If you practice good operational security and maintain a decent anti virus and fire wall you will probably be fine. I know people who still run Windows 7 to this day with no trouble because they are vigilant of what they are doing.
This isn't to say it's a good idea but that it can be done.
If you plan on running win 10 anyway Ask Leo has a video called "how to keep using windows 10 safely after support ends" with some solid advice
Thats always the worst part of linux for me. Everyone is always so hostile, I have to say though I have had a little success finding help on lemmy but not much.
I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.
It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.
Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.
Definitely there has been a shift towards video content.
But I think there is a discoverability dynamic at play as well. Finding a blog post that isn’t garbage can be harder than finding a decent video on any given topic. This is clearly a feedback loop towards video but I think partly this is because up until now you couldn’t just create a spam video channel with the same ease that you could a spam blog.
Not just social media, at work you're lucky if anyone reads the docs, and blessed if you find someone writing docs. To say nothing about how the substitute for those is looping zoom meetings.
How so? People like to learn in various ways, some people like to read, other people like to inspect someone else doing it in real time.
I don't see an issue with there being multiple ways to learn how to do something, whether it be textual, images or video.
For this type of thing having a video running in the background while I punch in the commands makes sense, I can perform the actions at the same time the video does.
Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?
Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.
Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.
I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate
Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing". I'm not claiming that there can't possibly be a reason that videos might work better for some people, but I don't think you've made a particularly strong case that you understand their mindset rather than judging them under the guise of claiming that I was the one doing that.
> Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing".
Not an argument. It's an explanation. Stop with the antagonism.
No, you're old man yells at clouds with the entire comment. Someone likes something you don't prefer, and want to share that with the internet. That's great, but you have to know that someone will call you out on it.
Some people like blue, some people like red. Some people like audiobooks, some prefer reading actual books. Some people like to go to movie theaters, some prefer to wait for the movie to watch at home. Some people like cilantro.
The internet is a big place. There's room for multiple ways of skinning the cat without preventing any of the other ways.
I don't feel I was insulting at all. If you feel obstinate is an insulting word I really don't know how to respond as anything else will probably feel as an attack on you now. I guess I could have said non-empathetic, but we're not talking about feelings so much as valid reasons someone prefers A over B.
I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.
I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.
I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.
I've seen probably too many terminals, but a video that actually demonstrates things (when to press the keys, for how long, what's the expected response from the installer, and so on, and so on) seems super helpful and easy to follow! (Even if it's worse in many regards, like terseness, accessibility for blind people, and so on.)
Agreed. Also people tend to add a lot of context when they're talking through a process. That often gets left out when writing.
I've written docs at work intended for non (or less) technical people and it's a pain in the ass to try and get screenshots of expected inputs/outputs, try to predict every question or misunderstanding and make the writing clear. There has been more than a few times I wished I could just record a video.
Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.
Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.
I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.
Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.
So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude
Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)
I'm coming here from a follow up post. I would find it difficult to follow a YouTube version of these instructions, but I might resort to searching for it because it is much easier to find this kind of information on YouTube than through a search engine, whose results are hopelessly polluted by LLM spam that has the deficiencies of often being just subtley wrong enough as to void it's usefulness, misrepresenting chronology in a way that makes it difficult to identify the up-to-date methods, and answering questions that are popular and easy to answer over ones that are difficult or unsolved, while failing to identify the difficult problem or its sticking point.
As a beginner doing tech things I quite like youtube video. There are various problems with text. It'll say just type this into that but sometimes you don't know what to click to get 'that' to open. Then you find the instructions don't work because they've either skipped over something they think is obvious, or the software version has changed since they wrote it or their setup is different from yours.
At least with a recent video you can see what they click, it's probably up to date and you see all the stuff they do and you can see if it actually works.
I was trying to install jupyter notebook a few months ago and all the how tos failed because macos had updated some nonsense. At least with youtube you can try to find a recent one where they mention that.
TextSniper on Mac and PowerToys OCR on Windows have eased my frustration with rasterized text in 'engagement'-obssessed videos that should have been blog posts.
