Not a replicant

It would certainly accelerate the development of language. How many new words will be invented, or existing words subverted, to serve clandestine communications and slip past the filters? Steganography, anyone?

Can I See Great Etchings Near Dubai Ending Roughly? <- That’s a bit weak, but you get the idea.

Fairytale of New York

Infosys is a mistake. It’s a poor choice for anyone.

And “National Lampoon”

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel…

We’ll see. I’ve set the Group policy to limit feature updates to Win 10 22H2. I will be unhappy if they over-ride or reset a GPO.

Lots of restaurants and cafes pouring their waste cooking oil down the sink instead of paying a collection service.

And in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and in the “The Great Escape”

Get Crazy (1983). Just a fun piece of silliness with a cameo from Lou Reed.

And Electric Larry

Pi-hole can block microsoft telemetry domains, just need to keep the blocklists up to date, and flush the Recall cache every day.

But you can feed a scrambled egg back to a chicken.

Last time I bought a Win 10 Pro DVD to install on a customer’s machine, it was AUD$195.00. And I still had to use powershell to de-provision some of the bullshit. Better than the Home version (AUD$165.00), at least I can use GPEDIT to disable some “features”.

Of course, a Windows licence on a pre-built Dell or HP would be a lot less.

“If you think this is expensive now, wait for 20 years” “Not a problem, I’ll be retired by then, it’ll be someone else’s problem”

I’ve got an Asus eeePC running WinXP. It’s air-gapped and the wi-fi is disabled in BIOS. All it does is play music, connected to dumb speakers. I update the music periodically via USB. Remarkably reliable and long-lived hardware.

Happened in 2022 to a 2017 MBP belonging to someone I knew. She went out and bought a new one, and put the old one in a drawer. She brought it to me in 2023, I investigated and found the shitshow - Apple saying “nuh-uh”, the ACCC (Australian consumer advocate) saying “you’d better”, then Apple quoting me $1100 because the ACCC never enforced it, and me getting it fixed locally for $550. It needed a new screen, not because the screen itself was faulty, but because the failing flex cable was integrated with the screen. Screw Apple.

Pretty much anything in the “Known Space” series by Larry Niven (et al - there are works by some other authors in that space).

Destination: Las Vegas

Ford car: “Visit Hard-on Henry’s for hookers and blow”

I’d say you didn’t actually remove the garbage. “Settings, apps, uninstall” doesn’t really get rid of it, the deployment package is still hanging around.

You need to use powershell to de-deploy those packages.

It’s a bit like the difference between “apt remove” and “apt purge”

There’s always the Microsoft telemetry blocklist in pihole. If you can’t stop the computer collecting the data, you can stop MS getting hold of it.

Do you tolerate the TPM/fTPM in your computer? Can you deactivate it? Can you query it? Can you tell it to do something?