ANYTHING cloud-connected - your doorbell, your security system, even all f**king post-2006 vehicles, regardless of manufacturer - are suspect.

And are highly likely to be actually spying on you.

I’ve been working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the IT industry since 1997. The proportion of average people who don’t realize how much of their stuff is exposing them, and by how much, is frankly astounding. It’s almost 100% of normies who are woefully ignorant. Even IT people who have no clue is in the majority.

And the security on this stuff that tracks you tends to be - except in rare circumstances - absolute dogshite. Sometimes it comes without any security at all, such as all devices sold having admin creds baked in, or all remote-access credentials being identical and non-user-editable.

This is why almost all of my stuff is hardlined, I have no IoT devices at all, and the wifi for my family’s devices is physically separate from everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, as IT for almost three decades I love all the new shinies. But I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid.

Would love to know when the iOS app is coming out.

It has its original hard drive which still works

For reliability you should really switch to an IDE SSD.

Yes, they do exist. OWC sells them, albeit in laptop HDD size, so you will need an IDE adapter.

Conservatives hate Science. They hate facts and evidence.

This is just one more step in returning America to a ChristoFascist theocracy.

Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.

Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.

liberals trying to understand equality: “what do you mean we need to give only to the poor? it’s only equal if we give the same amount to the rich!”

That comes from a fatal and corrupted understanding of what equality is.

Equality represents equal opportunity:

• A young adult who is wealthy has the intergenerational resources to pay for university, pay for their own housing, pay for essentially everything without having to work a single job.
• A young adult who is poor and has no resources should, in order to apply true equality, be provided with said education, housing, food and other resources as deemed necessary to put them into the same level of opportunity as the wealthy one.

See how that equality of opportunity works? It’s not opening up a spot at that university for the poor, but ensuring that they have just as equal of an opportunity to apply, learn, and succeed as the wealthy. And without constantly worrying about things the wealthy - by virtue of their wealth - don’t have to worry about.

And honestly, this equality doesn’t end at application acceptance. It should really go all the way way back to birth, with the disadvantaged family getting UBI, psychological parent’s counselling, parental guidance, healthy school district funding, affordable housing, and a lot more. Because systemic inequality is generations in the making, anything applied to only the current generation is a band-aid approach to a broken leg problem.

But I digress.

you need only ask yourself for what reason men-only groups exclude women and for what reason women-only groups exclude men to understand why protecting and elevating women’s groups and dismantling misogynistic institutions are both valid

Yes, that’s called anti-male gender bigotry, and there is just no other way to spin that.

Why do men want men’s only gyms? Not to oppress women, that’s for sure. Because, to beg the question: WHAT WOMEN?? There are no women at that gym to be oppressed.

There are far more women’s only gyms than men’s only gyms - women should go there. That’s what those gyms are there for - to allow women a place to exercise without men.

And conversely, men want to go to a men’s only gym to get away from the distraction of women.

Seriously - stand in front of a men’s only gym, and interview the men going there. A significant number will cite a variation of this as their primary reason for switching.

They want the camaraderie of men in a place without distractions. They don’t want the gym thots doing thirst traps on Instagram. They don’t want to be interrupted in the middle of a set by some woman fondling their buttocks (I’ve actually seen this happen, with zero repercussion only because it was a guy who was the “victim”). They don’t want to deal with unjustified accusations of harassment and other assumed slights. They just want to work out in peace.

And if they cannot work out in peace, why should women?

As in, why call it “equality”, when it is most clearly nothing of the sort?

I think the entire equity debate is confusing many of the inputs for outputs - which they are not. They are inputs, and are therefore equality-based, not equity based.

Take, for example, the old meme:

This meme is actually entirely wrong.

In the above meme, the left panel is an example of inequality. because the opportunity provided - the ability to see the game - is unequally provided across the three spectators. There is no equality of opportunity here, no equal ability to see the game due to the differing heights of the viewers despite the addition of boxes for all three.

It is the right panel which is the ideal example of equality - the ability to see the game. Here all three spectators have anny individual deficiencies that they cannot control and cannot overcome without outside help - their heights - made irrelevant by the equalizing effect of the boxes. All three heads are brought to equal and sufficient height for them to achieve equal opportunities to view the game.

Equity doesn’t even factor in here, because the enjoyment of the game is impossible to force across all spectators. To force equal outcomes - equal enjoyment of the game - would be monstrously inhuman and downright evil.

The issue isn’t safe spaces. I mean, in the context you used, you are entirely correct - society in general is largely a safe space for white men.