Its not as helpful, but youtube will give far better discoverability. Facebook isn't mostly the right audience, and everyone else is fractured up among many other social media companies. Not even reddit is a great place anymore for this sort of thing because so many older users and tech enthusiasts have abandoned it.
My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.
But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).
you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.
text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.
the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed
it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.
Suggesting someone can make money off of their efforts that doesn't cost the viewer/reader anything directly is one thing, but to suggest nobody anywhere ever posts anything to the internet without the expectation of monetizing it is just totally ignoring how the internet was started.
no one is talking about the entire internet starting from 1976, we're talking about the tech tips space in 2025 where a vanishingly small percentage of people are acting in a non-monetizable way.
Maybe we can get somebody willing to do a "in a weekend" project scraping websites to just to make that content available on a free website. of course, nobody could afford the hosting fees once all of the bots start scraping your site that you built by scraping other sites.
I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.
I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.
If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.
> I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here
It is because "modern" search engines will retrieve only links to SEO spam. The only thing that, somehow, works (50% of the time) is youtube search.
Take it down before Windows is ruined for everyone! Show not the devil's commands! All hail our Lord and Savior, constant surveillance without consent!
People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux. But they don't similarly complain about these ultra obscure, ugly commands. When Microsoft necessitates commands, somehow it's different.
Do people complain about that? Like, life long windows/mac users who aren't interested in linux I guess? I always thought people loved being able to do everything from the command line.
You didn't have to use to do this to your OS when Windows was still good.
It's only the absolute shitfest that Win 10/11 ended up being that you have to conjure 300 arcane powershell commands just to get the OS to resemble a productive environment.
> People complain about how they hate to use the command line in Linux
They do? How else does one use Linux if not via CLI? You mean those kiddies that like GNOME/KDE? pfffft, they're not "using" Linux. They're just using Linux to run other apps no different than using a ChromeBook
You're not supposed to do this, this is to get around a restriction on installing Windows 11 on certain hardware. If your computer is supported and you install it the way Microsoft wants you to, then you won't be typing any commands anywhere.
Generally curious, I don't see anything about hardware. Isn't this is about making a login that doesn't require you to login to MS's cloud. Also, what HW restriction does Microsoft want? Why do they care?
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, that's the actual reason a massive number of PCs can't update to it. There's apparently some way you can hack around that and install it. I assumed that's what these videos were about. But from the reddit post it looks like it's talking about both that and the account login issue which I wasn't familiar with.
> including how to install Windows 11 without logging into a Microsoft account and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
That's not really the use-case for this. It's not possible anymore to use Windows with a local account (for a long time), the official UI only lets you login with a Microsoft Account. These commands are not used to install Windows on an unsupported PC, they're being used to create a local-only account.
I for one still got a Windows boot partition next to my Linux, but I refuse to create an account for it. The only way I can install Windows on my supported PC with a local account is by using these commands.
You used to be able to just press a small button. Then you had to disconnect the LAN cable and not connect a WLAN to create a local account. Then you had to open the Commandline and execute a single command. Now we're at the point where you have to execute multiple commands.
If they actually manage to make it impossible to use Windows local-only, that will truly be the nail in the coffin for me. Currently use Windows to play games which aren't supported on Linux, but this will turn into a hate_for_online_forcing > appreciation_for_kernel_level_anticheat_shitgames.
To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff. I can see why google would be concerned about malicious versions of these videos being posted, and being difficult to differentiate quickly from ones with the legitimate instructions.
Or if those malicious videos were posted and reported, then I can see why a fairly dumb AI system would see the similar legitimate ones as the same thing. Probably a particularly bad scenario for automated moderation.
So you'd advocate for github to remove any install script that users wget + curl, and any documentation references that instruct users to wget + curl? That's much worse than a handful of limited commands in which you're modifying your own user account.
I'm guessing that they take down videos that give you instructions that install malicious scripts etc, if they're reported. I don't know for sure, but that seems likely to be against their rules. And I'd guess that most of those would target Windows. Obviously they're not responsible for it, but I'm guessing they don't allow it and would remove it if it's reported.
