"Meanwhile even questioning if the earth is flat will have you downmodded to (-1) Troll."

What you might as well have said.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

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.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

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.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

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.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

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.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

They really humiliated all the traditional supercar brands out there.

Uh, what?

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.