My grandfather had a CoCo. Whenever I visited (which was fairly often as my grandparents were less than an hour away at the time), I worked through the tutorials in Getting Started with Color BASIC . Eventually, I got a TI-99/4A at home, and then an Apple IIe. All of those put me on the path to where I am today, 40+ years later.

So you're saying not to hire people from San Francisco?

Not speaking for the OP, but yes. :)

various Microsoft tools - such as the setup programs for SQL Server Management Studio - like to lock out the Explorer window

I've not observed that behavior in a long time...and as it happens, Winget is upgrading SSMS as I type this. Everything else continues to work as normal while it does its thing.

On what are you basing that statement?

The first meme of the two here explains it.

The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.

I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.

And this is on Slashdot why?

Ditto. News for nerds? Stuff that matters? I'm not seeing it.

Ungoogled Chromium and SearXNG are your friends. They do what they say they do, without putting your privacy up for sale.

So, building out gas stations all over the country and regularly shipping fuel to each one of them was doable, but connecting chargers to the existing electrical grid is too difficult?

When the grid is barely adequate for the existing load? Yes, building out infrastructure for a fleet of battery-powered devices is pointless, unless you want to also build out a shit-ton of generating capacity to back it up.

You thought wrong. I have seen Vizio TVs at Costco, although not in a while.

My first LCD TV was a 30" Vizio, purchased at Costco the better part of 20 years ago. At the time, it was a relatively inexpensive HD TV from a company nobody had heard of, but it worked like a champ for me...until some asshole broke into my condo and stole it. :-P

You might have missed my previous post, I agree and want to add that to me it is even a bit more than that.

There is a complex interaction when you see a milk jug full of water hit by a bullet, or see the flow of plasma on the sun twisted by gravity and magnetic fields, or the plasma of the big bang as the expansion of the universe pulls it apart.

But they can be summed up as a expanding force vs a force of cohesion in all of them. Gravity is a force of cohesion on a cosmic scale, but so is magnetism. And at the great inflation, the lingering cosmic filaments of stars and galaxies look very similar to the water spreading from a hit from bullet where the cohesion is from more molecular forces.

If there was a "then a miracle occurs" part of cosmology that still existed, it would be the dark energy that continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe.

But it has one other side effect that isn't spoken of much -- creating clean entropy. How did we go from a homogeneous plasma at the big bang to such different hot/cold regions in the universe? Expansion, which has a similar effect on condensing gasses into liquids and even freezing them into solids. Only in this case some of that condensation ignites and creates the starts, pinpoints of very clean entropy to power whole solar systems. Expansion is what winds the clock of entropy, creating the differentials that then re-mix and make work happen.

So I completely agree, and if you ask me the story of creating entropy differentials for the universe to do work is the "then a miracle occurs" part of the story that still remains.

...or SmartTube, which also supports SponsorBlock.

What I'd really like to see is an alternative YouTube client that supports Invidious, so you can move your subscriptions off of YouTube's servers. Invidious works pretty well in a browser window, but an app that runs on Android TV, talks to an Invidious instance (I run my own; it's pretty easy to do), and includes SponsorBlock support would be great. I might even be willing to cut a few bucks loose for such an app. :)

Is this real? Do you have a link to verify this?

They've been doing this for several years already, starting at Gen 8 with their "SmartCarrier" trays. This caught me out when I bought a server and some drives separately and set about bringing up the assembled server. See here for more information. I was eventually able to bring it up after putting the drives in a different knockoff SmartCarrier-compatible tray that I found someplace.

I just got my ET-3760 running again after it had clogged so badly it wouldn't print anything. (This cleaning kit works pretty well for fixing that problem, BTW.) I have had to replace the overflow tank (or "ink maintenance box," as the replacement was labeled), but I've not yet run across the page-counter issue you mentioned.

Between that and an HP LaserJet 1320 that's probably approaching 20 years old now (so it predates HP's enshittification by quite some time), my printing needs should be all set for the foreseeable future.