It’s a good thing we have a stable government, which isn’t about to suffer a shutdown or has some self-important asshole who might get the NTSB shutdown before they can investigate what happened.

Ah, shit.

It was kinda thought of in the '50s. Ford’s concept the Nucleon was to use a fission reaction to heat water, which was used in a steam turbine engine. One of the issues folks worried about was, what happens in a crash? No, no one with a clue worried about a nuclear explosion, but the release of radioactive material would have been a real concern.

Some of this might change with the use of fusion. But, it’s going to be a long time before a fusion reactor would be small/light enough to slap in a car. At the moment, we haven’t really demonstrated a reactor which can commercially produce a net output of power. There has been some small scale experiments which technically produce more power than is used to initiate the fusion; but, that also relied a bit on an accounting trick (they only counted the energy of the lasers themselves, not the total energy used).

Also, when you get down to it, this is the ultimate goal of electric vehicles. Maybe someday, most of our electricity will come from grid scale fusion reactors. Those will charge the batteries which drive EVs. Moving the reactor into the car itself could happen some day. On the other hand, considering how poorly some folks maintain their cars now, would your really trust them to maintain a reactor? Again, not worried about explosions or anything silly. But, the release of radioactive material might still be a concern. It’s probably safe to just use batteries and keep the reactors locked up in large facilities.

We dun fucked up when we made tarring and feathering CEOs illegal.

This is exactly the problem, they have no accountability for bad updates causing hardware to become unusable. So, Q&A just becomes a needless expense and untested firmware is dropped on users. Sure, you could try and sue, or more likely get fucked by a binding arbitration clause. But, the cost would be far beyond what the device costs. So, it never makes sense. There need to be fines when this shit happens, which are significant percentages of worldwide revenue, to scare companies into actually testing updates before they are released.

In the end, all we can do is shake our heads and remind folks to never buy HP. They put out great products 30 years ago, but those days are long gone. Now, they just put out crap.

Hopefully, this will be another rousing mobile success for Microsoft. Right up there with the Windows Phone.

I’m torn between the beach house and the mountain house. I love the beach and would love to be able to wake up and wander out into the waves. Especially if the beach features tropical waters and soft, rock free, sand. Though, this home could easily be monkey pawed by placing the house on some rock strew nightmare of a beach with cold waters (or the opposite, for those folks into foot killing beaches). That said, such a beach house would invariably be overrun during the tourist season, and hell being other people, this would greatly reduce the joy of living there.

The mountain home, on the other hand, offers a wonderful sense of solitude. And skinny dipping with the wife in a hot tub is a fantastic way to start an autumn evening. Though, even in the mountains, you can find subdivisions where the houses are piled on top of each other and the “sense of solitude” has trouble being maintained with the neighbors plainly visible though the trees. And once you get into full blown winter, the cold can start to wear on you. So again, possibly a mixed bag, depending on the specific circumstances.

So ya, I guess I’d take the beach house and just take vacations to somewhere else during the high season. Maybe set it up as an AirBnB or the like for those times. Though, the idea of random strangers doing gods know what on my mattress kinda creeps me out. Guess I’d need a storage unit with rental furniture to swap out during those times as well.

Why do you expect to receive someone else’s work for free? Part of the reason the web has become so enshitified is that no one is willing to pay for anything anymore. We all expect everything to be “ad supported”, and then we act shocked when everything is covered in ads.

That said, there are usually open source alternatives for most software packages out there. They may not have complete feature parity or have quite the same slick UI as the commercial products. But, they do tend to be both free in terms of cost and ads. E.g for image editing, there is Gimp. It’s not going to replace Adobe Photoshop in professional spaces anytime soon. But, for a home user who isn’t willing to shell out the Adobe Tax, it’s a reasonable choice.

But, the reason so much is paywalled is because everything takes time and money to create. Someone has to pay that cost. Maybe it’s advertisers, maybe it’s a dedicated team of volunteers. But increasingly, creators are asking users to pay directly.

Decades ago, my father would have some fun with the receipt checkers at Costco. After a shopping trip, we’d commonly have lunch at the cafe in Costco. When leaving the store, he’d hand the receipt checker the receipt for lunch rather than the receipt for the items bought. More than half the time, the checker would just swipe the receipt with a highlighter (their way of marking it “checked”) without noticing that it was the wrong receipt. So ya, it’s complete security theater. Anyone with a modicum of thought can figure ways around it, and it only accomplishes inconveniencing the people who aren’t trying to get away with anything.

