“Fighting solves everything” - These guys are really out there thinking they can punch the genie of social progress back into the bottle. If this were a parody people would say it’s too ridiculous to be true.

Talk about a terrible way to go. For everyone involved. That’s a lot of people that’ll need trauma counseling for sure.

I’m absolutely worried this will get taken advantage of in the US’ hellscape that is their healthcare system, but that doesn’t mean the concept is without merit.

It’s like arguing that cars should not be available for purchase because someone might use one irresponsibly, while forgetting their utility outside of abuse.

In a healthcare system that optimizes outcome instead of profit, having the option to allow someone to choose to end their suffering should not be considered a bad thing.

I can’t understand why so many people are against someone dying with dignity. This is a form of harm reduction for not just the patient, but also their loved ones, and society in general.

Nobody wants to see their loved ones suffer endlessly or needlessly, and this is also a whole lot less traumatic than people committing suicide. Nobody wants the last memory of their loved ones to be the scene of their (potentially messy) suicide.

And that’s not to mention the trauma inflicted on bystanders for some of the more public suicide methods (not to mention that jumping to your death or intentionally walking into/driving into traffic has a decent chance of physically injuring or killing said bystanders).

If this process is undertaken with care and compassion, it’s far less likely to be traumatizing to all involved. And it prevents “spur of the moment” decisions, like many successful suicides are.

No, I’d say my biggest issue is with the US becoming an unreliable ally just because the conservative party wants to score some stupid political points. See my original comment.

Read the above. I’m having issues with them winning at all, given the implications for the future security of Europe.

And what, pray tell, is the alternative here? A surrender to Russia is tantamount a full on capitalisation of the west and a defacto encouragement for Putin to keep pushing aggressive expansionist agendas. Ukraine will have an ongoing border dispute that can turn violent at any time with an adversary that’s been emboldened by a proven lack of support by Ukraine’s allies.

There is no winner in war, but this would be about as close to winning as Russia could possibly get.

I get your point about the balkanization of US politics, but frankly it’s called for in this particular instance (as well as the Jan 6 coup attempt I am referring to) as it’s quite literally the conservative party’s representatives blocking the effort to give aid to Ukraine in congress. No ifs, buts, or both sides-isms about that.

And once again the conservatives are showing that they are truly America’s enemy at home. Not just through fomenting domestic terrorism and a coup, but also by throwing whatever remains of the US’ reputation and reliability for it’s allies under the fucking bus.

They have so much blood on their hands by this point I wonder if they simply enjoy being the villains of this story.

You’re not wrong, but as privacy conscious consumers we have more ways to force Microsoft and other tech giants to bend the knee than just disengaging with their product and leaving less savvy users to fend for themselves. One such example is legislative action, take a look at how the EU has been wielding their internal market to force companies into more pro-consumer practices. Another is class action lawsuits, there’s a long history of successful suits resulting in lasting change.

You might not agree with me on whether those options are the right path forward here, but I feel that we, as security and privacy conscious owners have a duty to speak up about these things for the majority that can’t or won’t due to their technical abilities.

Why does every mention or discussion of any annoyance in Windows immediately turn into a “install Linux” thread on here?

Sure, Linux might solve the immediate problem for the affected individual (and probably introduce a bunch of new ones as Linux isn’t always as easy to use as advocates try to convince people it is) but it doesn’t solve the larger issue - Microsoft needs to be held accountable for horrible design decisions and anti-consumerist practices.

Not everyone can, or will, switch to Linux. No matter how hard people champion that cause. And even if they do, it’s a process that will take time. In the immediate, lots of people stand to benefit from Microsoft not pulling this sort of bs, and it’s entirely justified to complain about it to make them walk back this decision.

My wife signed on for SFI after she moved, and found that the level and expectations were so low she had difficulty staying engaged with the classes and course material.

She looked into private tutoring and was fluent in Swedish in 4 months, and ended up teaching Swedish to highschool aged kids after just 2.5 years.

To this day she wonders if SFI wasn’t secretly designed to push anyone with any kind of ambition out of the system.

I personally think it’s a case of bigotry of low expectations, but it’s clear it really doesn’t work for the intended purpose.

Genious comment.

Morrowind memes in the wild. What a time to be alive!

Yeah, I’ll look into that. It’s just a shame to have to do extra work and spend extra money because a company decides to screw you over after your purchase.

Well, look who’s looking like an idiot for setting up my entire house with Hue lights recently after running two bulbs with local control for years… sigh it’s getting mighty frustrating having to deal with companies hoarding your data.

I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don’t have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.

Yes, but at the time Excel didn’t support concurrency either ;-)

Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that’s only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.

Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn’t, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that’s how they envisioned it to work.

Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.

Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)