Owing to the October 2025 Windows 10 phase-out/scare/scolding, I purchased a refurb Dell Micro for cheap that came with Windows 11 Pro. 16 G RAM, 1 T SSD, what was there to not like.

Come March 2026, Windows Update was slowing this machine to a crawl, especially if I booted it every other week because it was my PC separate from work that I paid bills on.

Consulting with Copilot AI (natch, you would think Copilot is savy about Microsoft products), it turns out that my cheap PC has a SATA SSD, not an NVMe SSD, and around that time, Microsoft upgraded the thoroughness of their weekly Update Tuesday. Copilot suggested that I spend 50 bucks on a 1T NVMe stick, and with current memory prices, good luck with that.

Yeah, yeah and yeah again, I should just change over to Linux, but I run tax software that is Windows only, so there is that.

Anyone know anything about this or is Copilot funning me?

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

Those of us who have rubbed elbows with our fellow student-athletes in Intro to Astronomy should know that the visible surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere, and it is the first layer at which the gas density has gotten low enough that photons are no longer trapped and can fly off into space, giving what we observe as sunlight.

I thought this was a parody of one time Senator from Indiana and later Vice President:

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

On the Dark Side of the Sun, of course.

How about the Statue of Liberty frozen into the ice of Lake Mendota in Madison, WI?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.wisc.edu%2Fhistory-....

I propose a continuous adjustment of clocks between summer and winter to avoid the step changes between daylight and standard time.

I mean this whole business of mean solar time has us meandering about when the sun rises and sets anyway,

What would say it is that you are doing here?

it's Slashdot.

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

Just.

Drive.

alter ego George Costanza work at Meta?

only outlaws will have weed-free landscaping?

Wait a minute, they showed the Artemis crew a story about a guy who is drugged and kidnapped by his space agency and wakes up 11 light-years from home with the rest of his crew dead to bolster their spirits?

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?