I don't think squaring the circle is a good example here, since the problem isn't so much a find the number problem, but a find the answer while restricting yourself to a few specific operations problem. So the non-algebraic solution doesn't count because it doesn't follow the rules. People knew what the answer was as a number that you can calculate for ages. They weren't sure if you could do it while following the arcane rules of ancient compass and straightedge constructions. It's turns out that the answer is no.

That's just kicking the can down the road. Besides, every function needs memory to store its definition, so you've saved nothing.

Flat butts are the thing!

It wasn't California who decided to base both houses on population. It was SCOTUS. They said that it violated equal protection to have geographical based representation that didn't spread the representatives equally based on population. They also said that you have to actually reapportion every ten years or so. Before then, a few southern states apportioned their representatives at the turn of the twentieth century and then didn't do it again because the old districts kept more black people from being represented than if they updated the boundaries. SCOTUS said that was BS, along with strictly geographical districts.

Another interesting thing about that 74 drinks per week statistic is that it works out to almost exactly a gallon of beer per day. I guess they're well hydrated then.

A drink is a standard amount of alcohol. It's specifically defined as 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof liquor or the equivalent in any other form. This works out to 12 oz. for most American Lagers and 5 oz. for most wines. Mixed drinks typically have two shots of liquor and so are usually two drinks, but this can vary. Regardless of form, a drink contains 0.6 fl. oz. of ethanol dissolved in however much whatever.

Hey, totally off-topic but I'm going to respond to your sig. It's even worse than you make it out to be. The Slashdot source actually has Unicode support. It has for more than 20 years. The problem is that it wasn't very good, so when they turned it on, assholes got to work breaking things. Rather than actually fix it, they just turned it off and left it that way. What broke, you ask? Direction markers. If you put a right-to-left direction marker in your comment, then entire rest of the page would be interpreted right-to-left as well. Well, until someone else changed it back in a later comment. It was really, really annoying. Rather than forcing the text flow back to left-to-right after every comment, like literally every site that supports Unicode today does, they just said, "Fuck it. We're too dumb," and turned Unicode back off.

Speaking of Quake, I think that Quake may be more influential on PC FPSs than Doom (or even Wolfenstein 3-D). The reason is that Quake is the game that introduced the world to mouse+WASD for FPS controls. Before then, controls were all over the place. The original Doom controls were really quite terrible. The mouse would move you back and forth as well as rotate the player, and if you held shift then the mouse would strafe instead of rotate. Also, the keyboard used the arrow keys, with the right and left arrows rotating instead of the modern strafing. To strafe with the keyboard, there was a strafe key that put the arrows into strafe mode as with the mouse. It was really weird and compared to mouse+WASD style controls that were introduced with Quake, Doom controls are just awful. All the modern Doom ports sort of fix the controls by getting rid of the mouse moving you forward and back and using WASD instead of arrow keys and making A and D default to strafe instead of rotate, but without mouse-look, it still feels a bit weird.

But in that case, it would have to be Angry Birds, which was the first viral phone game, IIRC. Prior to then, phone games (or mobile games, as they're called today) were more of a curiosity until Angry Birds made them a selling point of iPhones and Androids. Farmville was arguably more popular, but it wasn't on mobile at first, but rather on the web. Farmville was the first social media game and is also super influential.

Get used to it. That's just part of the speech of young Americans, particularly on the West Coast. It isn't going anywhere.

Double jeopardy only applies to federal charges because of the separate-sovereign doctrine. On any given crime, each sovereign gets its own bite at the apple. Each state, the federal government, tribal governments, and the governments are all independent sovereign entities. This means that every state involved can charge and try him separately and double jeopardy doesn't stop it from happening. Double jeopardy just stops each sovereign from trying him more than once themselves.

NB: there are a few states that interpret the double-jeopardy rule more strictly than SCOTUS, and in those states, double-jeopardy would apply. I'm not really sure which states these are.

Were they though? I don't remember reading anything about the state charges being dismissed with prejudice. That would have been really weird since no jury had been seated. Ordinarily the charges would have been dismissed without prejudice, since there was no jury, if they were dismissed at all. Often times in these cases, the charges just sit open waiting for the state to get ahold of the defendant or for them to die.

As far as double-jeopardy goes: nope. Doesn't apply. Dual-sovereign doctrine says that states and the fed are separate sovereign entities and so each has their own independent right to prosecute. Double-jeopardy applies sovereign by sovereign.