>To play devil's advocate, I'm guessing if you can get users to type stuff they don't understand into cmd and regedit then you can do some pretty damaging stuff
Are you just playing devils advocate or do you actually believe this?
I believe you can convince people to hit Alt+F4 for the cheat menu in a video game and they will do it. Actually I think I told people that is how to votekick someone in BF1942 when they are being a dick (me). I believe you can tell people to delete system32 and they will do it. I believe you can tell people to do more damaging things and they will. I still think people should be able to say and do those things.
In the early 2000s a newbie to our forums got computer advice to do something nasty to their BIOS. Months later they came back incandescent with anger. It happens.
I had a friend that would allow her kids to watch YT videos. One day they were watching a video in my backseat as we were driving where I could hear the audio. The person was trying to tell the kids how to get free stuff for some game or other. The instructions provided had my jaw in my lap. This was years ago so I don't remember the exact details, but it was straight up instructions for installing malware.
The point is that it wasn't just possible, they flat out were giving malicious instructions. Not sure why there's resistance when we all know there's shit like this on YT. I'm not asking anyone to remove it or ban it or report it. I'm just retelling the story of the first time I heard something so blatant that my jaw dropped on this not being some random story from the internet. It was just shocking the first time I experienced it. There's nothing to be done other than try to inform others it happens, especially when it's someone/a parent that doesn't know what it means.
I found an Italian website that offers this and other procedures. To automate the modification, it suggests pressing SHIFT+F10 and then using the built-in Windows curl command to download a simple cmd script:
https://www.ilsoftware.it/focus/windows-11-con-account-local...
The cmd file can be run with the no-oobe username option, allowing you to choose the name of the local user account to be created. I hope this is helpful.
Those sort of thing always make me nervous however because it's not easy for the average user to tell if its running any sort of malicious scripts in the process. This one seems to be safe and I'm going to give it a try to see what happens.
still works as well which would be even better because thats local and easier to verify its integrity. that being said I think these are both valid suggestions if they work and I'm going to give them a try.
Yes, before running anything, you need to analyze the source. Still, I trust it: it works well, and as the Italian website indicates, you just need to check the linked .cmd file via the URL shortening to see exactly what it does. This should be done before downloading it with curl and before executing it as a .cmd file.
The no-oobe solution also has the advantage of allowing the bypass of the entire OOBE phase.
I have a microsoft account. I made it for Windows Live to play Halo 2 for Windows Vista back in the day.
Except, then Microsoft adjusted their account infrastructure, and now it's also an Xbox Live account. Then it became also a Windows Messenger account. Then it was required to login to Visual Studio. Then it ate my perfectly working Mojang account. Now I need it to install stuff from the Windows store like the damn Windows debugger you use to analyze BSOD dump files
I do not want my computer preferences saved across machines. I want to set up each computer separately. I do not want cortana. I do not want to connect my local computer to my account.
I gain nothing by using my microsoft account to log in to my local computer.
The singular goal is that I just want to use my damn computer, to do local computer things.
Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)
Download .iso of LTSC version of Win. Make bootable install disk via Rufus and tick options to create local account during install. Install Win from created bootable device. Done.
Or use Rufus to create the install media, it will ask you what mods you want applied, after installing run win11 debloater, it will ask you what mods you want to apply. Then if you’re a sane person that just doesn’t want to learn to navigate your OS with every update, install openshell.
This is ridiculous! I'm still on Windows 10 Pro without a Microsoft Account. Back then I had to jump some hoops, but it wasn't that bad. Seems like they really doubled down with Windows 11.
defaultUser0 is used by windows for the OOBE if you don't delete it along with the registry keys it will just boot back to the OOBE again. defaultUser0 gets removed by the OOBE after setup leaving your system vulnerable. The administrator account is a built in account that is disabled by default but won't be disabled if you completely bypass the OOBE or don't use the old local account setup which you no longer can do because of microsofts removal of the feature.
