High-speed school-to-prison pipeline. Because inmates=free labour and prisons are for-profit. Gotta get 'em kidz institutionalized as early as possible!

Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.

Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you'll cry and you'll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We'll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)

Probably it doesn't quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it's much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.

Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).

DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.

Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.

Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.

Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.

And many others.

"How do I compromise with someone who wants to put me standing at a wall and shoot me? Stand sideways?"

Prime example that for a publicly traded company the people buying the products are not customers for whom to create value, but a resource to extract value from.

Shareholders are the real customers for whom they create value.

The perfect catch-22. Carrying a smartphone? It will be seized, searched and used against you. Not carrying a smartphone? This fact itself is used as evidence against you. This is something straight outta NKVD playbook, Beria would be proud.

Stupidity. Stupidity never changes.

Third party apps: "OK. We'll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can't find a workaround."

All this ado about "woke" this and "woke" that by the snowflakes... Pathetic.

If Ridley Scott released Alien today snowflakes would have a complete meltdown—imagine that, a black man and two women (neither of whom look like teen anime waifus, the horror!) in a cast! And the roles were written as gender neutral, for crying out loud!

PC. Because:

1. Better controller support—I'm not limited to what MS or Sony deem as "certified" or "authorized" hardware. Most of the really good hardware (VKB, Virpil, Arduino) will never be available for consoles and what little is available is bad at best.
2. Best sims are PC only (DCS, Il-2, E:D, X series, Hunternet etc)
3. Sims support 3rd party auxiliary software (TacView, EDDiscovery, OMH, EDMC etc) for better experience and that's simply not going to be possible on consoles, ever.
4. For other games, modding experience on PC is simply better. SKSE and ENB is what keeps Skyrim going and makes it still relevant 13 years later. Can't have this kind of code injection and wrappers on consoles.
5. If I ever get into retrogaming, emulation is the way, especially since actually acquiring retro console games in their original physical format is bound to become a very expensive collector's hobby if you don't have your own collection from childhood already or don't have local second-hand options.

Pretty much any Batman movie. It's subtle, because it's not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d'entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.

I'd argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.

Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that's standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.

Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it's so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.

Honestly, the best platform to play Bethesda games is PC anyway. What makes Bethesda special is their embracing of modding, and PC being an open platform allows for much, much more in that respect. IIRC, on Playstation one couldn't even use custom assets in mods, and console makers will never allow script extenders, .NET frameworks and ENB series that allow for amazing stuff on PC.

family is everything, child need them

My favourite part is when the conservatives start talking about all children absolutely needing mother and father. Not just parents, not a parent, not a family; mother and father specifically. Yeah, sure, now what about the millions of single parents? Shall we start forcefully assigning a new spouse of opposite sex to them the day after their current spouse dies, divorces (if we keep that as an option, that is), runs away or whatever? All pregnant people who are not in a relationship are immediately married off to a random person of opposite sex? No opt-out. Because think of the children!

Writes a song at 115 BPM. Makes it use double time. Occasionally changes tempo to 161 BPM half-time. Adds three layers of polyrhythms to it. Spices things up with metric modulation between 4/4, 13/8 and 17/7. Hides a sample of the "trolololo song" somewhere in there.

Trollface.jpg

Velcro, or maybe Van Der Waals force, or maybe whatever the hell makes gauge blocks stick to each other.

Guess it's time to dust off those VOR navigation skills, then..

And, as ususal, fuck Putler and his cronies.

Most of the services you use every day run on Linux servers. Even Microsoft uses Linux on their servers. And these services, not an average laptop, are the main targets of malicious actors.

The vast majority of behind-the-scenes infra that the end user never sees are open-source, even if the end-user part is proprietary. Eg. Facebook and Xwitter are proprietary, but run on open-source infrastructure like Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx etc.

Proprietary OS-s are workstation/office/home PC land. They have way more security issues due to crap coding whereas security problems with open-source server stuff are as a rule the fault of the admins misconfiguring services and not keeping their software up to date.

In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website [REDACTED], not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.

So how is this "hacking" if the information is publicly accessible for all?

The very day Hamas attack happened I suspected that there's no way Israel's intelligence orgs, some of the best in the world, did not know about the plan for the attack way before it happened. This whole affair stinks to the high heavens.

Wasn't normal 35mm film about the equivalent of somewhere between 4k and 8k depending on the film stock?

Plus, the projector optics will always limit the sharpness of the picture. No lense is ideal, and even ideal lenses would have fundamental limitations due to diffraction.

For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.

Shareholders are the real customers.

People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.

"A paintball player? Clearly you must be a gung-ho militarist who loves war!"

"Have a BDSM kink? You go around kidnapping and torturing people, don't you?"

"So you like reading murder mysteries, huh? Seems like you're a murderer yourself, then!"

—Some South Korean judge, probably.

Yeah, sorry, no. Even if I had the space, when I get home from work at 1900 the last thing I want to do is more work. It's not like you can just plop some seeds into soil and do nothing until the harvest is ripe—I know, we had a decent family garden when I was a wee lad. Took a lot of work to keep it going.

If I worked 4 or even 6 hours a day—sure, I could add some homework to my day. But not when working 8 hours+commuting. And many people are working even longer days.

