That person truly did great things for Civilization.

I used to rollerblade everywhere as a kid in the 90s. It was awesome.

OEM licensing isn’t the important part. It’s everything that comes with it. Subscriptions, cloud storage, etc. In my city, a bunch of field workers are being moved from laptops to iPads and phones with the next hardware refresh due to the price jump in laptops. Microsoft won’t have integrated Onedrive and SharePoint and full Office Subscriptions for them.

We already use third-party web apps that aren’t Microsoft (and are mostly hosted by AWS) for a lot of their work, so the only Microsoft product they’ll have is an email address.

Us abandoning the Windows laptops costs Microsoft hundreds a year per employee.

It’s almost like incidents without video filmed from multiple people and widely shared online don’t get as much attention as nurses telling a story they were told about an incident we don’t have video of.

It’s really bad, but it’s also entirely understandable that it gets less attention.

Why should I care about someone’s equity? Houses are for shelter and privacy. Why do we treat them as investment vehicles?

My car doesn’t become more valuable as it ages. Neither does my computer, or my clothing, or anything else. If they want their home to become more valuable, they should invest in improvements to it, not just depend on all houses getting more expensive for everyone else forever. It’s a ludicrous, unsustainable idea.

3.2 trillion is a stupid amount of money, but it isn’t all liquid. A 440 billion dollar hit (nearly 14%) would be very, very bad for them.

With the memory and SSD fiasco going on right now, fewer people are buying new PCs, which impacts their sales. Combined with the Windows 11 fiasco, the massive gaming division investments going nowhere, and the AI bubble, they’re probably the most vulnerable they’ve been in decades.

Microsoft contracts with the Pinkertons for private security.

Yes - those Pinkersons.

NDAs to hide crimes are illegal and unenforceable.

They’re literally extortion.

I think a lot of them.have known they were wrong fo or a long, long time, but they’re too prideful to admit it. And I’m not entirely sure that’s their fault.

As a society, we don’t put enough value in recognizing people admitting when they’re wrong or that they’ve made a mistake. We don’t celebrate people who change their minds. We don’t recognize that admitting you don’t understand something is good and an early step in making correct decisions.

When people change positions, they’re riddiculed for being a flip-flopper or for being weak-willed.

And then we’re shocked when people entrench themselves into support of a political party they’ve voted for for decades even when they recognize that they’re wrong.

Have you listened to the lyrics of “Born in the USA?”

If they take the poll to heart it can still be a sucess. They can advertise that they listened to their users and changed course.

That’s the thing about really good marketing - it should not only drive users to use your service, but the reactions to that marketing can be used as market research to improve your product and future marketing in a manner that drives even more users to your product.

Europe is prepping to do it for us. They’re rolling out EU-based payment processors and switching to Open Source and EU-based tech. Right now, they’re too dependent on American companies, so they’re divesting from that dependence.

Once they move away from US tech dependency, they can start sanctioning the US and hurting Trump’s financial backers. 20 million bubbas with red hats won’t matter when a few billionaires start losing money.

I used to be a gun salesman at a huge destination store. I remember us selling hundreds of guns a day when Clinton was running for President. I’m also a leftist, which was very unusual for a gun salesman.

One time, we had a trans woman come in, and some of the other salesmen started snickering, but I went right up to her. We started talking about what she was looking for, and it turned out she was pretty knowledgeable, as she’d served in the Marines pre-transition. She was looking for a target pistol, and I found a used CZ-75 Shadow in the back and she was super happy with it. We were talking during the background check and checkout process, and she opened up that people had treated her like an outcast at the range and at her church, and I told her about a place I would shoot that was less-Republican, and I even talked to her about the university church I used to work for that had trans people on staff and hosted the annual transgender day of remembrance and told her that there were kind people out there.

Some of the other sales guys spent the whole time snickering, but I didn’t care. My managers were thrilled because I was selling to someone that everyone else was ignoring.

The next week she came in with a few trans friends. They were looking for me because they were interested in getting into shooting but didn’t want to feel judged. There were a few “Chilie’s got some more girlfriends” jokes, but I sold a few more guns.l to people who would end up getting more into the hobby.

Over time, more and more queer people would come in, but I wasn’t always there, or I’d be with another customer, so the other salespeople would end up having to help them, and it started to click that they were just people. Eventually, I got promoted away from the department, and I eventually left the store for a real career, but I got to watch the store become a kind of destination shop for queer folk looking for guns. And more remarkably, I saw some pretty hard-core right wing people open their minds a bit.

I’m not going to claim miracles, but the department probably went from 90% anti-trans to like 40%, which isn’t amazing, but is a huge improvement. I’m still a little proud that I was able to help start that trend, and I still have left-leaning friends ask me gun advice, or ask me to teach them and their kids about firearm safety even if they hate guns.

California’s gun-control culture started with a 1967 law (Mulford Act) designed to outlaw carrying loaded guns. It was specifically written to keep the Black Panthers from patroling their neighborhoods with loaded firearms.

It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.

Felony murder rule. If you take part in a felony and someone dies as an outcome, you can be charged with murder.

It’s how getaway drivers for gas station robberies get convicted of murder when things go south and their buddy shoots the clerk.

She seems like a crazy person that’s also a true believer.

She went to Washington wanting to expose, among other things, a secret child-sex abuse ring involving people at the highest levels of government and society. And lo and behold, there was one, but it was being protected by the people in her own party.

Yes, but blue (Mercator) preserves direction and shape, which were all that really mattered for navigation by sea, so Mercator was a fantastic projection for centuries.

And we still use it today for smaller scale areas, since it does a remarkably good job at preserving all 4 features (shape, area, distance, and direction) close to the map origin line. Universal Transverse Mercator is a system that has 60 zones of Mercator turned sideways.

The reason it’s Transverse is because, unlike lattitude depending on a defined equator, longitude has an arbitrary meridian, so by turning the map sideways we can move the distortion point, and any map area that doesn’t stray too far East or West will be very accurate.

Think of trying to map something like Chile or Florida, where the area of interest is pretty far North to South, but not East to West.

My GIS rig is different than any of those.

Vertical monitor on the left, ultrawide lifted a bit high on the right, and open laptop screen beneath the ultrawide.

Verticals for email, teams, etc. Big ultrawide is mostly for main GIS window and spreadsheets, and laptop screen is kinda general purpose.

I actually have a 4th monitor technically, but it’s a big TV on the wall of my office that’s usually turned off, but that I can use for presentations or screen-sharing when I’m meeting with people in my office.

That’s jury nullification. The sandwich guy is a perfect example.

By the letter of the law, he did commit assault. Nobody denies what he did, but the jury decided it was unreasonable.

This is exactly why juries exist. Jury nullification isn’t a loophole or a trick. It’s a built-in defense against unjust laws and corrupted executive and judicial officials.