You are posting to a social media site which many of us started participating it when it started, when we were "children." Your bootlicking is pathetic.

I just did a clean install of 11 (all should work with 11 as well), did the shift+F10 command prompt on setup to create a local account only and used O&OShutUp10, WinHance before I ever connected the machine to the internet and disabled all telemetry and involuntary communication with M$'s servers. Those two pieces of software are really handy.

...and nothing of value was lost.

"What is the point of having a job, when you can not live from the wage?"

Sometimes it's to buy textbooks, or make extra money on the side, or to earn money during the summer so you can spend it during the rest of the year.

It's myopic to assume that all jobs are supposed to be full-time careers.

I just want to be clear about this: you believe the American middle class is smaller/worse-off than it was in the early 1900s?

Another person who needs to read Bastiat.

Do you think it would help the middle class to bring back the requirement for people to walk in front of cars waving a lantern?

You'll end up with the worst employee you've ever had. A narcissist who sounds completely compelling but is completely wrong, or just wrong enough that it sounds right, but the load calculation is off by a small factor, no one else catches it and the bridge fails under a certain condition, someone dies.

There's no intelligence when it's just mindlessly trying to slot the right word in the next position. I realize specialized AIs are starting to have some particular skills, but it still seems so untrustworthy that you still need intensive design reviews by senior engineers, assuming the AI engineer is an idiot and needs double checking at every turn.

"If I say "all white people should die"

That is 100% protected speech, full stop, and is absolutely your right to express in a free and open society.

"I've always been pro free speech, but"

You can always just stop posting after the 'but' because it means that you are not in fact pro-free speech.

It's also the duty of every country to warn their citizens against the spying activities of adversaries. You should both be spying AND protecting against the spying of others.

It's nice that they are making an official statement to drive the point home though.

LinkedIn is basically a platform for asset recruitment by foreign state intelligence services, job fraud scammers, and companies keeping job listings open that they're not actually hiring for to make them look better to investors.

Not sure if the windows version will have the same issue. But I have a bought and paid-for copy of office 2019. On a newer laptop I installed LibreOffice. My main worry is Word formatting errors or differences that LibreOffice can make that you don't know about until you open them in MS office. It becomes less of an issue as time goes on, as mostly these days I make Word Files that get turned into PDFs before anyone sees them.

I've had great luck not subscribing to any software as a service except Adobe Creative Cloud, which I use a lot. Would like to keep it to just that one and no others.

I can't understand the thought process behind them making everything public by default. Why on earth would anyone want personal financial transactions public?

That's the first setting I changed when I installed the app. I don't use it much, but some people prefer to be paid that way.

I just bought a used, reconditioned Surface Pro 7 for under $400 to have something small for international travel. It has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is more capacity than the base model of the Surface Pro 12, and it was released in 2021. If you don't need the very latest processor, there are a lot of good options on Amazon and Ebay for reconditioned units at budget prices. The only caveat is that the batteries are extremely difficult to replace, so they have a finite lifetime. They could be so much longer lasting if the battery could be accessed purely by miniature fasteners rather than having to un-glue the display and various other components with specialized tools, risking destruction of the unit at every step. Most people aren't going to try this. I believe it's possible to engineer for thin and light without compromising that much on repairability. I'm happy to live with a few extra ounces or an extra ten to thirty thousands of device thickness if it means I can swap the battery out.

A friend had a perfectly good, almost unused surface book 3 with dead batteries (it has two, one in the detachable screen / tablet and one in the base with the keyboard) and after looking up the replacement procedure I decided there was no way I was not going to fuck it up, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. We ended up sending it to the recycler and I kept the docking station and charger to use with my reconditioned Surface Pro. Planned obsolescence strikes again.

Other than the repairability issues, they are neat devices, well designed, and run full windows for those of us who need it. Probably the best hardware offering MS has ever churned out.

No one ever mentions that this is an option. The tech media just screams, "Your computer will be useless after they stop supporting Win10!" For a lot of people, sure, I wouldn't recommend using legacy OSs. For a small group of us, it's perfect. Once I got a substantial number of updates, I disabled automatic updates via the policy editor, before it started installing nags to upgrade to Win11 and trying to trick you into it. If it ain't broke...