A few typos were brought to my attention in my previous comment and as the time frame to edit it has passed I am replying with the required edits so that if anyone does want to attempt this they don't have to wonder what went wrong
I originally had “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” but there should have been no space before "net" and I should have put a space before the "/" after prefferedusername.
so the corrected instructions are below. (hopefully without typos this time)
at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10
CMD will open
Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.
Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /active:yes” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.
Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Next type "regedit" and press enter.
This opens registry editor, navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"
Delete "DefaultAccountAction", "DefaultAccountSAMName", and "DefaultAccountSID"
Right click on "LaunchUserOOBE" and rename it to "SkipMachineOOBE" and make sure the value is set to "1".
Yeah it's really hard, my 2025 Toyota Sienna is always connected. You can't just pull a fuse or rip out an antenna, I have to take the entire dashboard apart to reach the Data Communication Module (DCM) module. If anyone's curious what that looks like, it's a little bit easier on the Toyota Tacoma, here are some pictures of the process:
https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...
It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!
- there must be a physical mechanism providing connectivity to cellular networks
- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)
Manufacturers can certainly increase the difficulty to remove the offending hardware, but given these two axioms is can’t be determined to be impossible.
"- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)"
In 2025, this is true. At some point in the future, I predict this will be false. Maddening.
It's the We Must See You Online Or We Don't Owe You The Service You've Paid For Principle. Sure it starts with software (e.g. Adobe) and content (e.g. Spotify) but I can see it extending to home appliances and vehicles. Because they can.
Word to justify this principle will be used and the words will sound positive and good and consumers will nod their heads and shrug. "For Your Protection." "Safety." "Authentication." "Copyright Protection." i.e. assumed guilty offline until proven innocent online
Not if those components eventually get included as part of other core chips you can't remove. At some point, you'll have to completely redesign your cars electronics system to do so.
Think again. Imagine a scheme where the car won't start (or only operates in limp mode) if it has not been able to connect to the network (and therefore backhaul surveillance logs) in say 30 or 90 days. And this kind of scheme actually seems likely to arise from standard corporate incentives like wanting to make sure critical safety recalls actually get fixed.
Google is nothing but blinded by greed at this point, they are so shortsightedly chasing a dollar that they can't seem to recognize this behavior is exactly what is losing the money. They are inconveniencing paying customers to combat pirates who don't care and will only double down on their efforts and incidentally expose all of this for the brain dead blunder that it is.
Radio shack is at least indirectly responsible for me disassembling ( and sometimes successfully reassembling) most of the electronics in the house growing up. The tools and DIY gear they carried enabled me to learn and build electronics.
I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
Same! I took apart so many electronics when I was a kid. In retrospect, I really have to appreciate my parents putting up with this. Fortunately, I didn't permanently destroy anything... most of the time. Radio Shack was paradise for me in terms of being able to fix stuff and also build my own electronics. I built an AM radio transmitter from scratch using Radio Shack parts. That made my 11 year old self feel like I had discovered fire.
What happened to Radio Shack is pretty sad. I get that the business simply wasn't going to sustain at that scale as consumer tech evolved, but RS caused their own decline way sooner than it should have happened. Becoming a high pressure cellphone retailer was a stupid idea, and I remember their selection not even being that good to begin with. And, like Kramer from Seinfeld said, Radio Shack really wanted your phone number for purchasing something as simple as batteries. Today, phone numbers are asked for all the time when purchasing something like groceries, but I remember Radio Shack being overly aggressive in getting your phone number. Meanwhile, their electronics component inventory kept dwindling.
At least with Fry's Electronics, they still had a lot of components on the shelf right until the very end, as ridiculously overpriced as they were, whereas Radio Shack seemed to dismiss its core audience.
Silicon Valley's convenience store when JDR Microdevices, Graybar, and such weren't open... such a tiny addressable market that vanished to zero and failed to keep up with the advent of the internet. Other regional shops in other regions like B & H Photo at least figured out how to sell to a national audience and keep parity with their brick & mortar to complement each other (MicroCenter and Central Computer Systems also managed to survive). Fry's carried overpriced oddball inventory and failed to focus as Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy grew while even CompUSA (the long-time tech hypermart) died.
>I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.
