Okay, I’ll bite: in plain English using commonly-accepted terms, what is actually happening?
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I don’t know. I could see the flashing reflecting off a wall. It was especially sharp flashing. I couldn’t see in the direction of the source, first, because I was trying not to get hurt, second, because flashing and blinking objects obscure sight around them, like the sun obscures other things near it, and third, because flashing and blinking objects can create echo flashes elsewhere. (From my point of view, using flashes as safety signals seems like using a hallucinogenic and migraine-inducing gas as a safety signal, to replace fire alarms.) After the flashing stopped, there was some kind of utility truck with traffic cones and one of those mobile baskets-on-an-arm.
Sounds like utility work being done, or perhaps tree trimming.
I know those lights are horribly painful and disorienting to you, and my heart goes out to you. But just so you know, for most neurotypical people I know, those lights are a minor annoyance at night, and perfectly fine during the day. The contrast is noticeable, and by design, but harmless to the vast majority of people. We simply do not see them as weapons any more than we see the full moon as a blinding beacon, or orange pants as a vicious assault on the commonweal.
It would certainly be preferable to create attention-getting devices that aren’t painful. Some of us neurotypical folks got a very small taste of the crap you go through every day when new fire alarms were installed on the Warner Bros studio lot a few years ago, and tested every day for a couple weeks. These were the first alarms I’d ever encountered that made the room physically painful to endure, and my hearing is already shot from too many years of rock and roll and loud engines. Usually loud noises don’t bother me, but these new fire alarms aren’t just attention-grabbing, but apparently designed to shoo everybody outside as quickly as possible. Even if they have to be carried out in a quivering heap.
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All the doors to outside at my office emit high-pitched alarms if they aren’t shut completely (and they won’t stop until they are). I can go from totally calm and absorbed in my work to sprinting to an improperly shut door if that alarm goes off. Same for the photocopier if it has a jam – the only fun part is the alarm sounds like John Lydon singing “prooooob-LAM!” on the Sex Pistols song to me.
I like to think some engineer snuck that in. It distracts me from grinding my teeth when the alarm is going off.
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My new office has a number of gender-neutral bathrooms, which is great! I haven’t had to use a gendered one since the move. But increasingly they are all taken up by people who would be just as comfortable in a gendered bathroom, not considering that this is a major inconvenience to those of us who feel less safe in them. Pretty sure it won’t be long until I have to use a gendered one in an emergency because the neutral ones are always taken.
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Our cat, Sulfur, is sick; symptoms are vomiting, loss of appetite and the most pathetic yowl you’ve ever heard. Looks like a trip to the vet is in our near future…
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Oh noes.
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Me: Is trans.
Jackass: “You’re someone who I hope gets beat to death and murdered in an alley somewhere.”
The word is beaten, jackass, beaten.
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People claiming Trump was “democratically elected.”
If they’ve lived through November and December 2016, in the states, they ought to know better. A bare majority isn’t really democratic, a plurality isn’t really democratic, and winning without even a plurality isn’t within Voyager II’s range of being democratic.
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THIS HERE grinds my fucking gears
I don’t run Windows 
but other people in my house do, and two years later this is still a thing.
It does not seem to honor the obvious control panel setting that is supposed to turn it off. Even after being deployed all this time, it does not manage its transmission rates so that it would not cause problems and we wouldn’t even notice it.
On the contrary, for the last several days it’s been fucking up our wifi so it was barely useable. With double-digit % packet loss and ping times in the hundreds and thousands of milliseconds, good luck streaming anything, or facebooking, or whatever the kids do these days.
MAYBE fixed now with a couple of blocked ports on our router. We shall see 
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Ajit Pai.
I mean, he’s technically the new Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propoganda, yes?
This means I can punch him, right?
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Never gets old.
(And before anyone starts in, punching a punching bag and punching literal Nazis are about all the punching I approve of, if not in self-defence.)
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I would go further and say preemptively punching Nazis is self defence!
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When I built my Windows 10 system, I went with the Pro version so I could control things like that. It’s annoying to have to pay extra for “Pro” functionality just to be able to configure basic fundamental settings, but MS made it clear during the initial leadup and rollout that the free version was intentionally designed to carelessly brick systems and do unwanted things against the user’s will - an OS designed to operate like malware. Pro is good (so far), but any lower version is not recommended. All their automatic updates and forced settings to prevent malware are kinda pointless if the OS itself inherently behaves as though it were infected.
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This software is supposed to turn off the spyware: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10. I feel a little more secure having installed. I don’t know if it prevents the WUDO thing, though.
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This will come across as a Microsoft Apologist, but the Home version of Windows needs automatic updates on by default. Every version before that allowed updates to be turned off ended up as another member of a botnet.
WUDO by default is share with Local Area Network only. You have to go and flip the switch to share over the Internet.
W10 isn’t perfect, but its a damn site better security wise than anything before it.
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Proprietary OS’s are not recommended, not by me anyway.
If anybody was asking, I’d say start with Linux Mint and see how they like it.
(It’s popular and stable and the UI should be familiar for n00bz.)
Google does not seem to agree, except in regard to the Enterprise and Education versions 
In any case WUDO borked our wifi for days and blocking the WUDO ports at the gateway made all the problems go away. If, hypothetically, WUDO was committing only localized LAN crimes, that’s still not acceptable.
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Ahh… I only have a couple of Pro systems and those (just checked) were set to LAN only. The other 15000 Windows machines I care about are Enterprise, so that’s where most of my attention goes.
But, if everything is working as expected, the Update files would be downloaded over the WAN once and then shared amongst all other systems so you’re only taking the “hit” to whatever bandwidth cap you have once.
I keep one or two systems at the house on Mint just to keep familiar with it, but since I am a Windows Admin by trade, I do tend to gravitate that way.
To quote Upton Sinclair -
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
At least I am still cognizant of my bias.
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GOD DAMN IT
The SAME DEVICE has been doing SOMETHING ELSE that’s fucking up my connection today. A little Google Fu with the router’s system log suggests turning UPnP off might help, so I just did, a few minutes ago. Don’t have enough data yet to know if it’s really any better now 
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