You must not live in an area where dumbasses paying tons of money to ruin their cars with crackle “tunes” is popular yet, then.

There’s one asshat with a Mustang around here that he’s got deliberately set to backfire about twenty times every time he takes is foot off the gas, and he goes ripping up and down the main drag all night. I’ve timed him and you can quite literally hear him coming from about two miles away.

I’m a pretty live-and-let-live sort of bird, but damn, bro. Give it a rest after midnight, will you?

Do you like our owl?

It’s artificial?

Of course it is.

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X that “no one in Minnesota is above the law.”

That includes you and your goons, dumbass.

I employed the super secure expedient of never exporting my keys. I have no idea what they are, I never did, and I never will.

There’s really no irreplaceable data on my Windows machine. If I have to reformat it some day A) that’s no big deal, and B) it’s Windows, what else is new.

Using Rufus still works. I did it as recently as a couple of days ago.

If you sign in with a Microsoft account at all I don’t believe there’s the capability to opt out.

I only use local accounts. I have never had a Microsoft account. I never will.

They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”

Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.

Douglas Adams, apparently ever prescient, was on top of this long before the rest of us. This is from The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, which I will remind you was published in 1988 and in the foreword says it was typeset on a Macintosh II:

There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than Michelangelo rather liked them.

He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

“Dobby, I deed a fridge.” (At this point in the book, Dirk has recently been punched in the face and is talking funny due to a broken nose.)

“Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

Dirk found this highly unlikely.

“Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

“This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

“What would a microprothehtor be doing in a fridge, Dobby?”

“Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons I won’t trouble you with.”

“I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not home at preddent.”

“Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”

I’ll bet if you tried it the dealer would refuse to take it back.

I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that court case.

Wrong, time is obviously a cube. Everybody who isn’t educated-singularity-stupid knows it.

“Just printing money” to cover a government’s operational expenses is an express ticket to rampant hyperinflation that devalues said currency very quickly. Various cut-rate regimes all over the world have tried that tactic many times throughout history and it’s always wound up with the same result.

So needless to say, as insane as the current monetary policy in the US may or may not be, that’s certainly not how it works now.

“Look, kid. Let me tell you the secret of show business. Step one is to find someone with a great act. And step two, steal it!”

Hey, I like my 3D TV. Every once in a while I manage to find a pirated video that’s in 3D and it’s pretty neat. And unlike the current avalanche of generative/LLM bullshit, I can turn the 3D off, and when I do it works just fine as a perfectly ordinary TV, and in no way does it nag me incessantly to turn it back on.

All resistive electric heaters have the same efficiency, regardless of their shape, methodology, or what the manufacturer prints on the box. That efficiency is 100%, i.e. all of the electricity put into them gets turned into heat, one way or the other. The same amount of electricity (up to and including the locally specified legal maximum for a standalone appliance, which in the US is 1500 watts or roughly 12.5 amps) becomes the same amount of heat. It doesn’t matter if the manufacturer put “for large rooms” or “for small rooms” on the box, or what. 1500 watts is 1500 watts.

However in ideal conditions and specifically for the purposes of heating, a heat pump can achieve efficiency of over 100%. Which sounds impossible, but only until you realize that a heat pump’s method of operation is not to create heat but rather to move heat that’s already there from the outdoors to inside.

I use, “Enough of this, I’m going for a scuttle” all the time.