Old Man Johnson uses LONG RAMBLING STORY!!!!!

It's super effective!

Enemy geezer has fallen asleep!

The whole premise of "Breaking Bad" is that making high-quality crystal meth and becoming a drug kingpin is easier than obtaining quality healthcare in the US.

A nice quiet boardroom, important sales presentation.... the image on the screen stays a little too long while the presenter answers a question.

Suddenly the screen is filled with an unskippable ad for Karl Jr.'s "Extra-Big Ass Fries", followed by a unskippable commercial featuring a giant-knockered goth girl selling turnip greens to the sound of electric bagpipe music.

What new algorithmic AI-induced hell is this?

I work with many "least fortunate" people with disabilities. The average person is assumed by the social safety net to have internet at this point. Some doctor's offices are "portal driven", and calling them has a cheerful bot telling them to check the website. Plenty of different forms and paperwork are accessible online and you are expected to access it that way. Our city newspaper is online.

Government benefits haven't gone up measurably in years, but inflation is roughly constant at 3% per year, and groceries have risen 25% since 2019. I know lots of people using the ACP funding; none of them have $200 shoes, none of them have cars, the vast majority don't own homes, most of them aren't obese. Some live in ~130 sq. feet of space for which they pay most of their monthly income.

Yes, you can access things through the library internet; for many people with disabilities these trips must be scheduled at least two weeks in advance due to transportation concerns (I work with people who get on the bus at 5am to get to us at 10am), or people live in the sticks where busses don't run - and there is no guarantee if you are blind and at the library that any of the computers will have screenreaders, or that the individual in question has technical literacy or skill with screenreaders in the first place. Take things like Siri / Google Assistant. For someone who has nerve damage / vision loss, even something basic - like having Siri tell you the weather, or the time, or having Google dial someone from your contacts - even if that is all they are doing with the phone (no streaming, etc.) requires a data plan (and not all disabilities have accessibility options on the "Obamaphones".

I have an NEC Multispeed Laptop from 1985 (638K RAM, twin 720k floppy drives) that still works. I have a Dell GX220 (~23 years old) that runs my CNC machine. I recently retired a PII(233 MHZ, 1997, Win95c), and PII(400MHz, 1998, Win98se) from their jobs as media database / label printer and MIDI controller - they were still alive and kicking, but I was worried about depending on 25+ year tech. My daily use PC is a AMD A8 from 2011,and the one before that was an AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHz from 2000. Yes, they get some updates but a decade from a machine is reasonable.

I used TurboBasic Back in the day - it was a BASIC compiler and got pretty good performance. The cool thing about it was that you could also do inline assembler for when you really needed to tweak some speed. It was with TurboBasic I learned that data types really matter - going from the default (undefined) numeric type, which was a single float, to defined integers for some graphics codes enhanced performance by about 2000% or so.

In the Jurassic Park book, they knew the dinosaurs couldn't breed - they had built them to be all female. They even tracked every dinosaur on the island in real-time. However, nobody thought to have the computers *actually count* all the dinosaurs, they just assumed "supposed to be 15 dinos here, 15 dinosaurs accounted for, everything's fine"..... and then completely missed the "uh uh uh life finds a way" problem that the dinosaurs were, in fact, breeding, and there were a lot more dinosaurs on the island than they thought. They had to widen the filter to understand the problem. If we are to believe the statement, the balloons were hiding in a spot we weren't looking because there wasn't supposed to be anything there, and once we start actually looking there are a bunch of the things.

Yes, they did, and yes, its at least mostly wrong. Screen-readers, 99% of the time, are accessing the document directly in memory (e.g. the document, the DOM of a website in the browser, etc.), using accessibility hooks in the OS, not just what is visible on the screen. For the few times when you are saying "I want the screenreader to screenshot and then OCR (optical character recognition) the screenshot and then read me the text", in my experience, the OCR part goes smoothly on most non-captcha fonts (Serif or San-Serif). 5% of the adult population has a vision disability; lets say half of those are using a screenreader of some stripe. This change it font will probably a lot more helpful to the the 10-17% of the population with dyslexia. I just wish big-i and little-L looked different in Calibri (yes, little-L is slightly taller).

I can easily go on StackOverFlow and find PHP code (upvoted, no less) that uses straight mySQL built from assembled strings - no prepared statements or PDO or input sanitation - the little things that make little Bobby Tables' heart go pitty-pat. Security vulnerabilities that have been known and solved for ~2 decades only to have moe-rons perpetuating the cycle of abuse through crap code. I have seen way to many coding projects built from roughly assembled stackoverflow snippits. That the things run at all in the first place is a minor miracle. If ChatGPT takes off, it would lead to *better* code overall, once it knows the "good" way to do it.

At some point, the console wars were waged over hardware that is pitiful in comparison. How much time and money did people pour into games for the SNES/Gameboy/Gamegear/Genesis/etc? And yet the games (the ones that are remembered, anyway), consumed very little space and had high replayability. How many A-list titles now have 15GB+ of texture packs and still manage to suck? The storage space isn't the problem here....

This! If software is allowed to mess up the hardware beyond being fixed on reboot, then the hardware is at the very least badly designed.

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Let the History Channel run with this one... a fabulous treasure, BURIED under piles of garbage...... CAN THIS MAN find it? ARE ALIENS INVOLVED? ...... Cut to hours of pointless digging, interspersed with interviews of crackpot experts and local residents in mumus.

I read a short story - decades ago, not sure of name/author - but the concept was a genetically engineered cold virus that would spread rapidly, had a high R value, and yet would be virtually asymptomatic UNLESS you had a specifically targeted genetic makeup, and to those people it was almost guaranteed to be lethal (insert payload here). It could be tailored as broadly or as narrowly as the geneticists desired.

If you wanted to wipe out an ethnicity or tribe, you would just need enough tissue samples to develop the genetic template for that tribe or that ethnicity. If you wanted to wipe out male members of a tribe, you wouldn't even have to take a flight, just infect your neighbor and a year later (7 degrees of separation, etc.) it reaches the tribe and wipes out all the males. It would also make a perfect assassination vehicle - a pube you left in a public toilet is collected and sequenced, loaded into the virus regex match parameters, spread into the wild (and since it is asymptomatic, NO ONE is alert) and ten months later you drop dead from acute myocarditis - from an infection designed to kill only you.

Of course, you don't have to stop at murder - you could take notes from the zombie ant fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) and play with behavioral alternations - make it so that infected people with genetic profile X become amazingly trusting of anyone wearing a certain scent (coincidentally, the one you wear exclusively).

The riddle is simple if you know the punchline.

A big part of R&D is not knowing what is possible. It took thousands of tries to find a filament that would work for an electric light. It was a long while until we gave up Roman numerals for Arabic numerals and a base-10 system. Newton "wasted" half his life trying to transmute lead into gold; we accept now with hundreds of years of chemistry that this is AFAIK-impossible without nuclear bombardment.... but the point is they didn't KNOW then that it was a futile avenue of research. If we were starting over now, without a single book, the smarter high-schoolers would have a decent grasp of atomic theory and we would not have to waste time researching alchemy.

If you know that it is possible to cook food with radio waves, or cool a house by compressing a gas, or possible to have a machine make billions of calculations a second, or bat dung mixed with saltpeter can accelerate an object faster than sound, that is an enormous starting point over not knowing that any of these things are possible.