I’m glad electric vehicles are progressing. I often wonder how things might have been had we never stopped the innovations here. Batteries and distance on a single charge might have been much better. We’d probably have found something better than lithium ions by now, far advanced. Our roads likely would be electrified and able to charge as we drive…

It’s nice to see more serious innovations in this sector now. One of those things that definitely feels like the future I envisioned as a child.

I always wondered about those stories…

Felt like the deaths were real but the “asshole” side of things was made up so the audience wouldn’t feel so bad. Like a bully getting hit by a random tire passing by. You wouldn’t feel as bad about the death because the guy was being a douche to someone moments before he got hit but in actuality, it was just a random person getting hit by a tire and they weren’t being douchey moments before the hit.

Was that the case for your friends? Did the show embellish on the details to make them look worse than they actually were?

My current hardware setup isn’t great which is another thing I’ll need to improve upon as time goes on.

But thank you for the information about condenser versus dynamic microphones, I’ll have to check that out.

Duh.

It’s the classic thing that happens to all these movies and TV shows that are written by people who purposely avoid the source material and brag about “we didn’t play the game or read the books” like that somehow is going to make the content better?

No, I’m still salty they decided we should be on camera for meetings all of a sudden at my job. It’s so pointless and stupid to force us into. Thankfully it hasn’t been strictly enforced but most of us try to comply some of the times. Some mornings I’m too damned tired and don’t want to be seen yawning a bunch or like how it really is, that I literally rolled out of bed a few minutes ago to start my shift.

When I first came to this job, I remember joining a meeting and turned on my camera for someone to tell me “we don’t do that here” and it felt great to not have that stupid corporate pressure for something so trivial at the time.

I can understand wanting to make sure your employees are who they say they are and ensuring they are doing the job they are being paid to do. On the second part, that should be evident by the fact their work is being done. A camera wouldn’t change it for the lazy employees. They would find ways to appear busy on camera and micro managers would find a new way to micro manage people again. On the former, this would be evident with individual meetings on an ongoing basis between employee and direct supervisor.

Neither are necessarily solved by the constant use of a camera, at least where I work.

I suppose there are some jobs where a camera would be beneficial. We all came here with the idea of police officers which makes sense as a precaution for both the cop and the public they work with. (It should) keep everyone accountable and ensure things are being done as they should. But we see even that isn’t necessarily happening. We still get the “oops my camera conveniently tuned itself off during the time they claimed I abused their rights :( ”

Microsoft Office applications are unlikely to give them any of this kind of access. The most they would have is the ability to see the location and IP you sign into the app on, like if you visit London and sign into Microsoft Word there, they may be able to see that location and the IP you were given on the network there. Unless you got this from Microsoft who has built the app, then that’s a different story since they have much greater control over the software than your uni would.

The programs you most are worried about would be things like antivirus or VPN apps that have the ability and known history of tracking and logging events on the machine it’s connected to.

To determine the exact ports you’re using, such as in this app, one of the best ways I’m aware of is to have another deceive on the same network and have a program that listens/sniffs web traffic and then filter just for the device you are using to see what protocols are being used at a given time you’re aware. Time consuming and a bit of a learning curve to know what everything means and what you’re doing, but it works for this purpose.

As for your last reply about formatting the device…you can delete everything and this usually removes any spyware, but not always foolproof. In some rare cases, malware has been installed to the BIOS firmware, then no formatting of the Windows OS, for example, would fix this. Also, if something like Microsoft Intune was installed to the device, it’s possible that they can bring the computer back up from a restore or they have already backed up everything and can view it at their leisure. But in most cases, formatting is a good way to conceal yourself from prying eyes if you believe you may be compromised.

Depends on how the traffic is being transported and also depends on your device you’re using.

If the device you’re using (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) was given to you by the school or you gave it to them at some point to connect you or add a program to it…you can safely assume that they can view everything on the device. Either they have remote capabilities and can fully view your screen as if it were you or they have detailed logs that provide information about each process that goes on on the device or both. These logs can be related to things you are doing as well as things the device is doing in the background without your input, such as updating apps.

If the device is one that you bought and own and no one has used it or installed anything to it or you didn’t install any such applications that were required for access, then you are likely on the safer side with a caveat…

When on a network like a WiFi hotspot, everything you are doing that goes across the network, whether it is to connect to local devices on the same network (like a printer or other computer) or it goes through the internet (like logging into Facebook in a web browser or in an app), these packets are being sent over this network and may be picked up by anyone who is also on the network, not just the owners or people who managed the WiFi network like the university’s IT department but also other students or guests who are also connected to the same network.

If you are accessing websites or sending data over the http protocol (http://www.google.com, for example), this is an unsecured protocol and you can guarantee that all data you type into this website can be viewed by anyone else on the same network with very minimal effort on their part.

But if you are using the https protocol (https://www.google.com, for example), your packets are encrypted. This doesn’t mean that they can not be viewed by anyone on the network, it just means that anyone who grabs these packets as you send stuff over to this website will need to either use the right key or find a way to break it which usually involves something sophisticated like a quantum computer, which some universities do have, but are unlikely using them for this purpose. But just saying, the capability is there.

