But this has nothing to do with buying Apple products.

Apple has had deferred payment option for Apple Store for years now with the Apple Goldman Sachs credit card.

This is to purchase anything anywhere that accepts MasterCard apparently using Apple Pay not the Goldman Sachs card.

But I donâ(TM)t think a six week payment schedule helps much of anyone.

An air conditioner IS a heat pump.

A heat pump that heats your home is an air-conditioner with a reversing valve.

It's just a matter of which direction you pump the heat.

I was involved in this late 1990s debacle:

PowerAgent Shuts Doors

It's how I came be be deposed by David Boies. (PowerAgent sued Ross Perot's EDS when the failed to follow-through on promised funding. Bois represented PowerAgent.) I worked for a company that was contracted to do the front-end implementation. (Another company was responsible for backend.)

Part of this scheme was something called PowerFrames. I did the implementation of that.

We "framed" IE and Mozilla, and added a panel with 3 ads at the top, and tapped-in to the URL stream. Both had the means for embedding in an application, I think Mozilla had that first. And perhaps some trickery was needed to tap-in to the URL stream.

The URL stream would be sent to a server, the server would provide relevant ads to the user, and the user was supposed to be paid some incentive for viewing ads. (WGCW?)

At least it was transparent. Management went along with my idea to sign but not encrypt the data stream going up to the server, so that in theory users could examine the stream to make sure it contained only what was disclosed. Of course, there COULD have been some small amount of undisclosed data in the signature block, but there wasn't.

It's also obvious that the manufacturers don't really care to add the features that people want. I have a $3000 smart oven and every time I lose power, I have to reset the clock. With the little up and down button on the control panel. That's right, the oven won't set its clock using Internet time and the app has no "set clock" feature.

The only thing I get out of the "smart package" is that my phone gets an alert when it's preheated. That's it. This is the only useful feature.

So, use renewable energy resources to further heat the planet.

Music to the ears of Buffolonians.

Hellloooooooo!

Universe.

I briefly tried to mine Bitcoin in like 2010. On some motherboard I got at Fry's, with a honking PC Power & Cooling power supply. (San Diego native company, went there to get the PS.) I got my 5 free Bitcoin (Which old hard drive is the wallet on, I wonder, I wonder... which password-safe software did I stuff the private key in, and what's the password to the password-safe?)

I thought I was going to add some coin to the free coins I had in the wallet.

Well, it was summer, and San Diego, and though we have "mild" weather most of the time, it made my spare-bedroom office very ... uncomfortable.

So, that lasted about a week.

This is when I surmised that BitCoin will eventually be worth Z E R O.

But hell of a wait for a bit of schadenfreude.

"Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat! Whoa-oh!"

| Did they remove the most important feature? The one that inserts the "eh" at the end of every sentence?

Naw, they made it impolite.

It's not the manufacturer's responsibility. However, federal law requires that the manufacturer show that the Frankensteining caused the damage. Otherwise manufacturers would say things like "Our grills were never tested with veggie burgers" and use call that a misuse of the product and deny warranty service.

Are they provided free? Of course not. The act was specifically worded that way to get warranty writers to stop requiring specific products and providing a very easy remedy for anyone that does... they give their product away for free.

At the time, auto manufacturers were already set up to make the claim "we're not requiring our parts". They did this by creating companies to sell parts - GM had AC Delco, Chrysler had Mopar, etc. The exact wording in the act was intended to close this loophole.

The paraphrasing is not misleading, it is exactly what was intended and exactly what applying the more specific wording of the act accomplishes. Additionally, Weber violated both the paraphrased statement and the wording in the act since they don't give away replacement parts. So, the paraphrasing is both easier for most people to fit in their heads, and accurate enough to use as a functional replacement. The "settlement" that Weber reached simply puts them in compliance with Magnusson-Moss.

The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act of 1975 says specifically "Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty."

So, apparently the FTC entered into negotiations with Weber and "settled" on having Weber comply with an act of congress that has been on the books for almost fifty years. This was reported in the context of right-to-repair, so I'm curious if Weber made a deal to actually honor the existing law if the FTC would back off on its right to repair demands. Seems like a pretty weak deal if that's even remotely close.

Well, THAT has attracted interest!

A handful of entry-level courses in pretty generic skills. And probably not of much interest to people here. The press release must have been low-effort, as the Reuters story left me wondering what they were talking about, so had to go searching for the Google page (using Google...)

Instagrammers? It's Instagrammers, you say?!

OMG what will Instagrammers do next?

MUST stop the Instagrammers!

Let me see if I have this right.

A database of open subtitles has been hacked. So, now, all those subtitles are - open?

Mind explodes!