That was a little after my time, but back in the 90s my second job after I got tired of being a dishwasher was at Radio Shack.
During the brief time I worked there if I sold a single Tandy Sensation! (had to say it with the exclamation mark) the profit on that sale would exceed, by a lot, every single component we sold the entire month, and as an awkward teen I sold a lot of Tandy Sensation!s per month.
At my store, when I worked there, electronics parts took up about a quarter of the square footage of the store but was practically none of our revenue.
The only people buying electronics parts were church AV guys trying to fix a worn out 1/4" jack or blown capacitor in an amplifier.
Can't pay rent on those guys.
As an outsider I watched the parts shelves go from most of the back of the store to a single set of drawers to nothing and I can't say I blame Radio Shack. A lot of time was spent inventorying a mindboggling array of components, none of which sold in volumes great enough to justify the expense or the space.
The ability to have those parts was lost without the access and distribution enabled by widespread internet.
I would walk to to my local radio shack at least once a week for different parts for a few years as my friend and I were constantly modding our consoles, breaking our computers, and making little gadgets.
I’d love a place I could walk into now and get a breadboard kit or a potentiometer, and it’s just not there.
Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though
They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.
I remember some buzz around carrying Arduino not long before they went out of business. They drifted away from the DIY scene into cellphone kiosk territory. Maybe if they shuttered a bunch of stores and leaned into the new era of DIY (Arduino, 3D printing, drone parts) they might have survived.
Yeah ours had an Arduino branded section for a year or two at the end. Some starter kits, proto boards, a few relays and servos, that kind of thing. Not enough to pay the rent obv but fine for jumpstarting hackers.
Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.
Tough too to get by on small parts for minor repairs when things break rarely and then aren't worth fixing. Time was grocery stores had little tube tester kiosks, you know. That said, Batteries Plus seems to have a business.
My recollection is that they got out of the computer business after a very serious embezzlement case left them kind of broke around 1990, and that was the beginning of the long tailspin, but I can't find a reference to the exact story.
I was told I managed to disassemble most clocks and electronics in my parent's and grandparents' homes before kindergarten age. I don't even remember most of it.
As much as I love giving the middle finger to a company as awful as HP, people need to stop supporting garbage companies like this and then this wouldn't be necessary.
Business laser printers emit more particulates than consumer models into the air that aren't good for your health. Even their website displays that warning.
So keep it in a dry garage, just away from living spaces.
As an infrequent printer (a few pages every few months), their ink subscription plan (Instant Ink) is awesome for us. For $1/mo you get 10 pages (color included), and overages are 10 cents/pg.
So basically for $12 a year we can have a home printer but never have to worry about cartridges. They just show up in the mail when we need more, and the used ones can be recycled in the included mailer.
> For $1/mo you get 10 pages (color included), and overages are 10 cents/pg.
The math works out when I think about it but for some reason I’m still floored by the fact that $12 only gets you 10 pages of paper for an entire year.
If I have to wait for a cartridge to show up in the mail, why wouldn't I just go to FedEx and do my printing there?
My Brother B&W laser printers never die and a $30 cartridge ($60 if you buy OEM) lasts a minimum of 2600 and will never dry out. I replace the cartridge once every few years and if I need color then driving over to FedEx etc. is much faster than waiting for something to come in the mail to replace an ink cartridge that will inevitably dry up if you're not using it every day.
Color is the biggie. Color lasers are expensive, around $300 or so last I checked? If we printed more, I'd definitely get one, but we don't (and likely never will). At our usage, buying a new color laser would take a few decades to pay itself back vs this subscription.
PS you don't have to wait for new cartridges. It's all connected, so they will automatically mail you a new cartridge as soon as the printer senses it's low-ish, long before it's totally dry.
Their customer service bot is generous too. I lost a cartridge during a move, told it I was running low and it automatically shipped me a couple new ones, no questions asked.
I don't really know how HP manages to make any money on this, but it's incredibly convenient. Probably they hope you'll end up moving to a higher subscription tier, but that makes no sense because if we printed more, we'd just get a laser. Shrug. I'll enjoy it while it lasts though!
