses putting you under a microscope.

There is no solution to this issue.

The OS is bloated with things you will likely never use, and the apps are ever-more frequently bloated themselves, running in inefficient Edge Webview processes.

If you want to have more than a couple of things running in Windows 11 and want to be sure it'll run smoothly, you're wise to target 32 GB now with a 512 GB SSD. If you know what you're doing and are willing to spend a lot of time ripping out the unnecessary parts you can get it to run with 4 GB of RAM, but even at today's elevated memory pricing it's not worth the effort.

I'd be terrified from the moment I was selected all the way until I was back on Earth, but I think I'd have trouble refusing the opportunity to be the on-site tech for a mission like this.

Give me a handful of space-rated USB flash drives with my favorite reference materials and utilities, a diaper and a barf bag, and I'm there. Maybe a large bottle of gravol and some stimulants to counteract the drowsiness. ...And I would never talk about the diaper or barf bag.

Classic has the same bugs it always did, New is OWA in a browser app window and is missing features a lot of people care about.

Either one can have a wide selection of connection and authentication issues that are more or less unforgiveable but nobody seems to care because MS is really the only one who has the entire kitchen sink in their product reasonably well integrated.

It's also the last thing I'd have sent on this mission. I guess with modern communications it's nice to have an email client on your spacecraft, but with the lag you're not using Teams and you're not going to be attending any meetings. Do you really need all the extra crap?

I'd rather have them running older, more robust hardware with more efficient and more stable code on them than anything Microsoft provides.

A dummy load and some chemistry to use oxygen would do the same job with zero human risk.

If they're not putting boots on the Moon, they shouldn't have their asses in the rocket.

I have to say I'm enjoying it for home use.

I added Talk, and now I don't need Microsoft or Zoom to make a video call. It's adding calendar support to MailInABox. I use the SMB connection ability to backdoor my way into my NGINX-hosted web pages for ease of editing.

More "information wants to be free".

Once code is published, anybody can learn from it and be inspired to create their own version of it. Trying to police that is impossible.