You're missing the point.

That's a user-initiated quality drop. It's up to you whether you drop the video quality or not, it's up to you whether you want to use the data or not.

The problem comes when they say "We're going to force you to have lower video quality, by limiting the speed of your connection when you go to certain video streaming sites who didn't pay us. We're also not going to do that when you go to the sites that did pay us."

GAH!!!! NO!!!!!!!

Why would you want to do that? "Modern" websites are terrible.

His site is one of the most pleasant I've seen. It's just fine as is, uncorrupted by the awfulness of CSS and JavaScript.

If you are trying to explain why we haven't detected any aliens, how is "they were massacred by even more advanced aliens" a remotely adequate answer? That just leaves you with "why haven't we detected the even more advanced aliens?". The question was never "why do we detect so many deathbots and so few little green men?"

If anything, superintelligences are presumably more capable of doing high-visibility things(if they want to) by virtue of being more advanced; and, while they could all be carefully hiding because they're paranoid that same explanation would hold for standard aliens as well.

Seems like an awful lot of hypothesis to explain nothing.

Yep. He's even worse at predictions than I am.

But yeah, he's been selling these bottles for a long time now. I'm reasonably sure that site was featured on Slashdot back when getting Slashdotted was still a thing. I know I've seen it here before. I'm too lazy to look for it.

A Laserjet 2300DN was the last one I installed that didn't suck, and the next to the last HP I ever installed. That printer lasted over a decade.

A year or so later, I installed a 2400DN at the same client. It lasted a bit more than a year, just long enough for the warranty to expire. I never installed another HP.

The firmware update broke the printer. Before the update, 3rd party ink worked, after it, 3rd party ink didn't.

Nobody is saying that 3rd party ink broke the printer. HP broke the printer.

Oh, it isn't. But Apple did just get smacked down hard in Europe, and Europe isn't done with them yet because they're playing games instead of actually opening up the iDevices.

I still can't understand what was wrong with the idiot judge in the US who let Apple win a suit that they should have lost. But Apple's days of customer abuse are numbered. Oregon just banned parts pairing, the FTC is going after Apple's monopoly.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.

I'd agree that a production system that actually relies on actual floppies would be rolling the dice in a deeply uncomfortable way at this point; but I'm a little puzzled by the extent of the fuss given that(admittedly, more for hobbyist and niche stuff, retrocomputers and synths from the floppy era, that sort of thing) the practice of emulating floppy drives is quite well established and, thanks to the age and (low) speed of the busses in question, pretty technically undemanding.

If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.

I'm not talking about the sound. I'm talking about the smell.

DIY is a real possibility now with mini-split systems. They come with pre-charged linesets, you don't need a license to install them.

If you can live with the swamp cooler for a few more years, I would. That's just because new units with hydrocarbon refrigerants are starting to roll out, R134a and R410a are being phased out, and with hydrocarbons there won't be any need to worry about discharges for service in the future, the EPA has exempted the new refrigerants from licensing requirements. The hydrocarbon refrigerant units are still expensive right now, that should change soon.

A heat pump is just an air conditioner with a reversing valve. There's no excuse for the current contractor price gouging. My 3 ton heat pump was about $3500 over a decade ago.

The 'refrigerant' in a swamp cooler is water. No license needed.

I'm guessing because small children like to touch things, and don't know what high voltage is. And because big oil sponsored the thing for a long time.

It looks like the cars have some steerability from the pics, I've never seen it in person. That would add complexity to the pickups, particularly if they've got to be shielded from being able to be touched. Small gas engines are cheap, custom designed track riding electric pickups and track systems... aren't. And the rat loves to make money.

Since it doesn't run 24/7 (I'm assuming), batteries might make more sense.

I'm guessing since they're using small engines that the cars don't have catalytic converters. I remember when lots of cars without them were still on the road, it smelled awful everywhere.

But something you probably don't realize most of the time because you're used to it: Cars stink.

They don't smell as bad as they used to, but they're still not pleasant to be around. And when you get behind some asshat redneck who removed the cat or somebody whose cat got stolen, it's truly awful. I'm looking forward to everything on the road being electric.