In India, 90% of the inkjet printers use refillable ink tanks. The ink is way cheaper than in the US, there are no ink cartridges, print quality is the same, and the printers are roughly the same cost too (in USD).
Americans are dumb for accepting locked inkjet cartridges.
>In India, 90% of the inkjet printers use refillable ink tanks. The ink is way cheaper than in the US, there are no ink cartridges, print quality is the same, and the printers are roughly the same cost too (in USD).
No they don't.
Indian market sells same printer as they sell in US.
Difference is, indians refill those cartridges, reset chips, or use fake cartridges.
There are only few printers in market which can be filled for real.
Indian cartridges are cheap only because labor in india is cheap. If US had same labor prices.
But quality is just not same. I lived in both US and India.
Being exploited doesn't come from being dumb. If anything, the way I see it, it's no coincidence if people just happen to be kept ignorant in a way that's beneficial to the systems that are also exploiting them.
We do have some printers here that are designed for this use case for what it's worth. Dunno if they are any good. Personally, I have had a Brother color laser for years.
"Dumb" is an insult to someone's intelligence, as if the problem is them. Ignorant is a bit closer.
But that's not actually my point to be honest, my point is that the problem is not the people who are getting screwed over. It's the people screwing them over.
Everyone being pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs due to macroeconomic and political forces, generally. Possibly by a population wide event like a pandemic too, of course. And/or religious influence.
Yeah. Either buy their printers and throw them away when the sample ink runs out (because, while you are correct about HP, you are also a terrible person that hates the earth), or just buy from a different brand.
Having said that, we have an old Samsung laser printer, and the Samsung printer business was bought by HP since we got it. Recently, HP started shorting me on toner in the replacement cartridges (they cartridges go streaky with 25%+ “toner remaining”).
Switching to third-party ones that bypasses HP’s authenticity checks was clearly the right move (they’re higher quality, cheaper, and also, screw hp).
By the way, there is an excellent film called Rebel Ridge now on Netflix where the basic premise is about small town police abusing the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
If that comforts you (I know it doesn't) Swiss police can take any money claiming it touched cocaine so it was maaayyyybe used in trafficking. Stats say about 90% of banknotes qualify so it's a sure shot for them. Even if you're cleared of the accusations, they will STILL keep your money.
It's been recommending that movie to me, and it looks excellent, but I know if I watch it it's gonna end up with me throwing the TV out the window out of rage.
I know it's just a figure of speech, but I'd also like to add a reminder if someone needs to see it: channeling that same rage into investing time and effort into making a change is the very reason why such an enraging show is made and why it should be watched. Just raging into the wind is pointless, specially after choosing not to invest anything into making a change
If this were the case, would someone not have challenged it in court by now? If the dogs and their handlers were challenged in a controlled trial and shown to be biased, that would make for a useful test case.
"Handlers were falsely told that two conditions contained a paper marking scent location (human influence). Two conditions contained decoy scents (food/toy) to encourage dog interest in a false location (dog influence). Conditions were (1) control; (2) paper marker; (3) decoy scent; and (4) paper marker at decoy scent. No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; any alerting response was incorrect. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used with search condition as the independent variable and number of alerts as the dependent variable. Additional nonparametric tests compared human and dog influence. There were 225 incorrect responses, with no differences in mean responses across conditions"
"To test this, we influenced handler beliefs and evaluated subsequent handler/dog team performance according to handler-identified alerts. The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance."
The FBI spent 4 decades grossly lying about their ability to analyze hair. Think about that. The charade actually went on so long that some people would have lived their entire adult life, their entire career lying their asses off. It was later found that at least 90% of cases contained errors.
During this time someone could have similarly proved that it wasn't so because were it so surely someone could have challenged it.
An alternative explanation is that forensic science or indeed any sort of science as practiced by law enforcement has always been a joke and the bar to do something about it is always very very high.
The cost of challenging anything is often prohibitively expensive both in terms of legal costs and in risk of drawing a sentence several times worse than a plea and any case which might result in police losing a valuable tool can be mooted by simply dropping that particular case after that high bar is met.
