Free Republic

Your reply contained nothing but name calling and made no effort at all to refute the historical record. You are a tool of the deep state and your lefty allies. You are hoping for their continued destruction of our country. You should be ashamed of your ignorance and foolishness.

So, stop being so blind,and stop trying to rationalize Putin;s invasion. Only Putin would find your posts satisfying.

I have never written anything positive about Putin on this forum. However, the underhanded pattern of activity that took place which was orchestrated by western intelligence agencies along with George Soros and others over many years was intended to provoke the Russians into a confrontation. There are many here like you who blissfully ignore the root causes of what has taken place. It should be an embarrassment to repeatedly post ignorant nonsense and intentional mischaracterizations, but because you have been completely duped by unending and relentless propaganda... most of us with a different point of view refrain from name calling.

But a little self-reflection might be helpful to you. It should be a clue to you when you are on the same side of any issue as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez and the rest of our current cadre of DC swamp creatures. Do you also support black lives matter, and defunding the police? Do you support secretly flying millions of military aged illegal immigrant men directly from locations in hot spots throughout the world to strategically selected areas through the USA and putting them up in posh motels with taxpayer funds? Do you support letting men pretending to be women using the same bathrooms as little girls? Do you also support using lawfare with federal, state and local authorities to keep Donald Trump from taking back his rightful position as President of the United States?

President Trump has promised to quickly end the madness in Ukraine, and he will. His solution does not include sending unending $$$ hundreds of Billions of unaccounted taxpayer funds to Ukraine to further provoke the Russians into WWIII.

This situation is one of the largest swindles in history with the biggest victims being hapless Ukrainian men and boys who have been slaughtered by the millions not to defend their country but to provide a cash cow for corrupt politicians. But you just keep spouting out the same nonsense day after day. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez and the rest of our current cadre of DC swamp creatures thank you for your efforts.

Russia knows there is a big difference between the U.S. and Ukraine. Ukraine is a much smaller target, and right next to Russia.

The big problem with your point of view is that one has to ignore the history of how this situation was created that took us to this point. In other words, one has to suspend disbelief to buy into the Democrat/MSM narrative.

The Ukrainian people were duped into supporting the entertainer Zelensky and to a slightly lesser amount his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Zelensky ran largely on promises that he would keep the peace with Russia but instead immediately began adopting provocative policy and initiatives. Under his “leadership” the country went from the most corrupt country in the world to one of the most corrupt countries in history. Even George Soros bragged that he had more influence over Ukraine than any other country in the world.

Democrat and DC swamp leadership of course immediately began exploiting the corrupt government that Soros, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies had created. Was it any surprise that they used their Ukrainian puppet, Zelensky to try and impeach President Trump?

Ukraine became a cash cow and money laundering machine for DC Swamp politicians. Various means were used to transfer tax-payer dollars to political cronies in the US and Europe for nonsense “jobs” setup for their relatives to cryptocurrency schemes such as Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX cryptocurrency exchange. And let's not forget the bio-labs and other questionable endeavors set up in Ukraine.

I don't really need to delve further into the finer details here... even those such as yourself who cheer on our continued decent toward WWIII is well aware of this entire pile of feces. What causes a bunch of peaknik leftist idiots such as AOC and the squad to become unashamed war mongers? Piles of cash and deep state political influence... enough to keep them in power for the foreseeable future.

This war has nothing to do with stopping Russian aggression and everything to do with sleight of hand to further entrench the politically correct lefty cadre of idiots who have been running the show since President Trump was cheated out of office. The fact that you and others choose to ignore the obvious displays only your gullibility and how easy it is to influence those who celebrate war and chaos as long as a flag is waived in front of it.

They revolted against Communism and won... They can do the same against Putinism.

Except that Putin's popularity has increased since the beginning of this conflict. But you keep watching the MSM and dreaming of victory.

War is a two-way street in the Ukraine war

Yes, so why shouldn't Russia use their weapons to attack the United States or our allies? We have been manipulating the situation in Ukraine for many years and this "war" was the inevitable outcome.

100 million ballots this time for Biden

No, Biden is on fire! He has at least 200 million votes. He knows that he needs to win by at least 3 to 1 or people will not believe it. So unless President Trump gets 600 million votes... Biden has this one in the bag.

Just look at the enthusiasm Biden generated the last time around!

LGBTQ, woke, politically correct nonsense does not help sell anything and leaves such a bad taste in most people’s mouths that they will avoid any sponsor who advocates their crap.

I have never heard of Caitlin Clark previously, but she looks like a good example for others and has obvious value for sponsors. But never underestimate the stupidity of our leftist media!

A bit of brownie and cranberry juice helps me.

I just put it on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; you can hardly taste it that way. My wife didn't take any and recovered more quickly than I did. But she has a very good immune system, and she takes very good care of herself. She also worked as a nurse and was exposed to all sorts of illnesses for many years.

Absolute, nonsense!!! As a longtime pilot... there has been no changes in turbulence that I am aware of. This is crap that is not based on actual data.

I should have clarified that although your “hatred” of Microsoft sounds silly, many others feel the same way.

