Yeah, I immediately thought of the Triangle building as well. Although, if I understood the summary correctly, this situation differs in an important way. (Specifically, if I read it right, the residents did have the ability to let themselves in and out; they just had to use a key to do so, presumably due to lack of a proper working push-bar door. That doesn't meet current fire codes, for sure; but the situation in the Triangle building was markedly worse.)

It really depends where you live.

We do *have* some apartments where I live (Galion, Ohio), but it's really not that many relative to the size of the community, and there are always vacancies. 70% of the homes in this county are owner-occupied, and I'm pretty sure all of the apartments fall into the other 30%, because there are no condos in the area that I'm aware of. But I'm also pretty sure most renters, rent actual houses, though I don't have the percentage number for that.

Part of it is that housing was really affordable here until recently. Housing prices never recovered from the "market correction" (circa 2008), until some time after the start of the Ukraine war. (Then housing prices suddenly doubled, in the space of about eighteen months. But that's sufficiently recent, that we haven't yet had a lot of time to accumulate people who can't afford a house because of it.) As recently as 2021, it was possible to buy a two-story house here for around $50k. Under those conditions, a young person who is willing to stick it out living with their parents or on a friend's couch for a year or so, can scrape together a decent down payment, even working for minimum wage. So renters around here tend to either be people who don't want to be home owners because of the burden of maintenance (which is mostly the elderly), or people who are really bad at financial planning (which, admittedly, is fairly common; but some people just don't run in those kinds of circles).

San Francisco is, rather obviously, a completely different situation altogether. Opposite end of the spectrum, pretty much.

> Being poor in any big city kind of sucks.

Well yes. Frankly, living in a big city kind of sucks even if you're not poor. Though it's nice to be within driving distance of one, so you can go there a few times a year, for things like concerts, exotic food options, etc. But yes, it's disproportionately worse if you're poor.

I meant the side that is not visible from Earth, yes; it is traditionally called the "dark side" in mainstream English, because language is weird sometimes. This nomenclature is admittedly rather counterintuitive, and "far side" is more clear and therefore better terminology and is thus the wording that I ideally should have used. Sorry for any confusion.

Since Star Wars is also basically just a revisiting of all of the tropes from the silver-screen-age serials that predated the features, it's not really surprising that it doesn't have many women in it either. The crapsack universe is pretty violent, and paternalistic attitudes have meant trying to shield women from the less savory parts, plus military attitudes have also typically not included women in the ranks too much either, something that's changing but even the better part of five decades later only slowly.

So an analog computer?

"He sees cities as the givers and takers of things. He's fascinated by cities. He doesn't actually want to live in one. He now lives in a ranch near one. He wants to orbit them. He's a paradox."

This is not a special position in any way, shape, or form.

There's an entire industry built around people that want as much of a sleepy small-town life as they can get while still having access to all of the amenities that urban living offers, it's called suburbia. Everyone with their individual detached homes so they're not having to listen to their neighbors constantly, in their relatively quiet neighborhoods that see almost no outside foot-traffic from those who don't live there, because there's literally no reason to go into these neighborhood if you don't live there and aren't visiting those that do.

Yet a half-mile away there's a major intersection with one to four shopping centers on its corners, with a supermarket, a gas station, a department store, a home improvement store, a barber, a daycare, a dance studio, a fitness center, and perhaps a dozen restaurants varying from takeaway counters to sit-down full service places with linen tablecloths. And within five miles there's a hospital that can handle nearly every condition and ailment that comes in through its doors. Within ten miles there are civics centers with performing arts programs and other venues. And within 20 miles there's high-paying work available to those with skills.

Suburbs are nice because you have the choice of interacting with the local community or not at your leisure.

What would you say about my case? I open tabs when there's some news item or search result I want to know more about. I close them when I have reviewed the thing, even if it's just to decide I am no longer interested. For example, I've opened six tabs from the /. front page today. I'll read the ones that are of the highest interest immediately (there were three this time) and leave the others for possible consumption in the future, if I have time, at which point they'll either be closed or left open as a bookmark of interesting information (if there's some follow-up I think I might do). The tab for this article, for example, will remain open for a day or so as a reminder to check for any replies. I don't have a problem going back to open tabs, but there is more information in the world than time so I accept that I may never get back to some of them.

I certainly exhibit some signs of ADHD, but I don't think my approach to tab management is one of them. I don't think thousands of open tabs is necessarily an indicator.

That said, thanks for bringing it up as a possibility.

Disorganized?! Quite the reverse. Linear tab lists are how I organize things. One window per desktop, each window a different type of browsing (e.g. news/research/productivity) and then open tabs in each window. Disorganized would be somehow trying to track all of those URLs some *other* way. What, do you have thousands of bookmarks? How would you manage to relate them back to the type of task they're related to, and the time they were bookmarked?

