According to Wikipedia gambling requires three elements: consideration, chance and prize.

Packs of cards certainly have the first two - consideration is (according to my reading) the promise or exchange of payment. I'm not sure I'd agree about "prize", considering packs of cards are clearly labeled to have "n random cards". Some may be worth more than others, but it's unlikely to buy a new pack of Magic cards to find one card worth much more than the price paid for the cards.

Loot boxes, on the other hand, have prizes that have 'street value' much higher than the price paid. Though due to the chance the prize is often much lower. That's more akin to Poker, there's some slim chance you can win 100x what you paid, though more often than not you lose money.

Yes, but "Galaxy Note 9" doesn't have the same ring as "iPhone excess Max". The cherry on top would be the "i'm rich" app with the little gem in the task bar.

Gluttony and Envy are strong in the ranks of technology.

win + r, gpedit.msc
Poke around and change some settings, it's pretty well documented what each flag/option does. Then again, if you can't be bothered to google for an answer to your questions, then I doubt this comment would be much help either.

Or all the crap from Windows/Temp or Windows/winsxs. The former is all of the random crud from installs and updates (much like /tmp/). The latter is the pre-install downloaded patches and updates - which is kept around for god knows how long "just in case" something goes wrong. I've seen 50GB taken up between them, and their automated cleanup tool doesn't help. The winsxs folder in particular requires SYSTEM access to clean up.

To be fair, at the rate the government moves 20 years is roughly 5 years for a corporation. Just look at the computers being used on the air field - go ahead, I'll catch up with my 5.25" floppies in a minute.

When we get mega-corporations that compete in more than one arena the consumer ALWAYS loses. Comcast has local monopilies around the US and can command whatever price they want for their shit service - and NOBODY can do anything about it. The consumer has to suck it up and pay up for dropped connections and piss poor speed, or do without. The internet is becoming a necessity, so most will cough up the dough.

Now imagine Amazon had a stranglehold on something that's a true necessity like food distribution. They own Whole Foods and move forward with storehouses as you suggested. They control the price that the consumer pays - and profit from both the food and shipping. They can command whatever price they like, either pay up or starve (literally). They already have had some lawsuits regarding price fixing (Apple is who turns up for ebook fixing - seem to remember Amazon had some hand in it too), so I don't believe for a second Amazon would be altruistic in their pricing.

Keep the competition fair and consumers win. Let Amazon Shipping compete with UPS, FedEx and USPS on shipping and logistics, and Whole Foods (without the Amazon umbrella) compete with Smiths/Wegmans/Albertsons/whatever on food.

My nearest bus stop is 7 miles away, nearest train stop is 3 miles from work (~12 miles for me). My options are ~35 min of drive time, an hour and a half of biking, an hour for car + train, or near two hours for some combination with a bus. As mentioned in one of my previous comments, even dedicated bike lanes are in short supply and I'd be taking my life in my own hands with 3000lb wrecking balls flying 3 feet next to me at 50mph.

My city doesn't even have buses, I'd be going to an adjacent city to get to work. How's that for fun?

Personally, I think the best way is to set caps on compensation. Specifically, the CEO should only be able to make n times as much as their lowest-paid employee. Lets set that number to something reasonable, like 25. If Mr/Mrs CEO wants to make somewhere in the millions, then that lowest paid employee is going to be making $40k minimum. The law would have to include verbiage accounting for things like stock options and whatnot - so we do away with this "My CEO salary is $1, but I got my $100m bonus and $500m in stock options" nonsense.

The problem isn't necessarily corporate greed, but personal greed. Corporations are not money-grubbing ass-hats, the people running them are.

Oracle forgets a major point about cloud services. They have to be both available AND work.

Taking this one step further, your eye only has roughly 6-7 million color sensitive cones, with a large density of them in the center of your vision. 1920 x 1080 is 2,073,600 total pixels, while 4k has ~ 4 million pixels. At some point your eyes are physically not going to be able to take in all of the information being presented to them.

In other words, 8k is simply too many pixels for the human eye to make sense of - even if you were somehow able to limit your vision to only the 8k screen right in front of you.

That's right up there with the names of video standards:
240p - SD
480p - SD
720p - HD
1080p - Full HD ( *should* technically be "2k" referring to the total amount of horizontal pixels - 1920px. )
2160p - 4K Ultra HD
4320p - 8k Ultra HD

Nevermind the fact that the human eye with 20/20 vision couldn't differentiate the pixels of a 65" 1080p TV from 10 feet away, but I digress.

People DON'T pay for Android. Not even the big vendors like Samsung. Where Google makes its money is via OEM lock-in with the play store and assorted data collection and advertising revenue that results from that. The play store is also free, but OEM's cannot provide their own app store and expect to have the fully-featured android. It's ingenious really, subsidizing the cost of OS development by forcing everyone who has your OS to use only your store. It's exactly what MS wants to do with Windows 10 - and why Valve was up-in-arms about the Windows Store and Win10, then developed SteamOS.

Google moved most of their stuff outside of Android proper years ago, now they can handle a majority of the updates directly with the Play Store.

What if the pilot lights a match?

Nintendo has long had a stance about protecting it's own IP. That's part of why they had the "Officially Licensed by Nintendo" on their NES cartridges - complete with the locking chip. They bought the rights to the two adult film parodies of the Super Mario Bros so the films wouldn't be distributed. They issued a DMCA take-down to the developer of AM2R just prior to their release of Metroid: Samus Returns.

Sony, Sega and Microsoft have all used similar tactics to try to keep their IP within their walls. The only argument I have with them being ham-handed with the NES/SNES/N64 romsets is *it's not all theirs*. Nintendo *shouldn't* have any right to cease distribution of an NES Rom of Castlevania - that's Konami's job.

On the flip side, Digital music distribution has shown that if you make it easier for the public to get what they want, piracy becomes a (mostly) non-issue. If Nintendo had followed in the footsteps of iTunes and released the entire NES/SNES/N64 library via virtual console and made it crazy cheap and simple to get classic games I'm sure we wouldn't be seeing this nonsense. Instead they did away with the VC and it's stupid "nintendo points" currency.

It sure worked wonders for Blackberry...