I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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I use AirBNBs as locations to produce adult content. I'm not joking.

An AirBNB is perfect for my needs; it's a literal godsend. I want a clean home-like setting that is relatively generic and free from personal items, that also doesn't look like a hotel and can be unique for the amount of content being produced there. I believe this is a relatively common practice.

That being said, I bring my own bedding, towels, pillows, cleaning products and tools and I take my trash with me when I leave and dispose of it elsewhere. I am conscientious that I'm staying at another individual's property.

In one case, I found out the property owner was still home, in his basement, while I was working with performers upstairs. He wanted to know what we were doing and didn't actually have a problem with it, but talking with him informed what I should do going forward. Even if I wasn't responsible for messy human activities, I'd still choose to leave as little work as I can for service staff.

I realize that many AirBNBs are owned by property management services and in some cases even hotel groups, but what I'm paying for is exactly the thing I want: clean and not-a-hotel.

You know you don't have to install Adobe Reader, right?

FWIW, I had an interaction with the person responsible for PDFGear online somewhere and I've been using it since I found out about it. It's a free (gratis) PDF viewer and editor. Maybe the full, paid Acrobat product can do more things, but if so I haven't noticed.

The thing you are looking for is the Group Policy Editor. There are Group Policies that can disable the prompts to use Microsoft accounts and the ability to use OneDrive or Windows AI features, the hook Bing has in Windows Search (i.e. no more searching in the start menu and having it list web sites before the file or application you wanted) and all the "consumer experience" features in non-Enterprise Windows. There are a few GPO settings that get ignored unless you're on Windows Enterprise or Education. Most of them related to Microsoft Datamining.

It is also possible to transition a Microsoft account back to a local one without losing your Profile. This is done in Settings > Accounts > Your Info in Windows 11.

gpedit.msc is normally only available to non-Home Windows SKUs, but it is unlockable with a tiny bit of Powershell:

Get-ChildItem @(
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum",
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum"
) | ForEach-Object { dism.exe /online /norestart /add-package:"$_" }

Open an Administror-elevated Powershell or Terminal session, paste that in and even your $200 Acer vomit-grade notebook can work the way you want it again.

The reason we need GPOs for this stuff is that Microsoft's software updates will occasionally re-set registry changes. If the changes are made with GPOs, the settings get reapplied and overwrite changes no matter what state Windows is in. This is particularly annoying for stuff like OneDrive, CoPilot and Edge preferences. You either have to regularly re-run scripts to alter the registry to the state you like it and hope nothing makes a structural change to where those settings live, or you set a GPO.

I mean it's a cut and paste of three lines of powershell.

I wouldn't call the ins and outs of operating gpedit.msc trivial, but enabling on Windows Home is a couple clicks and maybe six key strokes.

I really do agree.
I maintain system images as part of my job, but it always made sense for me to extend that to individual devices since I am asked to help with them anyway. For me, this has been just adding a tweak here or there that grew over time. GPOs for Windows Home didn't become standard in my image management until Microsoft started inflicting Onedrive on everyone. Now I view it mandatory.

For what it's worth, I have a similarly long list of things I do when I configure a Linux system or MacOS. I definitely have to do the most arguing with MacOS since I hate some of the OS default software and Apple has a long history of breaking things that should be scriptable.

You can exclude them from installing through an autounattend.xml (see Schneegans.de for help building one) and prevent them from display via a GPO. You really want to use a group policy object because otherwise a Windows Update might put them back; it'll override a plain old registry change or user preference any time it wants but GPO changes persist.

It is trivial to restore Local Group Policy editing on Windows Home SKUs with a little powershell.

Get-ChildItem @(
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum",
        "C:\Windows\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum"
) | ForEach-Object { dism.exe /online /norestart /add-package:"$_" }

Some GPO settings are ignored outside the context of Windows Education or Enterprise SKUs, but most of those are related to user behavior data mining. I can verify that if you're just trying to supress OneDrive, Bing Search and Microsoft Account sign-ins, those are all maintained just fine even on Windows Home.

It's highly unlikely that anything you'd do in the course of normal desktop use would make much of a subjective difference from a SATA SSD to an NVMe drive. Most sustained IO operations don't take so long that you'll realize the difference. I can tell when I'm copying 30GB files from my camera card or doing full database dumps, but for just loading up a game or booting an OS? They're subjectively almost exactly the same experience.

That being said, there is such a thing as a cacheless drive. SSDs used to have a certain amount of DRAM or SLC NAND as a faster intermediary interface for storage. Low-cost drives might not have THAT, and that seriously reduces the utility of the SSD in the first place, especially on no-name drives. Those guys are sometimes no better than mechanical drives. Since your system is a refurb, it's possible they did just stick a POS drive in.

Audacity has been on a very long journey to modernize itself. It wouldn't shock me to learn that they shipped it with functions that are being most widely used or easiest to carry over just to get over the hurdle of getting a major release out the door. It's a beloved tool; I know a bunch of people for whom it's a production linchpin, and I think the developers working on are aware of the number of edge cases where only some tiny fraction of their users make use of a feature. Those people can stay on version 3 for now.

IIRC, a lot of what needed to happen with Audacity was an overall change in user interfaces, which required a lot of deep thought about how people interact with the application. It may be that some of the unhandled features just don't align with the current user experience.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

So you're saying that a US$212 replacement display that costs more than an entire Chromebook is going to be somehow better for these public schools over some period of time?

Right.

Do you think there's a world where Apple suddenly offers inexpensive replacement parts for anything? Sometimes the screens on Chromebooks are as low as $30. I'm sure they're third party panels, but they work and return the device to useful life. How likely is it that Apple offers screen replacements under $100, even to institutional buyers?