Because at the time you never had to do that for any other drive type. Floppies, cds, and even hard drives were able to be removed without damage.

My company sold appliances that used zipdrives as part of the update process. Trust me it was significantly higher than 0.5% of drives. It would eventually happen to any drive that was used on a regular basis. Or one that sat in a box unused long enough, Or one that was used on a semiregular basis. That is to say, it happened to any drive, regardless of how it was treated. We're just lucky that we shipped these with hardrives that were surprisingly much much less reliable. So people were too busy complaining about the hard drive failures to complain about the zip drive issues. But if you asked, they'd be like oh yeah the zip drive failed too.

Eh, no it does not. I bought a lifetime subscription to Musicmatch Jukebox. Where the hell is that now, Yahoo? I want a version that works on windows 11, dang it.

Did you ever use it side by side on a computer that also had Netscape or Ie on it? It was worth paying for one, it was painfully slow.

Okkkay..Well now you have. Adjust your memory correctly. Browsers weren't free initially. Yes, people paid for them. That was the whole juice behind the Netscape IPO. It was as you may well know, Microsoft who started giving away the inferior, but free internet explorer which caused Netscape to do so and basically lose their main revenue stream.

Yeah, I mean thats the thing AI will crack it if it has enough training data.

To be fair, its not open id but a different corporate identity that Sam Altman is also running that is behind it. So like open ai, but much much much much scummier.

No this is classic conspiratorial thinking. The government SUUUUUUUUCKS at controlling information. But they are dicks and are very good at acting like it.

What is done with a language is different than the feature set of the language. I love go too, but governments could and probably have done terrible things with Golang too.

But the positive things I or others do, shouldn't be a requirement to criticize an decrees in public funding for those things, or the lack of personal charity. Say what you want about Gates, he does appear to be incredibly creepy, however at least he has given huge chunks of money away and I hope he continues to do that.

Personally, More than any financial adviser says is prudent, given my income level. I used to be hands on in the trenches, but funding was bad, so I figured the better way was to work for much more money and donate to the hands on charities doing the work.

What were the "Horrifying ways" exactly? Getting a judge to issue a warrant? Thats obviously a precedent that the government has turned away from using.

Ok Snowden referenced, can we clear the air with him finally? He stole some information and had the guts to divulge it at high personal cost to himself. Great Good and Great. But don't fucking listen to any thing he has to say outside of it. He fled to Russia, which, if it is better at personal liberties than the United states, its only because it doesn't have more money to institute more surveillance. He has no great insight. He did a good thing, that doesn't make him president of doing good things, and certainly not a God like figure others hold him up to be.

Here here, agreed. Good thing all the libertarians who really valued personal freedom guaranteed in the constitution backed the one person who absolutely did not value any of the constitution at all. Good job principled conservatives You see when you say you believe something, you have to actually act on those beliefs and not just use them as a shield for your rampant xenophobic, misogynic, racist beliefs.

What!!! Sam Altman not following through with a promise!?! A legal one at that ?!?! Just screwing people over when ever it suits him?!? Crazy times when you can't trust the guy no one trusts at all and was fired over his blatant lies.