As an administrator, powershell is an essential tool these days. There are tunables that Microsoft simply only exposes via powershell even in their cloud Microsoft 365 environments. Just last month I had to rely on Powershell to trim previous versions on SharePoint, and 2 weeks ago I had to use Powershell to adjust a parameter on Exchange.

But also being able to pop a Powershell session and quickly apply a registry fix or run a diagnostic command or even just install a piece of software without disrupting a user's work is absolutely brilliant (plus saves a call when I can just email back and say "I've pushed it remotely, reboot and it should be sorted now")

I have one friend who uses the R word and insists it's to reclaim the term, but they almost exclusively use it in a self-degrading manner. They seem to be the only one in their circle that uses the word, and they've had lively arguments over whether or not it's a word to reclaim. I've stayed out of it but when the only person I've encountered who says they're trying to reclaim a slur seems to be using it to degrade themselves, I question if it's worth even trying to reclaim. It's just a word, let it be entirely forgotten to the sands of time like "forsooth" and any other words I don't know because they've left virtually all people's lexicons

Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there's templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.

There's also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use

I used it briefly in a class around 2015ish. It worked about as well as any Adobe software does, but honestly it was really difficult to use and quite frankly it probably would take just as long to learn the HTML and CSS skills necessary to make a decent website as it would to learn how to make one in Dreamweaver

I feel like it still counts given it's the exact same plug just a slightly different size

I ran my crappy lawmower on crappy gas I filled up 2-3 years ago, and I've never done any maintenance on it. I can tell it's not happy but also I'm sure this $100 lawnmower is a lot simpler than any road vehicle made in the last 50 years

10 miles is about 1 hour's bike ride or 2-3 hours of walking. There's a reason rural America has a town every 20 miles or so, that's about half a day's travel by foot, or one can feasibly go to the next town, do something that takes a while and return back by horse or bike within a day

It was actually the 70s but pretty close

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)#Historical_development

That's of course the 1870s I mean

I love how this very specific topic is posted in an Autism community and not any of the tech communities and yet it's getting potentially better engagement than if it was posted to a Linux/IT community

But onto the subject at hand, I work at an MSP at the moment (and probably not for long due to management issues) and the one thing I've noticed is that the MSP industry is all about risk, and deploying something they've not deployed to customers before is a huge risk. They'd much rather work with "the devil you know" than take the risk on something they haven't worked with yet. Commercial vendors also have the benefit of being able to hawk stuff onto their support to free up your own techs to take more tickets (and therefore make more money) plus of course the extra cost to customers is either a non-issue or a plus due to more margin (because everything an MSP sells you is sold with a margin, usually ~20%)

I will say, this experience has further solidified my belief that paying for outsourced services will cost more than doing it in-house for most businesses. About the only way outsourcing makes sense is if you literally don't have enough work to hire one dedicated employee to do the thing.

Not long ago I managed the claims database (among other duties) for a large company that contracts with industrial facilities. Built a report for accident free days that also happened to have a count of employees and other metrics. I quickly realized that safety was clearly a matter of the facility and/or the people running the gig and not so much related to company policy or training. Seeing some facilities with an accident every few days and others that haven't had an accident since the turn of the century, and no obvious trends related to the number of employees it was interesting to say the least

The part that's wildest to me is that nowadays with all the ways services are trying extract more value from their users (ads, increasing rates, reducing library size, restricting access to features, etc ) plus the DRM, the media consumption experience of just having the media files is so much better than the experience one can have through most of the streaming services or even DVDs with all of the unstoppable prerolls

Whether you rip your own DVDs (legally murky) or you're just watching a bunch of public domain silent films, or pirating, it's really hard to beat just having the .mkv and opening it in your player of choice.

About the only way to compete with that is one decent service with good quality, no ads, an extremely wide collection and minimally invasive DRM

I'm guessing one piece but I don't know enough to know if that's correct

At least you didn't accidentally quote Hammerhead

"So you can all hide behind your desks now And you can cry teacher come help me Through you all, my aim is true"

Brilliant song and it's cool hearing Dexter perform unclean vocals but also it can be too easily interpreted as aggrandizing school shootings

I mean in a situation where you truly can do nothing, giving the masses something to do at least makes them feel slightly less powerless

Also duck and cover would have been effective for some of the earliest nuclear bombs, just not the ones developed a few years later

In college you're all adults who are there by choice to learn. But also many students are fresh out of highschool so it's a fine line colleges have to walk between respecting ones rights and keeping the student body in order (and not letting the bad decisions of individuals become the reputation of the institution)

Adults can make a decision about if a phone call is important or not, if they need to dip out early or not, etc.

But yeah it's kinda wild the hard shift in responsibility from being a minor to being an adult and ideally there'd be better transition for kids as they cross that threshold

When I was in school smartphones were kinda a thing but it was still early iPhone/Android days. The general practice was a powered off phone on one's person is fine, but phones that are in use/ringing could be confiscated for the remainder of the period. I think that was because the school didn't have a good method to handle too many confiscated phones in a day

Randall's done several about climate change, more back when climate change denial was more widespread

https://xkcd.com/1321/ Cold https://xkcd.com/1379/ 4.5 Degrees https://xkcd.com/1732/ Earth Temperature Timeline https://xkcd.com/2500/ Global Temperature Over My Lifetime

Or just check the tag for "politics" on explainXKCD. Randall's endorsed political candidates before as well as generally shown a general libertarian and later left-leaning bent

Oh also this one relatively recently was pretty fun

https://xkcd.com/2515/ Vaccine Research

My wife had a doctor literally walk out of the room when she mentioned in addition to the abdominal pain she was having post-c-section she also had had a period non stop for 3 months straight. Y'know because she mentioned her period

I did a one-shot once with a Bethesda start (locked in a prison with a bunch of stranger) pickpocketed the keys off the guard, got caught, convinced the guard to gift me the keys, then when the guard saw me giving the keys to another player I convinced the guard I was just passing on the kindness. I then snuck into the office of the warden (boss) stole some magical items (including an immovable rod). Later after the inevitable fight where the other players who actually had the stats to fight wasted a few guards, I did successfully convince a couple of guards to just go home for the day before I snuck out.

Later attempting to escape through the city, we're stopped by some guards who'd heard about the prison escape and see a rag-tag group covered in blood and in a hurry so they assume we're the escaped prisoners. I told them we were midwives leaving a very messy birth and heading to another emergency (advantage on that roll was all that caused it to land) then ultimately met up with the warden at the town gate who I simply trapped with my immovable rod

Like utterly evil but I will go to the ends of the earth to ensure a child has a teddy bear.

Shit that gives me a great campaign idea whenever I get to DM again. Starts out as a silly fetch quest, important protagonist wants you to go get his kid"s teddy bear that was left in the market, then it turns into an epic power struggle as you learn that multiple factions are fighting over ownership of this powerful talisman then after all is said and done it turns out to just be a teddy bear that multiple factions have faught wars over and in the end you bring it back to the kid