It’s easy to see whether the website you are accessing is using http or https if in a web browser like Google Chrome, but it’s difficult if using it in an app because the app doesn’t tell you exactly which protocol it’s using. Most newer apps and websites are using https, but there are some outliers. You can find this out if you do some digging on your device through testing, but it’s time consuming.

Do keep in mind that http and https are only two protocols mentioned and there are vastly more protocols out there for other tasks such as peer to peer networking like in torrents, FTP and SFTP for file sharing, SSH and RDP for remotely connecting to another machine, and much more…

Anyway…sorry for the long comment reply, but this is all to say that it depends.

It’s best practice policy to be careful what you do when on someone else’s network and you know others are on it too because you never know who is on and what kind of tools or technology they have access to. Best to use common sense by not visiting suspicious/sensitive websites/apps on your most used devices or instead using throwaway accounts and devices if doing so, ones that won’t come back to identify you and ones you wouldn’t mind losing if lost. Such as, be careful about incriminating yourself if discussing crimes you’re committing or logging into something like an online banking app or website or checking your crypto wallet on the net.

Did they give you any programs to install on that computer or did anyone ever take your computer and install anything to it? Did you notice any new programs pop up that weren’t there before?

In the search on the bottom of the computer, type “control panel” then click Uninstall a program. Click the name for Date Installed to sort the column by most recently installed programs. Tell us if you see any since setting up with the university that you didn’t install yourself.

I’ve heard some say that they think the moon is a real, spherical body in the sky. While others disagree and think it’s either a simulation or something else entirely.

The problem with them is that they all have a different idea that goes with their view of this conspiracy theory so they all believe something different than the next. The grouping of them is so small that they never got a chance to really develop a singular idea beyond agreeing among themselves that the world is flat.

I do this too when I can. It works so well but it’s not a guarantee with every avocado.

This is if you’re going to use the entire half of the avocado too, which I almost always do, if not the full fruit.

Oh the best is when the computer restarts after finishing the update and needs you to reboot again to finish updating.

I’m not kidding, this happened to me 3 times last week where it had me reboot an additional 2 more times after the first reboot to install updates.

I was just trying to shut down the computer.

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Consider counting that on your tax deductions for the year since it’s a donation. This is all really nice of you and hopefully helps make their lives a little better.

It’s a nice gesture, but this is exactly why a lot of people don’t like giving away free stuff. It’s why IT departments are hesitant to give away equipment they are throwing out because some users will come back and expect free tech support. Not saying you’re against doing anything like that, but just that asshole companies like Microsoft make this so damn difficult nowadays that doing as others suggested here to create a new Microsoft account for this is going to get you calls inevitably in the future when they forget the password or run into other issues. And if not, it’ll likely end with them not using it because of the hassle or throwing it out.

I hate to sound negative because it’s an awesome gesture on your part to do and I’m sure in a perfect world, it would be wonderful for some of the residents to get to use something like that.

But since it’s not like the old days of having a CD you pop in but a digital app connected to an online account, you’ll need to do somethings that may cause confusion. It sounds like you’d have to do as others suggest and create a new Microsoft account and have a license for that game on there. Or get a GamePass subscription on that account that would allow access to Flight Simulator and more, but that would mean a perpetual donation for them to use it too.

Someone may come along and suggest a pirated copy of Flight Simulator, but I would strongly advise against that because it can put the home at legal risk if discovered and can cause other issues like if it gets patched in the future.

If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.

Not necessarily. In Teams, it shows the user’s specific hours they work as well as the time difference (this person is 2 hours behind you). All it would need is to remove the time difference and just display the time they work.

A person in Japan would just put in their signature or it would be in the application that they work from 0400 to 1200 while you still work 0800 to 1600 and you’d have your answer.

This is Grubhub and all those other apps when I get a craving at home and don’t want to drive or can’t drive because I’m not sober. I browse through and see some stuff that looks decent and get all the way to the end to find out that my $10 worth of food is now going to be $25 plus tip to be delivered to me. So I just close the app and then get one of those stupid notifications “hey you still have stuff in your cart! Come back and finish your order”.

No, fuck you.

The screenshots and video on the Steam page doesn’t go into the detail of what you can do when it comes to controlling your Sim-like characters. But this video shows more of that aspect of the game https://youtu.be/BEys39TsRdw?si=t3HU3vFlNO9q0O0T

Granted, it’s a lot of games in one like other top down tycoon manager games and has some elements of tower defense.

Most recent, but not the absolute worst, was ripping my pants at work. I bent down to pick something up and heard the rip. It was over my crotch region too. Thankfully I had boxers on but was still pretty embarrassed.

Thankfully my boss was cool about it and I just drove over to Costco down the street and got a new pair and changed in the back of my car. He make a joke when I got back which was fine.

Space Colony is an older game that was like Sims in space. I got this at Big Lots years ago and played some of it and apparently this is the remastered version on Steam.

Been that way for a while on my iPhone and I’ve never had Premium or whatever the fuck YouTube calls their paid subscription now.

It doesn’t work on music videos or videos that are for the music, like music with an album art in the background unless YouTube hasn’t categorized it correctly.