Exactly.

The street camera only holds 48 hours. But it offloads that on a daily basis, to whatever long term server is involved. Just like it does now.

rsilvergun's really not getting his $ worth out of this account. Do better.

Well yeah. And? We framed the summary to fit what we wanted people to believe, regardless of what the reference that nobody's going to check says.

Propaganda 101.

This is just self-indulgent doomerism.

Your narcissism requires that you see The End Times(tm) in everything so I get it, you can't just shrug and move on. Our g'g'g'etc parents back several thousand years:
1) watched significant numbers of their children die before adolescence; women would get pregnant and recognize that every single birth was a 1-1.5% chance she dies, often in agony.
2) were born to an average life expectancy of 20-35 years.
3) unless they were 0.1%ers likely couldn't read nor ever hope to be educated, or go more than 10km from home (unless they were captured/enslaved/relocated at the whim of whoever owned them)
4) mostly were serfs, slaves, other menial drudge classes, bound to work like slaves through all the daylight hours of their lives just to (hope to) survive...maybe?
5) lived in constant fear imminent infection, disease, pestilence, and/or war.

And yet they still had families, loved each other, struggled together, and kept on keeping on.

Now?
1) the biggest danger to a conceived child is a liberal woman who sees it as an inconvenience. Of course, even more recently we discover that a terrifying % of 'modern women' feel they can justify disposing of kids themselves even after birth if they're inconvenient or "sad".
2) the developed west children born today live rather more than DOUBLE that, a goodly chunk of those years basically at leisure given ample social networks (& even in the US despite constant weeping that US SS would be gone for the last 50ish years...).
3) in the developed world are what, 99% literate, have (through easy internet) access to all the knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, can live pretty nearly wherever they want, travel where they want
4) are largely free people who get to choose their lives, their partners, their lifestyle at their whim
5) have essentially no fear of imminent infection, disease, pestilence, and/or war.

The latter group have managed to generate abject, paralyzing levels of terror ("I can't bring a child into this world!") over "the sea might rise a handful of inches over the next century" or "I might have to go work in an office instead of sitting at home in my jammies" or "all this cheap food is making me fat" or if that's not enough invented crap to be afraid of, projecting anxiety on behalf of people you have never met, never will meet, nor will ever in your life have anything to do with. (Tell me honestly how many Americans could have pointed to the Donbas on a map in 2008, or even identified what a Rohingya was in 2015?)

I understand your panty-wetting terror and anxiety is very en courant. It's also not very rational, so... on-brand for the times, I guess.

Congratulations, you have created an exact MS Teams exact replacement.

I'm been using chat/messaging apps since BBSing and AIM and I'm not sure I could deliberately design a less useful piece of junk than Team if I tried.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

1) yeah probably but I wouldn't pretend that I'm presenting objective facts, either.
2) the facts don't back me up?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Farti...
"USAID Is Not Worth Blindly Defending
Trump and Muskâ(TM)s war against the agency should be opposed on principle. But we canâ(TM)t overlook that USAID has been a destructive arm of American imperialism for decades."
See also: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heritage.org%2Fprogr...
The Biden admin (treated) "...U.S. foreign aid apparatus as a global platform from which to implement overseas a rigidly ideological and domestically divisive agenda to promote abortion, climate action,
âoegender equity,â and âoeracial justice,â"
(https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.congress.gov%2F118%2Fmeeting%2Fhouse%2F116508%2Fdocuments%2FHHRG-118-GO06-20231025-SD004.pdf)
I *fully* agree that Congress SHOULD have destroyed it. This congress has spent most of its time politically wanking and getting little actually done. And yes, I agree that DOGE was largely a failure. Its only successes were killing USAID and driving 250,000 gov't employees off the books. Only about a million more to go.
3) personally, I think the shitheel Republicans in Washington are only slightly less toxic than the Dems. Both their houses are deeply corrupt and have little or nothing to do with their nominal constituencies outside the beltway. I'm convinced that NEITHER party insiders will allow any 3rd party candidate to survive, and will cheerfully collude with their "opposition" to prevent anyone else from stepping up.

Trump is a COLOSSAL narcissist asshole. Then again, he is despised by the insiders of BOTH parties, and I expect at this point only a wealthy narcissist asshole could possibly make it through their gatekeeping to actually be president anymore. I believe that's a large portion of why every demographic (save white women, lol) shifted rightward in 2026.
But like the Jesse Ventura experiment in MN, it turns out that 'outsider colossal narcissist' doesn't magically turn into a competent leader either if he finally does win. He just stays a narcissist and legislates for himself.

In the end, I'd rather have an incompetent boob in charge that the 4th estate actually scrutinizes, than a Biden/Clinton/Obama figure that is just as deeply corrupt, vastly smarter, and has a servile media cheefully licking his balls.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.

No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.

That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.

I propose "The Bill Gates Maxim".

Anything Bill Gates proposes or theorized should be strongly opposed societally because he is either wrong, evil, or both, in his prognostications.

"Love" is not a complex emotional state, it's an action - just like belief is an action.

"I believe climate change is a real and dangerous threat" - but you still drive a car and go about modern life?
"I believe in Jesus" - but you sleep around and do evil to others?
"I love my boyfriend" - but cheat on him?

What you describe is infatuation, not love. Love is a decision you act on.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

How many of those people infected and hospitalized were vaccinated?

That's the important information we need to know to make an informed decision. Nobody ever shares that information.