At least Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, had actual classes (let's not talk about the leveling system, shall we?) and spell making. Plus some really, really good questlines (including the main quest, and the whole Shivering Isles expansion was rad AF). The cities also felt larger than in Skyrim and the Arcane University was an actual university, not a random village school with 3 students. Role-play wise Skyrim was the weakest of the three modern ES games.

IP-ratings might suffer, but I'd wager that a global reduction in e-waste is more important.

Nokia made water resistant phones that had replaceable batteries 20 years ago. I owned two, both survived several water immersions.

Zero. Because it's turned off when I'm away from home for more than a few hours or sleeping. It never gets more than 24 hours of uptime, ever.

Even if my home server is turned on 24/7 it still runs a chron job to do a weekly reboot on sunday nights to keep things tidy.

Alien. It's the pinnacle of horror movies. And what makes it so good is the believability of it all. There is no supernatural, no ghosts, no masked mass murderers, no silly "monsters" that defy all the laws of biology and physics.

There are a few progressive/left wing ones, yes, eg The Institute for Policy Studies. But, unsurprisingly, conservative ones seem to have much more money and influence.

Winter:
-10°C outside, sometimes colder; comfy +22°C inside. Sun sets at 1600, but that's what tea, candles and mood lighting is for. Everything is nice and quiet outside, with an occasional noise of snowplows after it snows.

Summer:
30°C outside, 30°C inside (aircon is not common here in older houses). Hotter in the sun in the middle of the sea of asphalt and concrete that is called "city". Sun sets at 2200 and rises at 0400.

When the sun rises it's like fucking Jurassic Park outside when all the birds wake up and start making noises. And by "birds" I mean not lovely songbirds like blackbirds and skylarks but pidgeons, crows and seagulls (and no, I don't live by the sea; I live pretty much as far from the sea as one can in my country. The city is overrun with seagulls.). They seemingly love to scream right into the ventilation shafts of apartment buildings.

When the sun sets in summer all the inebriated revellers come out and start making noises including loud and off-note singing, loud laughing and loud inarticulate screaming. Add loud boomboxes to the mix and it's one hell of a racket.

Also, mosquitos. Lots of mosquitos.

Hiram claimed that his troops felt in danger due to intelligence that Hamas had a network of tunnels under the university

You're fucking soldiers in a fucking war zone. You're always in danger, there is no way to be safe in a war. If you think that the enemy is upon you, you change your position—do you even tactic, wimps? Did you learn anything in your basic training, maggots? Fucking cowards, go back home and play counterstrike if you want to feel safe.

Obviously somewhere along there were some hubs that weren’t obvious to the naked eye.

Probably the port on your laptop was on a hub built onto the mobo. If my understanding is right that's how USB ports usually are connected: controller->hub->ports. If you open up device manager and go to USB controllers you'll see several root hubs and hubs even when you have no external hubs or docks connected.

But this is the whole point; for a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom they create value. Shareholders and investors are the real customers. People who buy the products are precisely just a resource to extract value from for these companies.

In-ear phones have the potential of having the highest fidelity of all headphone types. So, no, being a "codec snob" is completely justified. Though I personally won't be using BT phones before we get lossless connection as a standard. Wired are cheaper, last longer and have less environmental impact during production and after EOL.

Forget about the neighborhood; the whole city's omae wa mou shindeiru along with the suburbs.

Honestly, the title confused me slightly—wasn't sure if it was about a workstation PC, GPU, ARM based microserver, gaming laptop or what. 24 GB of RAM and 240 W charging seem completely ridiculous for a phone.

Well, let's light 'em bridges up in glorious RGB rainbows anyway, just under the pretense of "PC Gaming Month", concurrent with a Steam sale of coincidentally LGBT+ themed games🙃

...And thus a truly cosmic amount of salt shall be generated by both conservatives and g4m3r manchildren🤪

Used to play strategy games quite a lot 20 or so years ago. AoE, Homeworld, Red Alert. But I never got very deep into them.

The main reason I don't like strategy games anymore is that most of them simply boil down to micromanagement and actions-per-minute. That is not how my brain works. I hate micromanaging and multitasking. I love planning tactics, doing recon and analyzing the situation (as long as I don't have to do statistical analysis with spreadsheets for that), setting goals and executing plans.

Best strategy game I've ever played? X3: Terran Conflict. Once you set your plans in motion everything works pretty much automatically—you don't have to order your traders or military forces around constantly or set up product batches in your factories manually. You set up parameters by which your assets work, and aside from occasional tweaking and optimization you leave them to their own devices. Instead you concentrate on the actual grand strategy or a single battle at hand or putting out some random brushfire that needs your attention without the worry about your "villagers" standing around idle because they can't figure out there's a fresh patch of fish 100 meters to the left.

Plus you're there, in situ, as an actual participant in the world, not an abstract godhand hovering over the map. First-person strategy. Commanding two task groups steamrolling through a sector from the bridge of your cruiser, sipping coffee as turrets put on a massive fireworks around you is epic.

Vortex is not a launcher, it's a mod manager. And you don't have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.

Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!

Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.