If you take certain scheduled medications, like Adderall, your doctor or (more likely) your insurance provider can require a drug test before renewing the prescription.

That’s not entirely accurate. No self-respecting Alaskan would be caught dead associating with a Texan.

Remember kids, the only things bigger in Texas are their stupid hats.

Either Consent to Treatment by Blue October or Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

I still enjoy both albums, but Wish You Were Here has pretty much always been my favorite album. It is also, coincidentally, the album I was birthed to.

I would say the potential for misuse, while definitely present, is outweighed by the potential benefits.

A creep watching you from their basement is less likely to act on their dangerous impulses.

An overcrowded bar, poses a lot of risks in itself and the ability to determine how crowded the bar is without having to be physically present can mitigate your exposure to those risks.

In a crowded bar you have a higher risk of being drugged or assaulted because security and staff will likely be distracted or simply unable to notice and intervene. Also, in the event of an emergency that requires you to be able exit quickly, such as a fire or earthquake not only will it be much more difficult to leave it’s also more likely that people will panic and exasperate the problem.

Is a camera with a public live feed the best way to achieve that? No, probably not. But it’s simple, cheap, and gets the job done.

A bar is also a public venue. In a public place you have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, while in most circumstances it’s unreasonable to expect that you’re being recorded, it’s equally unreasonable to expect that you’re not.

I’m generally in favor of privacy, but a bar is public place. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Unless they’re putting cameras in the bathrooms, I don’t see how this is an issue. They likely already have security cameras that are recording, this just makes some of those publicly viewable. Other than an additional layer of convenience, how is this any different from walking into a bar, seeing it’s packed, and leaving.

The 2 live crew bowl cut.

I’m currently using this. It doesn’t appear to have a way to auto import a list of subscriptions. But it fits all of OPs other requests. It also has a jellyfin add on to import the videos into a library there with title and thumbnail.

If it’s been more than 30 or 60 days (can’t remember which) you will be unable to sign in if you don’t have an active internet connection. I found that out in 2022 when I had to travel for work (90 days in a fairly remote area) and the only internet connection I had was at the worksite on a company computer.

That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.

It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.

As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.

The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.

So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world’s largest vendor of malware on the planet?

No, because 75 is too old. I’d support an age limit of 65. I’d also support a minimum age of 25 for the House/Senate and 35 for the Supreme Court.

I’d also like to see term limits imposed on the house, senate, and Supreme Court. As well as a limit on the total amount of time a judge can serve as a judge in the federal court system.

The kids are alright - The Who

The kids aren’t alright - Fall Out Boy

It’s DNS. Always DNS.

I haven’t heard of Spose in a long time. “I’m Awesome” was a hilarious song back in the day. Presumably it still is.

I wouldn’t say I’m new to Ubisoft, more that they haven’t released a game I’ve been interested in playing since Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

As for day one patches being a necessity for games, I would argue that if a game has major game breaking bugs on final release (AKA launch day) then the game isn’t worth playing, much less spending money on.

If a game can’t even install on a system that meets its minimum requirements without needing a patch, then I’d say that’s a feature not a bug. Since it tells me that I should strongly reconsider purchasing anything from that publisher in the future.

Bit late to respond, but as someone else pointed out, physical PC games are virtually nonexistent. Even the collector’s edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 I recently bought came as a steam key and a disk with the steam client installer and a few files for the game to make Steam think the game is installed and force an update. I was pretty disappointed by that.

And no, most people don’t have a blu-ray drive or any kind of optical media reader in their PCs these days.

As for whether or not disks that large are printed on by publishers, most physical PS5 games are printed in disks of that capacity as are 4K blu-ray releases of movies.

As others pointed out, you’re missing Vista from your list. You’re also missing Windows 2000 for Workstations (between 98SE and ME) and 8.1 (between 8 and 10) both of which were pretty good releases.

I believe they call those “Elder Gods” or “Great Old Ones.” They are far from powerless.

Do you know how many times Microsoft has had a supply chain attack inject a critical vulnerability into Windows? Or how many times a malicious insider at Apple has added a backdoor to iOS?

Nope, and you cant possibly know because those systems are closed.

With open source software you have the ability to audit the code for vulnerabilities. We have the ability to reasonably state that that incident was an exception to the rule because its so easy to see the available code and major security incidents tend to become major news.