If they weren't going to make money on it they wouldn't have bothered, they're not a charity. You can guarantee the construction is the shittiest they can get away with made in the lowest quality chinese factory and it will probably fail after a year or too anyway if used a lot.

It must've required magic to load those games if you didn't also have tape or disk drive to plug into it. Congrats on completely missing his point.

Yup. They're probably aiming at the xmas market, sell a few thousand, offer support for 6 months then disappear, cash in bank. Cube goes into cupboard, comes out 5-10 years later and goes into recycle.

"Now begins the trend of censorship on the Internet by nation-state boundary."

Begins?? Have you just stepped out of a time machine from the year 2000? Its been going on for years if not decades my friend in places like china, russia and north korea and they have far less noble reasons than trying to protect copyright.

Government isn't a zero sum game wrt enviromental concerns. Legislation on other things can and must happen as well, and any government thats just a one trick pony will soon find itself out on its ear.

Idiot anti nuclear anything pressure groups like CND and ignorant green hippies like Greenpeace and FoTE scared politicians away from nuclear for about 30 years from the 80s onwards. Now our old stations are closing and only 1 new one is being built.

As I write this here in the UK sitting under a cloudy high pressure system with not much (inland) wind , 47% of our electricity is being generated by gas, 21% wind and 13% solar. Good, but not great , and there are always planning battles over siting of new wind and solar farms. Wind can be put in the sea (making it more vulnerable to russian sabotage but thats another discussion) but solar can't so we're probably not far off the install limit of the latter unless the government starts compulsory purchasing land for it.

Everyone wants their kid to be special or have special treatment? Shy, a bit awkward? Must be something wrong with them, must get special attention at school!

No! They're just normal kids. There is no single normal human behaviour, there's a whole spectrum of it from the psychotically gregarious to the socially awkward types amongst who I include myself and probably a lot of people who have it ended up in IT have it because interacting with a machine can be simpler. That doesn't make us special or abnormal, quite the contrary.

... then no one has it because that means its simply a section of the range of normal human behaviour and not a special condition or disorder at all.

Don't forget cyclone and typhoon - both hurricanes, just different oceans.

"If you look at the happiest societies, theyâ(TM)re 90-95% comprised of a single ethnicity. In many cases, this means white."

And japanese. They took one look at multiculturalism and saw it for the bullshit it was. No problem with islamic terrorists there. Funny that.

"If you look at the happiest societies in the world they're all socialist"

The inhabitants of north korea would beg to differ.

An online setup system is an order of magnitude more complicated to develop than a simple app that runs locally on the machine. They didn't spend that money just to give their users the finger (though that is definately a side effect). They want user data, location and telemetry, simple as that.

Unfortunately this is what happens with near monopolies (and I exclusively use Linux but I don't fool myself its going to be used by the majority of PC users anytime soon). Any semblance of giving a shit about their customers goes out the window though with MS that happened years ago.

I maybe use it once every 2 weeks or so to ask short specific coding questions that I couldn't find the answer to or couldnt be bothered to wade through the hopeless signal to noise ratio on slack overflow to unearth. Does that count as active?

He didn't look "comfortable" given the state he looked before he died. And I have experience in my family of the wreck chemo can make of someone, it gave her an extra 5 years of life which she and us were very grateful for.