In high school, I had a finance class where we learned how to trade stocks -- without actually doing it for real.

Yes, it is actually possible to be inspired and learn without all the stupid corporate stunts and PR bullshit.

Because Americans are dumb. Just look at who we vote into public office.

Worse than that. If Steam notices there's an update for a game, it can disable the game completely until you update, even if you only want to play the game singleplayer or offline.

"Not owning" goes beyond them taking stuff away from you in the future. It means right now they can pull the rug out from under your feet by changing it any way they like after the point of purchase... crippling it, taking away features, injecting [more] ads, revising the EULA, etc.

Yeah, they can do this with streaming content, too, but the problem is far worse with games and applications.

Oh, this has been a problem since at least Windows 7, and it probably originated with Vista. It's the first thing I noticed after updating from XP, and it's been driving me batty on ALL my machines, regardless of hardware configuration, for well over a decade.

There's a LOT of responsiveness issues associated with the WDM. Thankfully missed input events only affect desktop applications. Anything that runs in fullscreen or overlay mode works fine.

I appreciate the tip, but I get seriously annoyed when geeks jam "it's trivial" or "it's incredibly easy" into every conversation. Please don't do that.

There was a time when we played almost all games solo, and it was still fun.

The "launcher" is a DRM-laden store that slams you with an endless stream of advertisements to buy more stuff. Huge, bloated, and annoying. It would be nice if the "launcher" was just that, and all the other stuff was optional, but... that's not how the world works.

The hell are they talking about "safer?" What is unsafe about PNG and JPEG?

Stupid marketing trash.

If the crap is still there, there's no reason for me to believe disabling it actually disables it.

Recently, I had this happen with a Logitech keyboard. The key mapping software automatically installs the Discord app, but you can "disable" it in the keyboard settings. Naturally, the app still runs in the background, so I had to manually edit a bunch of JSON config files to prevent the damn thing from launching on every boot.

Come on, pal... we all know this opt-out nonsense doesn't work. No company will leave free money on the table, no matter how much profit they make on hardware.

"I was just following orders."

Yeah, all this stuff is totally for the end-user's benefit. That's why it's being forced on everyone.

We live in odd times when people think games need to have low-level access to the OS and read hardware serial numbers, even if you want to play exclusively offline.

I used to use Userchrome to reorganize the order of context menus and do a few other UI tweaks... until they removed those features.

Now I don't bother. I just use a fork of Firefox.

I see ageism is alive and well.

That's only when the PR shit hits the fan. Up to that point, it's cover-ups all the way down.

You know, just like any other organization full of petty office politics.

If all the AI systems were to disappear tomorrow, are you confident you could function without it?

I've had my fill of people saying they've "learned" things, but can't actually get anything done without automation.

That reminds me, I should find a new stand-alone PDF viewer for my workstation. The Firefox PDF viewer is orders of magnitude slower than any other PDF viewer I've ever used. If I have a 100-page document consisting of bitmap page scans and I skip to the end, it can take 30 seconds to render a page. It is just so damn slow.

But yeah, improving initialization time is a newsworthy deal.