People who hate Microsoft fall into many categories. The most common are people who don’t know much about computers and have difficulties because even though they use them for simple tasks such as email, web browsing, and word processing they never bother to spend even a little time learning the basics.

Then you have people who are not really very computer savvy but somehow managed to get one of the flavors of Linux working on one or more of their computers. They often like to brag about how they hate Microsoft and use Linux instead. They feel that this makes them seem smarter and more sophisticated than the average computer user who makes do with the operating system that the manufacturer was given for free by Microsoft in exchange for installing a bunch of maddening bloatware.

Of course, we should never forget Apple users who in an effort to avoid frustration were willing to pay twice as much for a pretty little device with half the memory and processing power. And because their hardware and software choices are very limited, they usually have less trouble.

Then we get to people like you who know computers and know when the computer should be able to do something but cannot because of poor software design, etc... You have perfectly valid reasons for despising Microsoft who has inexplicably not fixed their products but managed to drive companies with better products out of business or bought them out and discontinued the superior product. I can think of dozens of examples. I don’t blame you a bit.

I can’t tell you how many boxes of software that I have saved with titles that no longer work on the latest 64bit versions of Windows. (I already mentioned in this thread that I was a computer software and hardware hoarder.) Fortunately, sometimes the superior products are still available through various legitimate channels.

Here is one of my favorite openings for the IT Crowd television show that is a funny parody of Facebook. But it also summarizes the concern management of most Big Tech companies have for their user's privacy fairly well.

https://youtu.be/hE0orX3TjvA

With Recall, however, you're getting deep, native integration into Windows, while Rewind is a third-party app you have to install and hand over system permissions.

I can never quite figure Satya Nadella out. He has made many disturbing statements over the years. They typically turn out to be nothing burgers. Is he the true leader of Microsoft or a figurehead that can be thrown under the bus to satisfy people when Microsoft gets caught with their fingers in the cookie jar? Why don't they use an underling to announce this type of nonsense.

Microsoft and all of the big tech entities want to have as much of your personal information as possible for marketing purposes. But there are obviously other more nefarious possibilities. Taking refuge by switching to Linux or switching to a different type of phone likely has little impact on this type of misbehavior in most cases.

Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, not to mention Google, Microsoft and many other corporate interests invest heavily in Linux. Almost everything going into the kernels these days is paid, sponsored, or commissioned. Most people like to imagine the work is being done by idealistic computer nerds working for nothing. This is mostly a myth at this point. How many people do you know who like to spend their days working for nothing to fix programming issues. I have never met someone like that, and I have been farting around with digital technology since I was in the 5th grade. When I started... learning how to use a soldering iron was a more important skill than actual programming.

Unlike Microsoft it is much harder to pin down who put in a backdoor when one is actually discovered. Is it a big problem? Probably not, but people have a false sense of security. People know very little about the true origins of most flavors of Linux these days. Reading through the posts on various threads here gives one a pretty good idea of how much people desire to assign blame to the easily identifiable boogie men and want to believe that there is a safe and viable alternative.

Yesterday, I started up a couple of the Ubuntu Studio installations that I hadn't started for a couple of months. They each took hundreds of updates for the operating system and apps installed... and I have not installed that much extra fluff. I have no idea what all those updates were actually for... I just let it do its thing. Windows typically does maybe half a dozen updates if you haven't started the machine in a while.

Microsoft simply doesn't care enough to make a decent product. I have hated that company for decades now, for good reason.

I always enjoy a good rant. So, thank you for that. Personally, it took me awhile to understand how excel eventually managed to beat out Lotus 123. I even helped teach a class on 123s programmable macro language, which in my opinion was more capable and easier to use than the early versions of Visual Basic. But of course, Excel was designed to integrate better with Windows... something which initially had little importance to me.

I set up menus using batch files to run the DOS programs that I used most frequently... Initially, I felt Windows was just a glorified menu system. I tried GEOS, Commodore's graphical interface system long before I ever saw a MAC. But it didn't make much of an impression on me despite the hype about graphical user interfaces.

A few years later after I purchased a scanner and the first edition of Photoshop that ran on Windows and needed a mouse along with Cakewalk and other music software along with Office apps and games that worked with Windows I saw the light. Despite all of the niceties associated with Windows it ran on top of DOS which sucked up processing power and memory.

I believe that your “hatred” of Microsoft sounds silly although your observation that inertia has a lot to do with their continued success has merit. Microsoft's products have served me well for years despite the more than occasional frustrations. If the open-source versions of Office type applications meet your needs just use them instead of Microsoft Office. I have them installed in my Linux installations and they work fine.

I IMMEDIATELY upgraded (yes, upgraded) to W10 LTSC. No Cortana or other bullshit, fewer ‘updates’, and in-support till 2028 or something like that.

That was likely a very good choice and one that most people are not aware of. I am not much of a fan of most of Windows 11s niceties that are meant for people who never have gotten around to learning the finer points. I don't find Windows 11 to be much of a hassle, but I certainly understand your perspective.

Thank you very much for contributing!

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/ltsc/overview

Sounds like you have a superiority complex to me. All Hail the great fireman15.

