its ridiculous from the onset. The auto makers are not required to make sure the buyers wont one day drive drunk, same for the gas stations or makers of the gas for the cars. Electric and Water companies are not held liable because someone turned their house into an illegal pot farm. Spoon manufacturers are not held liable because someone got fat using their utensils. This isnt 1999 anymore. Denying someone online access is borderline death sentence anymore. So many services have been pushed to online-only in the last several years. Two-Factor authentication has only increased this need. Until 1929 a first class letter was just $0.02. Over the last 40 years there has been a rapid pace of postage increasing while the quality and delivery times plummet. 3 years ago it took just 1 day for a letter mailed to an address within my city to arrive. Now postage is almost 20 cents more and it takes as much as 10 days to reach a house just 3 blocks away. I have literally had letters come back with yellow stickers saying undeliverable to an address in my neighborhood, that I have to turn around and place it in the goddamn mailbox myself. Totally unreliable. This in turn is driving the demand for online filings, online communication, online shopping, and online bill payments. There are some things you cant even buy in a big box store anymore. The only way to get it is by online shopping, usually on amazon. Like it or not, online access is no longer a luxury or entertainment, its damn near as big a requirement as access to water and shelter. With this rediculous logic the state and federal highway employees should all face criminal charges because the interstates are being used to transport heroin/fentanyl up from Mexico and down from Canada. Why arent they being sued?

It was overcast where I was, even though I was in the 95% band of totality. at 2pm EST the moon began crossing the sun's path. Up until 2:20 the sun was bright enough to pierce the clouds and use the solar glasses. By 2:20 the moon was covering more than half the sun which was enough light restriction you could only see it as it peeked between the clouds. Around 2:45 to 3pm, as it was at the peak, glasses were no longer required. You could not see through the clouds but occasionally enough cloud would part so that the layer of cloud above provided just enough filter to see the eclipse with a naked eye and it still be rather dim. Throughout the entire event I kept laughing inside at all the Rapture/Doomsday predictors. When my area saw the peak of the eclipse, it had already been occuring further west for the past hour. There were even fucking nutjobs on the internet claiming the day before feeling 'weird' and blaming an event that 1) happens every goddamn 7 years in your geographic location, more frequently all over the world and 2) wont happen for another day and its not like the sun and the moon are suddenly in different places in the solar system. I swear ever since social media evolved post 2010, everyone has gotten fucking stupid and cant seem to remember something that happened just 7 years ago. My local schools closed schools, not so they could see the eclipse. That would be a great reason. They did it for 'safety' reasons not wanting kids to go home from school in the 'dark'. FFS, its never been THAT dark, its as dark as early daybreak/twilight at best during an eclipse. Its been darker during a heavy storm. FFS its darker at 7am in JANUARY when you expect these kids to walk to school, its pitch black at 7am in january.

FDD were already phasing out in 1998. Two competing formats used the IDE interface: the ZIP drive and 3M’s LS120. The latter could read standard floppies and read them 1.5x faster, but the ZIP drive was more popular due to name confusion with pkzip shareware popular of the day. If it used FDD it might not have USB1.0 which was emerging at the time (Bill Gates famously demonstrated a BSoD bragging about USB hotswap ability in Windows98).

Be impressed that the entire OS still fits inside 1.5MB. Even the IDE interface would be a step up from the floppy interface port, but as you say, its hardware limited based on the equipment you need to keep running. I guess the real challenge is equipment pre-USB 1.0. A usb-floppy chipset has been around forever; making one to read a flash drive would be trivial. A flash drive to physical floppy interface port would be more unique. Power was provided externally to the FDD cable. Theyve had IDE to CompactFlash adapters forever, so I imagine a FDD to MicroSD would be a logical replacement to keep these systems operational. Even old school SD is faster than the FDD interface. Hell you might even rig a RaspberryPi with a special Hat to clone your floppies onto the MicroSD.

One day I will no longer have to joke about the navy having issued me a second liver in my seabag. Now I can continue to pound shots like Myriam in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I take it that theres no cash back situations in Australia then? To give you 1% through all the overhead of the 4 tiers of clearing, half a percent wont cover it.