This hasn't been a thing since Windows 7, at the latest. Jesus wept, get your complaints up with the times. What you're describing was a problem introduced with Windows XP, that continued a bit into the Windows Vista era but was definitely ending by the Windows 7 era when Microsoft put requirements of motherboard manufacturers to make BIOSs that allow the embedding of Windows product keys into them. Changing hardware doesn't affect the embedded product key, so you're fine. It was pre-embedded product key machines that used this mechanism involving a hash of the available hardware.

And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the TPM, for Pit's sake. The TPM doesn't give a crap about your video card. The TPM only really cares about whether the bootstrap has been modified (aka Secure Boot), so it knows that it's giving up the stored key to a secure OS, thus preventing outside actors from decrypting your hard drive without your consent. Except it never even gives up the stored key. Instead, it does the decryption internally, resulting in a different key that can be used to decrypt your hard drive. This way, if your motherboard fails, you can still recover the data by supplying the decryption key manually, and there's no way for outside hackers to obtain the key, even if they have the hardware in hand. Furthermore, the OS has to supply a passcode of some kind to get the TPM to do any of this in the first place. No OS actually requires that that passcode be stored on your hard drive. You could supply it yourself on every boot.

Everything I described so far depends on Secure Boot being enabled. If you don't want Secure Boot, you can still use the TPM for stuff, it's just way less secure.

So, no, the TPM isn't some nefarious POS that fucks you at every corner. It's a hardware security device that makes it much harder for attackers to pwn your system, even when they have physical access to it. It is good.

And, having a Microsoft Account is a really good idea for the vast majority of Windows users. Having one allows you to recover your hard drive data in the event of a motherboard failure, for instance, and also gives you access to automatic backups of certain files and settings, and gives you access to OneDrive, which most people definitely are going to want. OneDrive automatically backs your documents, pictures, etc, up to the cloud, and, for documents, maintains a version history, allowing you to recover previous versions of documents in case you need undo some mistakes. The utility of this cannot be overstated. You may not like the privacy implications, but for most people, the benefits massively outweigh the malefits. And, you get a copy of Office for a small monthly fee, along with additional OneDrive storage, which is hugely nice to have. I'm sorry, but Google Docs and LibreOffice suck donkey nuts in comparison to Microsoft Office. Office is just miles ahead in terms of ease-of-use, compatibility, speed, portability (Office for Android is great, and integrates with OneDrive), and everything else that matters.

And I say all of this as a person who legitimately used Linux and FreeBSD as daily driver OSs during most of the XP and Vista eras. Windows is just better as a desktop, Visual Studio is the best IDE out there, Office is the best office suite, Edge is a pretty decent browser, and Visual Studio Code is the best plain text editor around. My only real complaint is that Windows 11's taskbar sucks. But ExplorerPatcher fixes that problem, and with that Windows goes to the absolute top of the list for desktop OSs. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great as a server OS, and can be made into a pretty fine HTPC, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD definitely have their places too, but for desktop use Windows has them beat by a huge margin.

Did you even read your "evidence"? That thread is about what is almost certainly a dead motherboard, or possibly two dead video cards. It's definitely nothing to do with Windows or Microsoft. It hasn't gotten to that point yet.

You get what you pay for. I bought a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation 7750 (their highest end laptop at the time) back in 2020. I'm still using it every day, on my lap rather than a desk or a table. I haven't had much break on it, except for the SSD and the headphone jack. I got it fixed under warranty late last year and it's still going on strong. The only thing that doesn't last is the power supply cord, causing me to replace the power supply about once a year. Fortunately, when I ordered one last time, Amazon sent me four for some reason. I only paid for one. So I'm set for a while. Also, it's new enough for Windows 11, so that's also great.

With this same use pattern, historically I've gotten about 2.5 years, tops, on a laptop, and that's with a yearly keyboard replacement, as well as various port replacements every six-ten months or so. I had an HP Envy for a while, a Dell Inspiron, and a Dell XPS laptop over the last decade or so, and they all wore out pretty quickly. The XPS lasted a ton longer than the HP Envy and the Inspiron, but it was also more expensive. Now, my current laptop has lasted the longest I've ever had for a laptop. I think I'm going to need a new keyboard pretty soon, but that's pretty minor, and pretty good for a four year old laptop.