Remember also that the prosecution and the judge aren't scientists but ARE colleagues. Perceptively evidence from dogs are brought only when they actually find something so even if they don't provably always "work" in the scientific sense they perceptively help them nail bad guys. The idea that the judge would be liable to remove that useful tool because it didn't pass scientific muster is both optimistic and naive.
Police science is a parallel world of non-science. Over and over, fake science like hair id, bite mark analysis, fire, shaken baby, excited delirium, and others are debunked. But the courts have been terribly uninterested in hearing science contradict police-science.
To be clear: courts have their own way of deciding disputes, and that process has distinct differences from the scientific model. E.g. stare decisis is actively hostile to new evidence; appeals may not reference new evidence; police practices are given deference as experts in their own magisterium, and may not be held to normal scientific practice; and others.
To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler. Then they would claim he doesn't know how to handle the dog properly, or doesn't have the required "soul bond" with the animal. Can't win against crooks.
> To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler.
Not necessarily if the experiment is double blind. (Or tripple blind I guess because it is the dog, the handler and the on-site experimenter who are not aware of where the samples are hidden.)
I hadn't heard of this before, but here are some sources. Note this quote from [2], U.S. Customs and Border Protection:
"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."
I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
> I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
Yes, dogs give you a convenient excuse to produce 'probable cause' in order to authorise a search whenever you feel like it, because the signs the dogs give are interpreted by their handlers.
Cannot find the story now but there was situation where they sentenced woman for drug possession ONLY because dog indicated so, but they found no drugs on her or in her car.
Do you happen to remember if she was sentenced because she was convicted by a jury? I have very little faith in the U.S. justice system so I guess that wouldn’t surprise me, but it feels likelier that they used the K9 “evidence” to coerce her into accepting a plea bargain (which, to be clear, is also bad).
During a three-week period, fishermen fooled the Nazis and police dogs who
searched their ships – lacing handkerchiefs with a mixture of rabbit blood and
cocaine, in order to fool the dogs.
That kind of seems like the mixture of rabbit blood and cocaine overwhelms other scents?
The government has always been a violent gang that steals people's labor and property by force, and says that's okay because they wrote on some pieces of paper that they are allowed to do that.
But when I point that out I'm the delusional extremist.
For what it's worth, I agree with you.
After all, none of us living in "democracies" were ever given a chance to vote about the legitimacy of the constitution, of the law codes, of the armed thugs, of the state itself...
I don't know that a system with no government or voluntarily funded common services and functions would be "better" than what we have, but civil forfeiture is not fundamentally different than taxation, from the perspective that OP viewed it. The government decides that is a legal way to raise revenue and they carry it out under threat of force.
You can disagree with civil forfeiture while agreeing with taxation, but not with general complaints about a state sanctioned violent gang stealing from the populace.
I'm certainly no fan of civil forfeiture but I eould argue that it's fundamentally different from taxation.
Taxes are impersonal. The rules apply to "everyone" [1]. They are written up, voted on (by congress) and so on.
Civil forfeiture is a random event made by a random cop on a targeted individual. It is the very definition of unfair.
Equally you can define taxation as "stealing" hut it's really not. (CF is stealing in my book). It was different in the past, but today taxation is used to pay for things - it doesn't just go to the bank account of a person.
-some- govt and govt services are necessary for society to function. (A quick look at places without govt demonstrate that.) And yes, one can argue about the priority of one service over another. But fundamentally govt serves the society and taxes is just the way that gets paid for.
The scale, priorities, spending of govt is obviously up for debate, but funding it is necessary, and so I don't consider taxes to be theft.
Incidentally, if you feel that all govt is bad and we should exist without one I recommend trying to live in a place where the govt is non-functioning. Thats when you discover where all that spending goes and what it achieves.
[1] for some definition of "everyone" - the system has flaws.
This isn't to say it's a good idea but that it can be done.
If you plan on running win 10 anyway Ask Leo has a video called "how to keep using windows 10 safely after support ends" with some solid advice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpAIOcYPYgo&list=TLPQMjkxMDI...