If you are referring to the minitel, it was a terminal with keyboard, screen and modem. There was a serial interface you could connect to a computer. The modem was V.23, which is half duplex . 75 bps upstream, 1200 bps downstream. The modem was reversible. It was still quite slow. A 360KB floppy would take about 25 mins to download, assuming no protocol overhead. And of course, the minitel servers also used 7 bits per byte, not 8. Let's just say it was slow. And file transfer protocols were not standardized.

I ran a BBS in France in the early 1990s, and also wrote code for a game company there. No patches were ever distributed by game companies via BBS there. Or distributed any other way, as far as I know. What you got inside the box on the original floppies was it. The only patches I ever saw were to crack the copy protection. Did quite a few of those myself.

Not in France where I grew up. No patches whatsoever, no ability to get them. Games got released in CGA and you had to buy them all over again to get EGA or VGA versions. Needless to say, no kid could afford that. Maybe their rich parents. Let's just say I had a lot of floppies sent in the mail in the days of V.23 modems.

Was it previously so buggy as to be unplayable ? That was my first thought when I read the headline. In the old days, games used to ship on tapes, cartridges and floppies, with no opportunity to patch them. One had to do actual QA before RTM.

Of course, in this case, it's just some report from some blogger about an unreleased game having somehow reached an internal milestone. Stuff that matters ? Surely not.

It could always be worse, like inkjet printers where your next set of cartridges costs as much as the printer.

1/8th of the console price is not all that bad if it's a game you'll be playing over and over. Like the good old multi-player games, before consoles had any kind of networking and couldn't connect to rhe cloud or depend on it. I spent many dozens of hours playing Mario tennis on N64 on a big CRT with colleagues. It was quite a while ago. The game just never got old.

You can still do it. I did it with an LG gram laptop I got from Costco in November. It came with Win11 home. It wasn't hard to find on a search engine. Took about 5 minutes to find, and perhaps 10 more minutes to do it. You have to make sure not to login to Wifi, not to plug in Ethernet, click the right boxes. As I recall, you need to open a command prompt and type some OOBE command, then reboot. And then it is done. I have 1 desktop, 1 laptop, 2 HTPCs all running Win11 with local account. I would have stayed on Win10 if not for the pending end of support issue, and the fact that many bug fixes weren't getting backported anymore. Win11 has a lot of shortcomings, though, especially the UI which is a regression.

Do you actually know any poor people? I know someone in California on public assistance who bought a used Leaf for less than $5k. He later switched to a used Bolt.

California also instituted flat annual fees on EVs, on the order of $100/year, to pay for road taxes. Our 2015 Volt and 2017 Bolt PHEV/EVs are apparently exempted from those fees still. But newer model years have this fee. We are in no rush to buy new cars, as the ones we have meet our needs. This is just one more reason to keep the older ones.

The annual mileage on my Volt PHEV is very low, and $100 would represent much more than any road tax amount I would spend if driving 100% gasoline. The fee also doesn't distinguish which type of fuel I use.

Last week, the car stopped operating on battery altogether, because the gas in the tank is so old, and it insists on burning all the gas first. It will take at least a month to burn the remainder of the 9 gallon tank, as i am now out of the country.

If not one can afford the food, they'll close shop.

Even if you could get that number, how would you apportion it to a specific purchase, and more importantly, how would it inform your decision to purchase the item or not ? It's not like you have a choice of which country of origin to buy the item from, for most items. The manufacturers are the ones making that decision for you, and they made it over a time period of decades. It won't be reversed overnight.

Even many made in USA items are merely assembled from foreign parts. My husband works in manufacturing, and that's how the business is done. There are no domestic sources of parts for them. If the tariffs on China aren't significantly pulled back, I suspect the company will close shop. They are not essential items, and unlikely to be exempted.

Europeans can do math just as well or better as Americans. Travelers just aren't aware that many prices are pre-tax in the US, because the laws differ.

It's also difficult, even for an American, to memorize all the categories of items that are subject to sales tax or not, as well as things like CRV which can be quite opaque. The prices in a store really should be listed with taxes included, or, at best, both pre and post tax.

You may not need eggs, but your favorite restaurants probably still need them. We found we could live without them, until it was time to bake home made brioche.

People will have to pay more for essentials that are manufactured abroad. That is a loss of purchasing power, and disposable income. Eliminating purchases of unnecessary items can only free up so much. The tariffs will have inflationary effect on essentials, too. Stores may stop importing them if their customers can't afford as many if them as before. Foreign factories may furlough or shut down, without any domestic capacity to readily replace them. Be ready for literal bread lines. Ot brioche, in the case of eggs.

The point of knowing this pre-tax price is that this information helps you look for the same item at the same price out of state, from a company with no presence in your state, which means they won't be required to charge any sales tax when shipping to you. Of course, your own state may require you to declare it. But there is no practical mechanism in place to track it, even for those who wish to comply. So, in practice, the information helps you find a small out of state sellet to avoid paying sales tax to your own state. Not exactly a great societal purpose. But in times when people's purchasing powwr is getting squeezed by tariffs, there may be more of this happening, for those not already doing it, that is.
 

Nobody would ever have heard of him if all he had was failures. The world might have been better off, too, without Brexit.

Is what Gemini tied to convince me of a few weeks ago.

So yes, the AIs can write all the proofs they want. Correct ones ? I have my doubts.

Very similar situation here. But there are fixed wireless ISPs in the area. It works even with the hilly geography. Sometimes a tree will grow too high, and the antenna has to be repointed.

When asking about RSA encryption a few weeks ago, one of the lengthy paragraphs Gemiini responded with explained that 1 is not a prime number.

There is a reason Gemini won't let you share links to conversations, and it's not privacy. It's because the hallucinations are fucking embarassing.

ChatGPT at least lets you share links to one of its replies, but not prompts, and not an entire conversation. The limitation is intentionally.