Now, now.

You can't really say that you wren't warned about going hunting with Dick Cheney . . . :)

hawk

>If you have a hankering for murdering parking cops you don't need an app.

I think the motivation is more *avoiding* them than harming them!

If you wanted to harm them, you'd just tell their mothers that they weren't really hookers . . .

!

hawk

>In my state, the cops are legally required (and so) post public
>notices about where DUI checkpoints will be.

Speaking as an attorney who was still handling DUIs when checkpoints were in common use . . . announcing and pbulsihign ahead of time will make at most a marginal difference in the number of drunks heading through them.

You'll get a slight decrease in sober drivers who don't want the hassle, but drunk drivers just don't plan that well.

I recall my Criminal Procedure professor in law school commenting that he *really* wanted to get stopped in one and just sit there not speaking, staring straight ahead. Just to see what happened, as they couldn't possibly develop probable cause under the circumstances.

[*checks beard in mirror*]

oh, crap!

anyway, I both leaned unix on a pdp-11 at work and bought my first Mac in 1984.

Various Macs until I switched to a combination of unix and *nix as a graduate student, largel over LyX (largely a graphical front end to LaTeX at the time, as I was editing plenty of matrices full of integrals and such, so keyboard navigation was critical.

Then in 2008, back to a Mac laptop when it mugged me on clearance in Frys. I figured I could put FreeBSD (or maybe linux) on it, but it was a good enough *nix box, and it's battery management beat the daylights out of what I could get from FreeBSD or linux on a laptop.

And it's been Macs, largely used as *nix boxes, ever since, whether legal writing or developing software.

The bit on lower maintenance, less frequent replacement, and lower support costs goes back thirty years and more. And with some notable exceptions, the general quality of Apple hardware has been top tier, dating to when it was somewhat (but not hugely) better than #2 IBM.

That evil guy Trump has the solution, created last Friday- $100,000 minimum application fee for new H-1bs

If Trump wants to make the $100,000 H-1b fee *extremely popular among techies*:

-$30,000 to an American worker laid off in the last 36 months for retraining funds and or job coaches
-$50,000 in a trust fund for the worker to be paid upon purchase of a return ticket when the visa expires, or alternatively, to pay for a conversion to an immigrant visa
-$15,000 to the revenue to help pay for INS/ICE and the bureaucrats to process the application
-$5,000 to a company that cancels an H-1b application to hire a US Citizen

We'll remove a toy from the market because it killed a total of three kids and nobody complains, but we are powerless to do anything about misinformation that has killed thousands.

Who cares about a CEO's opinion on what technology is cool or works?

there are lots of those, often with their own "store." I find batteries like that a lot.

But this was explicitly a Walmart listing, by Walmart, rather than a 3d party listing.

You have no idea how Jobs was immune to it? The answer is they faked it. Here's some random link I just found: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fandrewzuo.com%2Fapples-f...

Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

It's not just amazon.

I ordered a thermostat for my mustang last week. It was described as "sold and shipped by Walmart."

A couple of days later, I found an Autozone box on my porch. And not just the box, but the shipping return address was to auto zone!

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

>Has about the same importance as smart tech in a fridge for me.

I live in the desert, you insensitive clod! :_)

but seriously we doohave many days of 115-117F most summers. Self-replenishing ice is *important*.

it's not why we bought it, but our LG actually has two ice makers; one in the refrigerator door, which you can actually clean out, and another for larger square tubes in the upper freezer drawer (which we turn off for the cooler half of the year)