Because your perception of things given to you by people who want you to distrust the media is incorrect.

It's going to be different this time. Yeah I know, that's been said before too.

The growth is exponential. The last 100 years or so have been exactly as you describe. Milkmen become refrigerator salesmen. So what?

But there is a ceiling. Name a profession that goes beyond automation engineer. Milkman to salesman to this to that...eventually you run out of space. That is happening, right now. Before much longer there will be robots, the people who build and program and service them...and nothing else. There isn't anything past that.

I'm not lamenting it, I'm just wanting us to be prepared for it. Because nobody takes it seriously and I have no idea why nobody takes it seriously. Things are due for a big change and we are amazingly unprepared for it.

I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."

You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.

I think I can help.

The problem with your statement here is the "is not wanted and is not needed" part. This software is wanted and is needed.

Sure, you can buy a copy of Windows and run Windows software. You are correct - that need is fulfilled perfectly well.

By one vendor, and one vendor only. That is the important bit.

As a mental exercise, let's say that Microsoft does something completely odious in their next Windows 10 patch. All your personal data is collected and stored at Microsoft and sold to the highest bidder. Advertising everywhere. (Yes yes I know, people already feel this is happening. Bear with me.)

What now?

You're a small dev company writing an application. You have to write it for Windows because that's 90% of the market share, pretty much. You have years into development and it has to be for Windows because you don't have the resources to run it anywhere else. And now suddenly Microsoft is doing this terrible thing, and you don't want to be a part of it.

You could release your application on a ReactOS image. You get all the Windows functionality, and none of the "locked in to one vendor-ness" of Windows.

So long story short, choice is good. There is a metric ton of legacy code and applications that depend entirely on Windows, and having a single point of failure for all of it is untenable. This is why projects like ReactOS and WINE are valuable.

Toni Wilen, the programmer for WinUAE has different goals in mind other than creating an excellent gaming experience. He's trying to recreate the *entire* Amiga ecosystem in a single program. His web page usually has him asking for obscure boards and roms because he wants to emulate it all. I think this is a grand goal.

Every single board I used to drool over in the old Amiga magazines and wish I could buy, he wants to emulate. So for someone like me being able to run an Amiga Blizzard board or an accurate Amiga 4000 or some such...it's a way to scratch a very old itch.

Toni also got MMU emulation working, which made Amiga Linux possible. It was a HUGE kick to see the old m68k linux stuff come up in the emulator. Not everyone's cup of tea, obviously. But a lot of fun. Reading the EAB threads as the thing was coming closer and closer to boot was pretty exciting. I'm sure I'm a minority on that, but still, I thought it was a lot of fun.

But to your point, WinUAE can also provide an excellent and simple gaming experience. The first default configuration tab has default *stock* Amiga configurations right there. Just select an OCS Amiga 500, and 99% of your games will run. You don't have to drill down into the tech stuff and twiddle chipsets to make things work.

However, the police need to assess the situation on their own before taking action. That is part of their responsibility, and why they are supposedly trained in law enforcement.

Yes, this. Thank you.

Apparently you can pick up a phone, being absolutely anybody and make up a story - and police will storm a building and shoot people. No questions asked. They won't verify anything, they won't assess the situation when they arrive on the scene, they will never consider it's a prank call - none of this. They will kick in a door and start shooting.

You can pick up a phone and make this happen in this country. That's a strange thing, isn't it?

Is the prank caller culpable? Certainly. But nobody ever looks at the police that show up. Nobody ever asks if they might need a little more training before kicking in doors and shooting people.

I wonder why that is?

To my way of thinking, the cops are every bit as wrong as the prank caller and possibly more so. You would hope that police officers would do better. Ostensibly their profession is to serve and protect, I'm told. Perhaps they might want to focus on that aspect of it a bit, rather than using Judge Dredd comic books as source material and blasting anything that moves for thrills.

The ruling of "involuntary manslaughter" to me is an admission that we know that a large enough percentage of the cops we have are ill prepared for their jobs, poorly trained and/or have the wrong temperament for the job, and therefore dangerous in and of themselves.

Prequels? What do you mean? There weren't any prequels. I didn't hear anything about any prequels and I certainly didn't see any prequels. I don't know what you're talking about. No sir. That would be as bad of an idea as Highlander sequels. Which didn't happen and I didn't see either. So yeah, no idea what you're talking about.

There will be a movie about power droid before they're done.

The charge is involuntary manslaughter.

From that link:

Three elements must be satisfied in order for someone to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter: Someone was killed as a result of the defendant's actions. The act either was inherently dangerous to others or done with reckless disregard for human life. The defendant knew or should have known his or her conduct was a threat to the lives of others.

The interesting bit is "The act either was inherently dangerous to others or done with reckless disregard for human life."

We're admitting that simply having the cops show up is so inherently dangerous that it constitutes a reckless disregard for human life.

First off, it's not enabled just yet. You have to jump through some hoops to enable it. You have to go through all this, at the moment:

In chrome://flags enable the following flags:
#enable-experimental-web-platform-features
#enable-surfaces-for-videos
#enable-picture-in-picture

Download and extract the extension zip file.

In chrome://extensions toggle Developer mode (upper-right corner) if it is not already on.

To load the extension, click Load Unpacked.

In the dialog box that appears locate and select the src/ folder from the directory where you unpacked the zip file.

Navigate to any YouTube video and click the extension browser icon to toggle Picture-in-Picture for the current video.

And if you want to see what all that gets you, it looks like this.

All that being said, I'm sure that this feature will be abused at some point in the future, and there will be a setting to turn it off, and your clueless parents/aunt/grandparents/whatever will call you and bug you about a little TV on your screen they can't make go away.

It's the IT circle of life. Advertiser wants feature to pester people with, people are pestered for a while, IT people turn off feature, advertiser wants new feature to pester people with...

Children occasionally do things their parents would rather them not do, you know.

IMO, the word "hack" is a lot like the word "shoot". The target is what matters, not the verb. Shoot a Nazi? Get a medal. Shoot up a school? Lethal injection.

Context is what matters.

They appear to be an exception to this rule at the moment.

Here's hoping the FTC takes notice of them, finally.

I've got a C2. I needed to run a Java app on something Raspberry Pi sized. The Pi could just barely manage it - app was unusable. It runs just fine on C2. The extra memory made a huge difference.

It's a marketing ploy. AI is being mentioned in the news a lot lately, so Microsoft has to look like they're on board. That's all this is. I'm surprised they didn't say "blockchain" in there somewhere as well.