monotremata

Good news on the latter front, actually: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-expands-investments-in-the-u-s-to-usd165-billion-with-new-fabs-and-r-and-d-center-a-closer-look

Yeah, I had the same thing with the photos of diseased bodies and the disparaging of contraception. I remember in particular that the textbook chapter on abstinence was immediately followed by the chapter on parenthood, which felt like it left a pretty conspicuous gap.

Amusingly there were two very different Health Class experiences to be had at my school. You were assigned one at random, you couldn't choose which teacher you got. One was a first-year math teacher and member of an unsuccessful local Christian rock band. He's who I had. The other possibility was a lesbian gym teacher, whose class was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a LOT more useful.

But yeah, the 90's kinda sucked, and I hate that the US is trundling back towards that kind of "education."

I guess I sort of agree? It's a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.

E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I'm actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it'll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it's fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don't have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don't think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I'd burned previously. But that fixed it, and it's been fine since.

So, yeah, it's got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That's also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn't seem all that different in general.

But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it's really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn't have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren't willing to upgrade to 11 because they're afraid too many things will have changed, and I'm thinking I'll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I'll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.

Unless you switch to IoT LTSC, which will continue to get security updates until 2032. It's kinda bullshit that they're still making the security patches and then just refusing to give them to consumer 10 users.

As far as I can tell, this is a user who reviews games that use Denuvo, and always reviews them as Not Recommended, but will change that review to "Informational" and the review text to "Denuvo removed" when the game removes Denuvo. There may be other circumstances when they'll change it, though, so if you're thinking of actually buying one of these games, it seems wise to click on the game's "Not Recommended" or "Informational" and then scroll down on the store page until it shows you the relevant review. It should be highlighted on the page, though you have to scroll a ways down to see it. There is also a box just after the controller support info that lists 3rd party DRM a game uses, which should be there if the games uses Denuvo.

Perlmutter was laid off from the Copyright Office after publishing a report on the contentions between artificial intelligence and fair use.

Oh, of course it's ultimately about trying to do an end-run around Congress in order to enable the AI grift. Everything is always in service of one of the grifters providing Trump with a slush fund.

I'm so tired of all this.

That's not the C&H I expected to see in this thread.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/cyanideandhappiness/images/9/90/The_Genie_of_the_Lamp_-_Gallery.png

A little random, but your comment reminded me of a poem I encountered in college. It's by Liu Cheng, and in Burton Watson's translation it's called "Poem Without a Category." https://ccl.northwestern.edu/curriculum/poetry/cp.cgi?C/Cheng/PoemWithoutACategory

It's directed by Terry Gilliam, and it's brilliant. It's set in a bureaucratic totalitarian state, and follows a minor functionary who is slowly losing his mind. There are multiple overlapping plots, involving a rebel heating engineer, a man mistakenly abducted and tortured to death by the government after a computer glitch, the functionary's politically ambitious mother, a quack plastic surgeon, a beautiful truck driver, terrorist attacks, and the functionary's ever-growing escapist fantasy life. It's one of my favorite films. Right up there with Delicatessen in terms of dystopian comedy sci-fi.

My high school did this. They hauled me and my friends in front of one of the deans because we'd been playing chess in the lunch room, and they said that if they let us play chess, they'd have to let the other students play dominos, and when they play dominos, they gamble, and when they gamble, fights break out, and there weren't enough security guards to handle that. So no chess. We pointed out that we were the school chess team, but they were unmoved on the topic.

It was really dumb.

We talked a bit about the possibility of having a couple of our better players play mental chess, that is, no board or pieces to look at, and just yell moves back and forth across the lunch room while the rest of us loudly gambled on the outcome, but we never actually did it.

You left out the most important reason: getting people to come kiss Trump's ass to ask for exemptions. Nothing is more important than getting Trump the sycophancy he has to settle for in lieu of respect.

Thanks, that does help.