Gestrid

An exit poll is conducted after a voter exits the voting booth. It's conducted by a private organization (usually either a news organization or someone working in collaboration with a news organization) and polls people to find out how they voted. The exit poll is voluntary.

Organizations can then categorize that info based on age, gender, race, area where they voted, and other details. News organizations can then use that info (along with a bunch of other data, including polls conducted leading up to the day of the election) to extrapolate who will win an election in a given area. Typically, despite being somewhat limited in their scope (not everyone at every polling location nationwide is polled), the exit polls are usually reflective of the actual election polls.

Campaign organizers for the next election can also use the data to help figure out their strategies for the next election. For a general example (I came up with it off the top of my head), "We failed to gain the aged 60+ black male vote in this state. We need to study how to appeal to them better in the next election."

Fun Fact: The actual official votes actually take days to count. So these and other types of election polls really help news organizations predict the results even just a few hours after the election polls close, and they're rarely wrong. Sometimes, they're even able to call an election the minute the polls in that area close*. These news organizations often each crunch their own numbers, too, so they don't necessarily all rely on each other's data.

*I should note that each state has its own rules about how and when they release election results. Often, to avoid influencing voters who haven't voted yet, they won't release results (including results from early voting) until polls in the entire state have closed. This is usually the case with news organizations announcing their predictions, too. That's why some news organizations are able to immediately predict some races as soon as the polls close.

I'll field this one.

Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?

I've had the odd stability issue every now and then. (There was one ongoing issue with my wifi that was caused by a bug in my manufacturer's driver, but that was years ago on Windows 10, and they eventually fixed it.) But I honestly haven't had any issues caused specifically by Microsoft recently that I can recall.

Any problems caused by major features updates are usually solved by simply reinstalling the driver. (And I haven't had any of those sorts of problems in at least a couple years.)

It... only updates once a month, though. The second Tuesday of every month.

Any other updates are from the manufacturer/ software developer and not from Microsoft.

Well, time to install two new add-ons: Return YouTube View Counts and Return YouTube Upload Dates.

Somebody please make those.

For me, it's not that Windows updates my drivers during a big update. It's simply that Windows broke the driver while installing a big update.

I've had it happen where my Wi-Fi driver broke so it could only connect to an unprotected network. So I'd simply setup my phone as a hotspot and download the Wi-Fi driver from the manufacturer's website and reinstall it. That'd immediately fix the issue. Though, actually, that issue hasn't occured in years. The last time it happened, I think, was in the early years of Windows 10.

My understanding (unless they've changed it) was that a restart is a restart because software (either the OS or 3rd party software or both) may need the computer restarted to finish installing or updating stuff.

I'd heard that a shutdown wasn't actually a shutdown, though.

and I got one at least once a month.

According to this post, that's the monthly update Microsoft releases.

/j

OP didn't mention games that have Denuvo in them. They simply mentioned pre-ordering games.

And before anyone says this is a post about Denuvo, OP's comment was phrased in such a way that it could sound like, "Why would anyone pre-order games in the first place in 2024, regardless of whether or not it has Denuvo?"

I said I hardly ever buy PC games.

If I'm interested in a PC-only game, I check GOG first, then I check Steam. I will rarely ever pre-order a PC game.

Edit: Also, I appreciate the (probably unintentional) Attack on Titan reference.

ten years at least.

If you haven't seen the show, don't look it up. It's a spoiler.

Honestly, if I can, I always get physical. If I buy a digital copy, there's no guarantee that the store I bought it from won't take it back or something like that.

Yeah, it's still pretty common for big publishers to sell their games physically. Games from smaller devs that self-publish are usually only sold digitally, though they can sometimes end up getting published physically later on if they get popular enough.

Edit: Or were you talking about Best Buy and Amazon selling physical games?