Oh it gets so much worse. The QNutz are out there claiming it'll activate the nano-virus for the vaxed and kill them all. And this is meant to kill all those smart appliances when the call goes out when the respond to the signal to self destruct. And it'll shut down power grids. And whatever else the EMP crowd was talking about last year as well.

I guess that's one way to look at it. You do you boo.

Testing. Communication with the teacher through the classlink portal. Assignments. Grading of said assignments on the teacher version. It replaces almost every text book which is a hell of a lot cheaper than paper, a wet dream for every school board. Research aid through internet searches. Text to speech for lower functioning kids. Speech to text for the ESL kids. Creation of slides to be included at the morning meetings the teacher does daily. Math games. Reading games. The list is pretty long.

Honestly, I always found Heretic and Hexen to be better games than DOOM. Especially that damn chicken weapon.

Here's the problem that you're not seeing. Administrations change over the course of a project this large (the money movers). Point of Contacts change (the policy driver). The fed handler will most likely not be same throughout the majority of the project and neither will the contractor (following the POCs changes). The scope of work will take years to capture. The technology will be obsolete by the time you deploy to production. If you're lucky, there will be a board of review that might actually have users on it vs just oversite members. It's a political mess that no appointee wants so just maintaining the status que will rule the day.

It's officially EOL, yes. However if you have enough money MS typically allows larger corps to continue to pay for break fixes on older product lines. A smart retailer wouldn't allow an OS that old talk to the wild wild internet, but would be on an intranet and firewalled to hell and back. The larger problem is finding a POS that will allow for XP support to work as time goes by. That's going to do more to force the hand of those that still use an OS that out of date.

Basically this. Last week, at a PetSmart, their GUI display didn't go full screen for the checkout guy. Turns out that PetSmart is still running XP. You will pry XP from some of these corps cold dead hands. Another example, the bowling alley we frequent only just upgraded their flooring/pin setters/screens/computers from it's 90's setup to what amounts to an iPad in a stand and new graphics in the last 2 years. If it ain't broke and doesn't have immediate ROI for the board, don't fix it.

I imagine stateside you'd need ASCAP. I asked the lady that owns our local bowling alley last week and she subscribes to a specific service that streams to alley's. It's not cheap. But it's cheaper than the per use fine you can end up with by far.

Shop smart. Shop... S-Mart! I need to ask, WWAD in this case (What Would Ash Do)?

Yep, pretty out there. I'm surrounded by farms and just enough trees and a bit of a depression that I also don't have any cell coverage. So 4G/5G is out without buying a really expensive booster as well. Really, the best descriptor for my location is "I'm 6 miles from anything" in terms of food/gas/schools. But I enjoy not having to deal with people. This whole remote school thing with 6 of us in the house has sucked but I'm hopeful that Starlink, or everyone actually going back to school next fall, will make it kinda moot anyway.

I have one choice. Dual bonded DSL over copper lines or a single DSL line over copper through the same place. And I'm grandfathered in at 20 Mbps down and a whole 1.74 up.. They don't even sell it anymore, this dual bonded service, and I hope my router never bites it. There's no fiber lines run to my street. And probably never will be. There's no coax lines run to my street. And there absolutely never will be. My only hope is starlink.

Unless they've ended the program they're currently fixing joycons for free right now. I dunno if that'll mitigate for the future but they've replaced 6 of my joycons from two different systems that have all ended up with drift over time. I got shipping label from them, off it went, and within two weeks they returned them back to me. It's annoying but would this negate the class action suit I wonder?

Not anarchism, think of it more as NIMBY. Basically it doesn't affect them, their voting demographic, ergo it's not a problem they should have to deal with. But it's more of subset of Republicans vs the party as a whole.

I discovered this in the late 90's early 2000's when I got a replacement warranty set of Oakley lenses from their call in number. They owned a shit ton of brands even back then. I've since noped out of buying "expensive" brand frames for anything and stick with Walmart brand crap that has a polarized lens. If I lose them, so what? If they get scratched? So what? I bop in to the nearest Walmart and pick up yet another $15-20 pair and replace them in a year or so.

I remember trying to get the Basic programs printed in Penny Power (and later renamed to Zillions) magazine to run on our IBM PC clone in various Basic versions (a, qw, etc). Holy shit was that frustrating. At least you can do copy and paste now. Though to really feel the pain of the past kids need to type all that in by hand!