Wall Street questioned how much pain President Donald Trump will let the economy endure through tariffs and other policies in order to get what he wants.

Trump wants to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Depression with an even bigger one. It’ll be the Greatest Depression. With bigly unemployment! More economic pain than you can imagine. And Canada will pay for it!

I think the most surprising thing here is that 60% of networks don’t allow any/any. I swear, the number of devs I’ve had to convince that they don’t actually need to plop their MySQL backend on the open web, to allow their web front end to reach it, is way higher than it should be. Folks moved their workloads to “the cloud” and decided that we needed to internet like it was 1999.

Always look on the bright side of life

I’d be curious to see how they handle the problems which have cropped up with similar systems in the past. Player housing, for example, can be an absolute nightmare. I was actively playing UO back when they implemented player housing, and it was a clusterfuck. You couldn’t go three steps without slamming into someone’s house and most of them ended up being owned by a few big guilds, because space was at such a premium that no one else could afford one. And with the land so littered with houses, they had to create an alternate world to quest in, which specifically didn’t allow player houses. I can also see the systems they are designing becoming a playground rife for griefing. Look at that nice home you built. It would be a shame if someone diverted a river into it while you weren’t online.

MMO’s greatest strength can also be their greatest weakness: and that strength is other people. The more open and free-form a world is, the easier it is for the griefers to find and exploit edge cases.

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of the skill sets of salespeople and politicians, it wouldn’t quite be a circle, but I suspect it’d be pretty close. Politicians exist to convince you that they are going to represent your interests in whatever level of government they are running for. Once there, they need to negotiate for their policy positions with the other elected representatives. The main difference is that the currency of politicians is votes, instead of money.

Sure, some of them might actually believe the bullshit coming out of their mouths. But, even then, they have to convince others to vote for them and then vote with them. That requires skills like negotiation, and persuasion, much the same as sales. Though, politicians probably have a greater emphasis on public speaking.

I’ve not played Wingspan, so I can’t really compare the two. On it’s own, I like Wyrmspan. Though, it’s almost like each player is playing their own game and you just compare points at the end to see who did the best. To the point that, during one turn we had two players end up with a few extra actions to complete, and the third player got up from the table and walked off for a bit, without much of a worry that his game would be effected by the other two doing stuff.

Had a game afternoon this past weekend. Broke out:

• Wyrmspan
• The Quest for El Dorado

And a couple of simpler games to allow for general socializing and relaxing:

• Chicken
• Just Desserts
• Tsuro

This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
– President Eisenhower

It seems that this is going to be put to the test.

Kinda makes sense. Microsoft Teams fills the same space and Skype hasn’t been P2P for a long time. Other than the brand, there’s nothing really left of Skype anyway to turn off.

About once per year, I start up a new character in Quest for Glory 1. Always the EGA version. It’s like putting on a comfy blanket and drinking a hot cup of nostalgia.

It depends on what your goals are.

• Ventoy is good for having an alternate OS on a Thumbdrive. Even with a USB 3 device, you may encounter I/O blocking and find this isn’t suitable as a “daily driver” OS. However,. for booting something like Tails or Windows/Linux for OS specific hardware/applications, it can be a good solution.
• Dualbooting is a good way to “test drive” an alternate OS and also have a way to fallback to the other OS if you regularly need access to some software which only runs on that OS. This is likely to have better performance than the USB/Ventoy setup at the cost of Windows fucking up the bootloader config from time to time.
• Windows/Linux with a Linux/Windows VM is useful when you know what OS you want to run on a day to day basis, but have some reason to reach into the other OS on occasion and aren’t too worried about performance and hardware access in the alternate OS.

Ultimately, it’s going to come down to what you are trying to do and why you want to run multiple Operating Systems. For example, my main system is running Linux. But, I want the ability to run Windows malware in a controlled sandbox (not a euphemism, I work in cybersecurity and lab some stuff for fun). So, I have KVM setup to run Virtual Machines, including Windows.

For another example, prior to making the switch to Linux, I had Windows as my primary OS and booted Linux on a USB stick (not Ventoy, but close enough). This let me gain confidence that I would be able to make the jump.

I don’t have a good example for dual booting. Maybe something like a SteamDeck where you want a stable, functional OS most of the time; but, have some games which will only run in Windows.

17 and 19 is a two-year gap, that’s totally fine.

Might want to check the laws in your local jurisdiction. In the US, in some States this may be OK under Romeo and Juliet Laws (check your local laws if the whole “kill yourself from a misunderstanding” bit of the story is required). But, some States do not have such laws. No idea if/how this applies in other countries.