You would not feel that way if we met in person. I feel freer to share my life experiences here in this mostly anonymous setting and tend to send off whatever comes to my mind. You likely don't come across as an entitled whiny baby in person either. Microsoft is a faceless behemoth that has been the leader for many decades in the OS segment of the computer market. I am not sure of the mechanism, but some other entity will eventually replace them. Some form of Linux? Quite possibly. But Microsoft does not owe you a thing and the stability their dominance has provided has been mostly a good thing.

Superiority complex... it is sometime hard not to come across that way when conversing with someone who seems to have a very narrow focus. You have made some good points in this thread, and you obviously are a thoughtful person with past experience. I suspect that your expertise lies somewhere other than with the finer points of operating systems.

The really funny thing to me about Microsoft and the marketplace is that the inertia of MS-Windows dominance is almost the entirety of their profits. Every other part of the market, be it phones or tablets has crashed and burned spectacularly. If they didn't have MS-Windows to fall back on, they would be lost.

Your perception has a lot of validity, but there is much more that you may be unaware of. I met Steve Ballmer with his kids while he was CEO of Microsoft and Paul Allen used to come to a dance that my wife and I used to go to every year. They were both sociable and approachable but neither seemed like super geniuses. I also have known quite a few other people who worked for Microsoft in earlier days and made a lot of money... they obviously were smart people but one felt like their success had more to do with them being at the right place at the right time.

My great uncle started out with nothing in the 1920s but became a millionaire by the 1940s and 1950s back when that still meant something... he also was very bright but didn't seem super intelligent.

Timing, having some good ideas and knowing how to capitalize on them is how almost all of these big tech billionaires have come out on top. The true innovators usually are not the ones who have made fortunes.

Microsoft has come up with some good products other than Windows. I think you are forgetting that Office dominates that segment of the market as well, despite many good open-source products that are perfectly adequate for most people. They are also the quiet leader in the AI marketplace; they spent over $11 Billion developing ChatGP and $Billions more on GitHub Copilot and other AI projects.

Yes, Microsoft has had some market failures with phones and tablets... but they have their tentacles in so many other projects that most people just are not aware of like Azure and other cloud-based projects. And it goes on and on. They are a behemoth in many ways that fly under the radar.

All of the big tech giants have well publicized failures, because they all are hoping to use their unimaginable fortunes to dominate the next big thing. The problem is that none of them really have the United States or even the world's best interests in mind and they use their influence in ways that are bad for humanity. This is because power corrupts and those with power and influence always seem to let it go to their heads. The leadership at Microsoft is certainly no exception.

Or try Linux.

That actually is part of option 3 in the article. My preferred flavor is Ubuntu Studio which has a lot of content creation programs pre-installed. But I have to admit that I still prefer Windows for most of my computer time.

What are those mountain goats doing up here!

Many years ago my wife and I used to fly to Southern California frequently to ride the roller coasters. One time we ended up diverting a long way to the east to get around some nasty weather. We ended up over the Northern part of Utah before we were able to start making our way back.

We were flying VFR at a high altitude on a westerly heading, so we were at approximately 10,500 feet. We were getting jostled around pretty good because of the strong headwind, the mountain range obscured by clouds below us, and the two weather systems coming together. As we were looking at the clouds to the North, we could see something solid poking through at about our flight level. It was surprising how well the snow-covered terrain blended in with the clouds.

It was Lassen Peak which is 10,457 feet high. We were close enough that some of the turbulence we were hitting was actually from the “rotor” that forms behind a big peak in windy conditions.

Fortunately, about the same time we noticed Lassen Peak the clouds started clearing out and we were able to make a straight line for our fuel stop at Yolo County Airport. Yolo County Airport at that time had the largest skydiving operation in California, probably in the country. And it turned out that it was naked skydiving day so my wife and I saw some other interesting scenery that same day.

CFT, especially with helicopters, is the main cause of course.

There is a saying and it goes something like this... There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. It is not actually true because a lot of us have gotten away with stuff that should/could have killed us.

My wife and I live on a small airport. A few years ago, a very experienced friend of ours flew the airplane he was flying back from an airshow into the side of a steep hill in an area that he was very familiar with. This was someone who flew VFR (visual flight rules) in low visibility conditions many times, and it finally caught up with him.

We started out hang gliding, joined an ultralight airplane club which evolved into an experimental airplane club and finally a vintage airplane club. We knew this guy from when we were all into ultralight aircraft. The airplane he killed himself in was a high performance homebuilt experimental. He was the one flying, the guy who built it had less experience and was in the right seat. My wife and I had both flown with him previously and he took a lot of chances. We never flew with him after we got our own General Aviation aircraft.

As a Win7 fan I refused to upgrade to Win10. Somehow I was forced to use Win11, and I like it, with a few graphical tweaks.

I have to admit that I was in the same boat. I installed Never10 software on my Windows 7 computers to keep them from migrating to Windows 10 against my wishes. It was new hardware that came with Windows 10 that eventually convinced me to migrate most of my computers. I have still got a big tower running Windows XP with high end audio recording equipment installed in it that I fire up every once in a while.