I own a Stratego board and play it regularly with my son. We also play it with close family from time to time. It's one of my favorite games. It allows for the right balance of strategy, skill, and adaptation, with just the right amount of luck mixed in. Additionally, even as one may be on the verge of losing, there still exist opportunities to win the game. And because arrangement of pieces can be different every game, and because your pieces are largely unknown to the other player until an attack is made, the element of surprise allows for every game to feel unique and special.

If you haven't played it, I'd encourage you to try it again sometime.

Now I can look up at the night sky with a telescope, find 1981 EC26, say out loud to myself, "That's Weird", and be at peace with my factually accurate statement.

They also must be certified by an outside safety organization like Underwriters Laboratories and have a feature that would prevent electricity from feeding back into the grid if there's a power outage.

Yea, I'm sure Amazon will enforce that law.

That's a bold security decision, freezing patches for CVEs reported in your base software.

Would be a shame if there was relevant cybersecurity regulation that required you to mitigate known issues.

...Young buyers prefer the newer controls...

They also prefer affordable cars. Wonder when the industry's going to work on that problem?

Apple released the Neo at just the right time, at the right price, right when the market was stressed and looking for answers.

I've been ordering Chromebooks for my district for eleven years. Prices hit an all-time low of $227 per unit back in summer 2021. Since then, prices trended up for me year after year. Last year's units were $297. This year's were quoted to me in April at $430 each. I was able to find new-in-box 2025 models for $330 each and went with those instead. I was also warned that, if I ordered Chromebooks, it might take months before they would arrive. I have a neighboring school district that placed an order, then had it cancelled two months later because Dell couldn't fulfill the order. (There are supplies of Dell Chromebooks to be found, but at the moment, Dell is prioritizing supplying its biggest vendors like CDW. Meanwhile, many districts in my area typically order through smaller in-state vendors who aren't getting the same priority from Dell.)

The market is stressed this summer; supplies are low and difficult to find. Supplies that are available are 50% - 80% higher in price than last year. Apple comes along and says "You can buy an educational laptop right now for $500", and hell yea, the fish are gonna bite. It has nothing to do with people suddenly falling in love with Apple, and everything to do with constrains in the marketplace.

And I have no love for Apple either. Don't forget that schools have been begging Apple for a decade to release a $500 student laptop, and all Apple did was thumb their noses at us every single year. Why did they decide they now they need to release a $500 student laptop? It's only because they've been losing business to Chromebooks for a decade.

That was always the case. And it's always the case in every representative country that allows voters to elects leaders.

You can have stability and continuity or you can have elections in which voters can make large policy changes.

Obviously a lot of that policy is unwise, but people were fooling themselves if they somehow believe that any representative system is immune from "population elects person with unwise policy platform".

"Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal." --John Carmack

I had never thought about games in this way before. When I fell in love with Doom (and gaming) as a teenager, I didn't have any social media & smartphones competing for my time, because they didn't exist. Lots more time for gaming. The games back then were made to reward you for investing more time in the game itself. There was a joy in it, discovering all the hidden places that rewarded you with power-ups. Finish a level only to find out you found 87% of the secrets? That's when the OCD in your brain kicks in, you re-load the level, and hit spacebar on every inch of wall space you can can muster until you find that hidden BFG-9000.

Today's "games" don't try to reward you in that classic sense anymore. They've turned gameplay into a casino, where you grind away for six hours hoping for that rare-item drop. They can't beat the addictive components that make up social media, so instead they incorporated some of them into the gameplay...If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. The only winning move is not to play.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

Also makes you wonder how many officials are getting kickbacks from SafeSpace Global for this.

"And....it's gone!"

I'm hoping they can upgrade the OS all the way to Windows 2000. Peak UI, peak performance, and peak efficiency.

This crap is why I would never willingly choose to live in the Bay Area. This type of person is disproportionately well-represented there.

I'd take that bet.

if (true) {
say "Let me go ask my manager about that..."
}