You should hate Amex and their 4.9% then. A lot of merchants will tell you that you can take Amex or Discover and plant it firmly in your ass. Dont forget that now that cash-back is so pervasive, its going to be hard reducing fees. If you are getting 1% back you can bet your asses its 3.5% at the merchant.

Did you find space to be an issue? I recently had to start buying 5mm and 6mm jewel cases branded for 4k and Bluray. Which in turn had me scaling down the size of the slip covers and re-printing on glossy paper. All in all not a bad hobby. Space has definitely become an issue when wanting to preserve 1 case per title and not go for some scrapbook approach of just flimsy sleeves.

in a way it is deliberate. Economies depend on consumerism. What causes more purchases? 1 time expenses or consumables? This is why the subscription model of software has become a constant. Rarely does a business buy a copy of MS Office anymore. Instead you sign up on a monthly per-seat pricing for Office365. And they are not the only ones doing that by far and away. If you are in the business of selling toilet paper you always have a market of repeat customers. Selling treadmills is a lot less of a recurring purchase so your sales strategy consists on always finding new customers. Unless you happen to do dumb shit and send a 6 pack of Bud Light to a tranny influencer who badmouths the NFL right before the superbowl, you can bank on a steady income of revenue from repeat customers. Electronics have fallen into this area. Even pregnancy tests are now electronic and disposable after a single use. Its not like they made them like the diabetic blood glucose machines where you plug in the testing portion but keep the electronics.

The largest issue that right-to-repair wont solve is the items in that $10 - $100 range. When the labor and parts of a handyman exceeds the cost to buy a replacement. In the 70s TV repair and repairing toasters was a Big business. Who fixes a $30 toaster? Or a $150 flat screen 32in TV? TV repair shops at the time fixed everything from 12in TV to the large 27in models.

The problem is I could either spend $100 repairing a battery power bank, or spend $23 on amazon for two more just like it. As long as a total replacement is more convenient and costs less than labor costs of repair, people wont do it. That leaves geeks like me fixing shit because broken stuff bugs me. Even of I buy a replacement; I am compelled to try and fix something before tossing it in the trash.

Dude its waaay beyond PC and Laptops. That stuff sticks around a lot longer than cheap consumer grade shit. Nobody repairs anything any more. You throw away what, one laptop, every 3 years? 5 years? When was the last time you repaired a set of ear buds? Or a digital thermometer? Or any other gadget that costs you less than $50. Fuck at one time people actually repaired their toasters. Air fryer go out on you? Time to just buy another. We live in a very consumerism dominated world and the entire economy depends on you throwing shit away because it costs more time and money to fix versus replace.

The suck part of that is that inevitably these expenses only drive up utility prices. So some fuckwad goes consequence free working out of an Iranian government building. Should drive up their costs seven fold. Nuke their oil fields so they cant be used for 30yrs. Only people buying it was Russia in exchange for the hypersonic missiles they gave the Houthis. Seems like eliminating Iranian Oil would hurt Iran and Russia more than the drop in production would impact global sales to the rest of us.

Im tired of seeing everything coming from Iran. The Houthis fire on our ships. Now its reported they have obtained hypersonic missiles. The same hypersonic missiles that Russia gave Iran in exchange for weapons and soldiers in their ongoing war in Ukraine. If Iran is trying to poison our waters its time to do the same. Drop nukes on all their oil fields so they cannot extract their oil for 30 years. Then tell them they are to round up all the Houthis theyve been supplying weapons to, and deliver their heads in hand woven wicker baskets. If we so much as see a 3ft drone in the air or under water anywhere in the red sea, we will nuke every aquifer for 500 miles. These primitive sister-raping inbreds only respond to strength. The only diplomacy they respect is after they are looking at a bloody stump that used to be their hand.

Youd better pack up every blood relative you give a shit about. This isnt the US. Retribution is still possible. Hell China is considered a firdt world country and they sure as fuck would stick your entire bloodline in a work camp. In a 3rd world African country your family could be chopped uo with a machete. Most people have friends and family to go after. By uour single-pointed view, Its sad you have neither.