I agree we're in the state of decline. Every nation in history has gone through or is going through the same cycle of ramping up, peaking, and then declining.

It's not just in the level of formal education people absorbed .... It's everywhere. I've always been into music and played in an alt-rock band for a while, back in the 1990's. I used to say there was no such thing as "bad music". It was all subjective and anything could be pleasing to the ears of the right listener. In recent years, I'd have to say that's still a fact -- but ... we're seeing a sharp increase in popular music that's mostly computer-generated or simplistic/repetitive, vs requiring a lot of musical skill. How many of today's rock songs actually incorporate complex guitar parts? How many have complicated drum riffs or musically interesting bass lines? Even with just the lyrics -- I'd say it's the exception, today, for a song to tell a full story or have deep meaning or clever lyrics. With your classic rock of the 60's and 70's, that was more of the norm.

The movie industry is the same way. Our local theater has such poor attendance for the latest Hollywood spew, they had to resort to showing random documentaries, which turn out to be far more interesting and draw in a more intelligent crowd, willing to pay the ticket prices.

Who cares, those crazy bastards will burn shit down just because they're smoking meth while high. There is no safely housing addicts.

Now they will start using metal zip ties.

I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

How is this any different from paying with a credit card? Americans have been carrying significant credit card debt for decades.

Seriously. Nobody cares as long as it doesn't affect them. If people cared then most scams would fail because the tools that scammers use would be shut down long ago.

Did you ever wonder why it's so easy to find your personal information and so hard to find the scammer. Because nobody cares about the vulnerable.

People are motivated to pass the problem off to others just like "think of the children" campaigns.

Back in the day, we used to run "tarpit" SMTP servers which looked like an open mail relay but ACK'd incoming packets only just barely fast enough to keep the remote client from timing out and giving up. The theory was that tying up spammer resources was a net good for the internet, as a sender busy trying to stuff messages through a tarpit was tied up waiting on your acknowledgement, reducing their impact on others.

Similarly, perhaps the right answer here is to limit the number of concurrent connections from any one network range, and use tarpit tactics to rate-limit the speed at which your server generate contents to feed the bot -- just keep ramping down until they drop off, then remember the last good rate to use for subsequent requests.

It would perhaps be interesting to randomly generate content and hyperlinks to ever deeper random URLs -- are these new crawlers more interested in some URLs or extensions than others? If you pull fresh keywords from the full URL the crawler requested, will it delve ever deeper into that "topic"? If their Accept-Encoding header supports gzip or deflate, what happens when you feed them a zip-bomb?

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

I can't think of a sci-fi series that's more polarizing than this one in recent memory?

Even in my own group of friends, it runs about 50/50 that people either loved Alien Earth, or they thought it was trash.

I watched it because of a high recommendation from one guy I know, and tried to give it a chance. I had to stop after a few episodes. It was just painfully awful, IMO. I mean, sure - lots of money was poured into good special F/X and it's the creatures we all know from the long-running franchise. But the story line and characters were ridiculous.

I mean, sure -- let's take a bunch of kids and immediately throw them into harm's way, doing "save the planet" stuff! And "Boy Kavalier" is a bad caricature of just about every tech CEO in modern times that people like to poke fun at. Except even more over-the-top with his "poor me ... because I'm SO intelligent, nobody can even have an enjoyable conversation with me" garbage.

The thing is though? I *do* get the points people raise in favor of it. The concept had "legs" in the sense there's potential in the idea you have competing corporations with different approaches to "improving humanity" and it creates a dynamic of tensions between your cyborgs vs your hybrids or synths. It's just that to me, it felt like they took those great ideas and squandered them.

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

This concerns me from the standpoint of using FireSticks for TV signage purposes.

Our workplace uses the "ScreenCloud" software to turn a number of our TVs around our offices into digital sign-boards displaying things like employee birthdays and general office news, calendar info, etc.

We already had issues where Amazon decided to lock down a newer model of FireStick to the point the ScreenCloud app refused to run on it anymore. At first, the makers of ScreenCloud expected us to "root" each FireStick and do a bunch of steps to it in "developer mode" so their app could keep working on one. Then, Amazon locked them out of even that work-around. It seems the two companies got together at that point, and the result was a requirement we buy some more pricey variant of the same FireStick that's designed just for use with ScreenCloud!

I could see a lowish range bev for a second car, as long as I can charge at home. If I can eventually get one cheaply enough.