They know exactly what I've bought from them and when, so computing the tariffs I've paid through them is a matter of database queries.

They know how to give the money back to me - they send me a credit based on my executive membership every year, and that would be an acceptable and minimally painful way to refund the tariff windfall. They could give Costco store credit cards to non-executive members.

No they aren't

You could boot from ATA and SCSI Zip disks just fine, just not from LPT port drives. For Linux you could load a kernel with LPT and Zip support from floppy and boot that way, though.

I erased and rewrote a bunch of CDRWs. But about the same time they got cheap, DVD-RWs came out and I stopped erasing CDRWs.

You don't have the courage to say that to someone even on Slashdot, let alone face to face, coward.

And you expose your true self... as a selfish prick.

They already can't drop the package onto a covered porch the way they're operating now, unless they're doing it as a bombing run and calculating the arc so as to miss any roof over it...

I have all you have plus children on minibikes, quads, and sometimes lawn tractors, and people sawing up stumps with a chainsaw at the tree service less than a block away. The owner drops them off there so poor people in the neighborhood can get some nice wet firewood to choke us all with. I'd barely notice a drone dropping a package off on my roof from ten feet above it, let alone in my yard.

If you mean using SMARTDRV you could theoretically ctrl-alt-del and then shut it off, as it was supposed to flush buffers when you did that. For anyone else's solution, no clue.

It could also be hidden from Wingdings or... (wait for it) ...Impact.

If the animal is hidden from view then it's irrelevant to this discussion since the drone only can react to what it can sense.

She should have said "programmed" rather than anthropomorphizing it, but other than that, she's correct -- that is, in fact, how it is programmed to behave.

It depends on the density of the neighborhood. The preferred use-case for drones is "neighborhoods" where the houses are few and far apart from each other, making ground delivery tedious and making the distance between the drone and the nearest set of ears larger.

The AGI won't need to identify us. It doesn't even need to keep score. All it needs to know is see human, shoot human.

But it isn't. It's easy enough to use stereo vision to measure the distance to an object and then determine whether or not it could get into the drop zone even if it started moving at top speed with no acceleration time. Also, if it was "worried" it wouldn't drop things from such a height.

They came out here first, at a time when they were still useful. CDRWs were very expensive and/or slow. Most of the old ones were SCSI, and most people didn't have a SCSI interface in their PC. As I was a nerd with a Unix and Unixlike background I did, and my employer kicked down a Philips CDD521 with the 2x upgrade that they had been using to write masters and had only recently obsoleted with a 4x Plextor. This is sometimes said to have been the first CD writer, but I think I read somewhere that there was a Sony drive first that came only in a rack mount case.