The issue here is actually men’s-only spaces. And it is in that context that the anti-male bigotry comes boiling out of the societal woodwork under the weaponized mantra of “misogyny”.

As in, women can have all the women’s-only spaces they want or need, because to force them open to both genders is “misogyny”. And honestly, I am willing to let them have that olive branch.

However, they then turn around and demand that all men’s-only spaces be opened up to women, because to keep them men’s-only is also, somehow, “misogyny”.

Sorry, but that’s not how that works. That isn’t how any of that works.

The single most effective tool for determining if bigotry exists is to change the terms in contention, and see if things read identically to before, or oppositely to before.

If the two examples read wildly differently from each other, then congrats - you found a bigoted pattern.

So when you hear about men’s only gyms being cracked open for women to attend, consider how wildly different it would read if it was a women’s only gym being forced to admit men. That sure reads wildly differently, doesn’t it? That’s because there is deep bigotry in having the former being forced through while the latter is being defended against.

And honestly… if true equality in treating everyone with the exact same rules is “misogynistic”, why call it equality in the first place? Just call it for what it truly is: anti-male gender bigotry.

Downvoted you for this stunning example of cultivated ignorance:

I think their claim is nonsense, grossly exaggerated at best.

One only needs to look at the scouts of America to see this in play.

Boy Scouts were sued to open their ranks to girls. That suit won, forcing them to open their org to girls.

Girl Scouts were then sued for the flip example - to open their ranks to boys. The suit was almost immediately thrown out for “misogyny”.

After that “victory”, the then-head of the Girl Scouts admitted in private and off the record that she would rather destroy the org in its entirety - essentially razing it to the ground and permanently locking up the name “Girl Scouts” from being used by anyone else - before admitting a single boy.

Now, because they have both boys and girls, the Boy Scouts have tried to drop “boy” from the name, to be called only “Scouts”. This precipitated another lawsuit from the Girl Scouts in that dropping that part of the name will only accelerate their own membership decline.

You literally cannot make this sh*t up.

Men’s-only spaces across the country, like private gyms, are being attacked from all sides on the claim that their very existence is “misogynistic”, and yet service-identical women’s-only spaces in the same city are immune from those same “rules” under the claim that any attempt to apply those same rules to them is also “misogynistic”.

One of the best ways to uncover bigotry is to flip the term in contention and see if it reads any different after that from before. If it does, you’ve found a bigoted pattern in play.

True equality reads identically regardless of how the term in contention is flipped.

Edit:

I have zero issue with women’s only spaces. They are needed. But FFS you cannot eat your cake, and have it, too.

Real equality can only be achieved by applying the same rules equally. If women are to be allowed to have their own women’s-only spaces, men must also be allowed to have their own men’s-only spaces.

Hence the term, equality. Because if things aren’t equal, why even use that word? You might as well call it for what it truly is - anti-male gender bigotry.

Conservatism in general is a great evil, he is just one of its most visible practitioners.

Virtually all CEOs and a good 20% of America would fit into the same category of irredeemable evil.

“I have never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great relish.”

You stopped a bit short on your delete spree I guess.

No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:

• Win10Privacy
• Win11Debloat
• Winslop

I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.

And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).

If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.

I just rebuilt my Win 11 Pro Workstation setup (yes, it is the version for stupidly high core and thread counts), and one of the first things I did was to violently eviscerate anything AI in the system. Right after gleefully ripping out all the telemetry and spyware.

And this is why I would never own a vehicle made after 2006.

Dammit. I’ve had an LG plasma for the last 15, and it looks like I’ll have to get that Sony well before I’m ready for it.

The objective is not to win. Winning against America’s imperial might is impossible.

The objective is to make them bleed as much as possible. To make victory as phyrric and as painful for them as possible. And when going up against the most expensive war plane in human history, this means choosing the aircraft that can get as technologically close as possible with as many units as possible on a per-dollar-spent basis.

We can make them bleed much more with 420 fully-functional Gripens than we can with 88 partially-functional F-35s that can be remotely shut down against our will.

We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.

The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.

And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.

And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.

Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.

Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.

Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.

As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.

The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.

And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.

Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.

REPRESENT.

Even in Canada I grew up with non-American time, thanks to German parents, and knew of AM/PM only via analog clocks and use outside of the home. I remember confusing the heck out of an elementary school teacher by giving an afternoon/evening time in proper units. She had to do the math (calculators still being hella rare in those days) to convert out of PM in order to see if I was correct or not.