King Louis-Antoine lasted about 20 minutes.

They aren’t trying to drive people away, they just have learned there’s nothing they can do that will substantially scare people away. So time to pivot to trying to milk that captive userbase for all they are worth. People who are leaving are leaving for mobile class devices and they learned in Windows 8/Windows Phone 7 that they have no idea how to tap into that market segment anyway.

Yes, ‘enthusiasts’ are going Linux but they are a rounding error, hardly worth trying to capture compared to the revenue capture from the rest of the market. Particularly since the enthusiast market tends to be a bigger pain in terms of being picky users who complain and simultaneously unlikely to just say ‘yes I’d like that service you just popped up in the notifications for only $5/month’.

And Windows ME, though they made odd efforts to try to hide this shameful fact.

I think it’s a hard case to make that 7 wasn’t objectively better than XP.

Windows 10 did roll back some of the more egregious stuff from Windows 8, but still was sort of committed, sort of not. You had a platform with multiple personalities, multiple right click context menus, multiple ‘control panel’ with a new one being emphasized, but not actually completed, so it’s an awkward mix of the platform they had suceeded with and a platform they wished it could be (combined with telemetry). Forced microsoft accounts and using the desktop as a platform to promote products and services…

Yeah I think a fair argument can be made that WIndows 7 was the ultimate execution of the general vision that started with Windows NT, and what came after was something else that also happened to have bits of that original product hanging on.

I’m not too terribly excited by any Windows in particular, but I can recognize something categorically different they wanted to do starting with 8 that remains partially executed to this day, starts to emphasize Microsoft’s interests at the expense of the users, and a direction that no one really asked for.

The plain old basic hammer probably should have been Windows 2000, and then a big playskool plastic stuff slapped on for XP, but ultimately pretty much exactly the same.

can speak free for an hour

Well they couldn’t do that, they could only say stuff that wouldn’t upset Saudi Arabia.

Because it’s impossible to be good, in the words of Eleanor Shellstrop: “There’s this chicken sandwich that if you eat it, it means you hate gay people. And it’s delicious!”

Can’t speak to the ratings, but given the nature of things, I wouldn’t be surprised if ratings were a fairly secondary concern.

This was a PR nightmare, people who didn’t care one way or another about the show were outraged. People were cancelling Disney+ subscriptions that had nothing to do with the show.

The administration may have even pushed things back in place so they could come out with this backpedaling with some degree of ‘credibility’. They saw that the Colbert way worked without unacceptable blowback, but more direct threats and immediate action are the line that starts making things riskier. Besides, the late night hosts are relatively harmless outlets for those upset with the administration, bread and circuses and all. Sure they may boo the administration, but it doesn’t matter. They were booing all through the 2024 campaign season and it didn’t phase things at all.

So Kimmel is probably safe until at least the midterms are settled, no matter the ratings.

Of all the things one could find fault with Miller, porcelain dolls are not even on my list. A man who openly stated that he would have red states send their National Guards into uncooperative blue states without permission, and folks are talking about whether or not he has what sounds like an innocuous if not unusual hobby.

I could see someone being frustrated that from a third party, it looks like you are not responding to a reply and that person could spin that as a concession that they were right

I could see a compromise, where a direct reply from such a blocked/muted person is allowed, but indicated so that people are aware a response could not have been done.

Challenge any nation in the world to match our advances in deep frying technology. We invented ways of deep frying foods no one else could have ever imagined.

Also, it doesn’t specify what sorts of arms. It also specifies it being as part of a well regulated militia…

Yes, as a part of a well regulated militia. How many of these gunmen were party to a well regulated militiia?

sex-positive, consensual space for couples and moresomes."

Oh so discriminating against lesssomes

And a lot of people end up with a hematoma like that because something screwed up during their annual blood draw. Most of them are not dead two days later.

It means someone was poking around his blood vessels. Could be for serious reasons or routine.

Yeah, I had a mildly botched routine annual blood draw and it left a pretty significant hematoma for a while.

Yes it means he has probably had blood draw or IV through the hand for something, but impossible to say if there anything significant to it just because it left behind a hematoma.

I am good at technology even when I don’t do anything.

There’s a client who says that if I just join a call and do nothing but say hello, things that weren’t working just suddenly start working for no apparent reason.

Same here, funny carry a balance, but at least for a couple of weeks I owe my credit card company.

Simply because if I use my debit card, i get nothing. Use my credit card and I get 2 to 3 percent off…

Not even what it hears most, it is very biased towards reinforcing the prompt text.So it will very expressly try to be an echo chamber and say ‘yes’ to whatever opinion the input suggests if plausible.

If anything deliberate I’d imagine it to be some protest by an employee that wanted some symbolism to back his thoughts on the administration’s treatment of the Constitution.

As dumb as this administration is, I don’t think even they would think they could meaningfully erase sections of the Constitution just by “clerical error”