Untrue. I run Firefox with a dozen windows each of which has hundreds of tabs. All it takes is enough RAM, but I make sure I have plenty. If RAM pressure is a problem for you then look up the BarTab extension (it's defunct, but I believe there are some active forks). Firefox absolutely can do this.

Now Chrome, that's where you'll have trouble. IT was really not designed for a large number of open tabs. Its minimum tab width is ~48px and once you have enough of those to fill the horizontal bar new tabs open on the right *hidden*. Unlikely Firefox there is no window into a current set. The only way to interact with them extra tabs is via the "Search tabs" menu, which is highly inconvenient. Chrome's UI assumes no more than about 75 tabs open at a time.

It's not laziness. I typically run at least low hundreds of tabs open, frequently up into the low thousands. I know I've cleared 5,000 before, but I'm not in the business of tracking too closely--I'm just not interested in how many there are.

Bookmarks are not the same thing as open tabs; a site can vanish but still be available in browser cache/memory. A bookmark may help you find a page you were on earlier, but it's hard to know *why* you bookmarked it, to organize them linearly, and to distinguish between an ephemeral interest and a permanent reference. Really, bookmarks are a vestigial feature of the pre-Google web. Do you remember when we all had "home page"s that given over to collections of links to commonly-used sites? That, too, has gone. In my case these have been replaced by tabs.

It's all part of an efficient workflow. I see people do something like: Google search, click a result, read some of it, click back, click the next result. This pattern is inefficient and drives me nuts; when I do a search I scan through the results and open anything that seems helpful new tabs--I may even refine my search a few times and open some tabs for each variation--, then I C-tab and begin to review. I can go from zero to 20 tabs in moments without even noticing it, then I read through them and close tabs that are irrelevant. When I get to the end of the subject I am researching I'll close most or all; I may leave open a tab with an answer or something I need to refer back to as I go back to what I was doing. With news it's the same: I open in a new tab each story that I want to read more about. I may not read them all the same day, but I leave the tabs open as a linear queue of interest and get to them eventually. It often happens that the queue grows faster than it shrinks, and that's fine. I come back through later and close out unread tabs that no longer seem interesting.

I can't imagine *not* doing this. It's not lack of window management; I currently have 11 browser windows open and they *each* have dozens or hundreds or thousands of tabs. It's *not* laziness. This is simply a way to organize information that maps well to the way my brain works.

The day that Firefox removed tab groups was a sad day indeed. There have been few tab management features which actually improved my ability to organize, but that was one of therm.

That would be pointless, though.

Doing something that another country has already done long ago, doesn't impress anyone. If they want to be perceived as advanced leaders in scientific research, they have to do something that has NOT already been done decades ago by other countries, especially hated Western countries.

If there were any conceivable way they could send a manned mission to Mars, that's what they'd be doing. The dark side of the moon, is the loftiest space-exploration goal they thought they had any realistic chance of achieving.

A dead patient is no longer a source of revenue.

But their estate still can be.

> Whatever happened to the goal of Windows 10 being the last version of Windows

That was never intended to actually be true. They said that because IT people with actual discernment were looking at Windows Ten and going "Eh, this version is pants, I think we're gonna stick with Seven for now and see if Microsoft can get their act together for the *next* release." And that would be a disaster, because then they (and more importantly their companies) might not pay Microsoft any money for upgrade licenses for Ten.

Once just about everyone who ever pays for software upgrades let go of Seven and upgraded, the "Ten is the last version" line was promptly dropped, because it was no longer needed.

There is one significant way in which Eleven is better than Ten: the "is your PC ready for the upgrade" check is significantly more realistic about system requirements. Ten will happily install on a system with 8 GB of RAM, which is less than a quarter of what is needed to run it at an even vaguely acceptable level of performance, and it doesn't even *warn* you that there might be a problem. The result, is that the system can't be used for anything because it's too busy swapping, because the core of the OS doesn't fit in physical RAM, let alone any applications (and the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem is even more pants than the NT/XP/Vista/Seven one). Eleven doesn't have this problem: it actually tells you your PC isn't good enough.

I still say Seven is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it ends up being the best one Microsoft *will* ever produce.

WhatsApp is owned by the same company as Facebook.

There has never been another company in the entire history of the Earth, that has been caught violating its own stated privacy policy and doing things with user data that it had specifically promised *not* to do, more times than this company.

I'm not saying they're the most evil company ever. They're not. There have been companies that have done worse things to people. Like, participating in genocide, for example. And there are companies that are in bed with totalitarian governments and directly exploit user data for Orwellian surveillance purposes (*cough* ByteDance *cough*). Which is not great.

But when we're talking specifically about whether the company will distribute your data to various third parties after promising that they wouldn't do that, *nobody* has ever had a worse track record for that, than Facebook/Meta. In particular, if a company comes along and offers them money for some user data, for marketing purposes, the only reason the deal would ever break down would be if they don't offer *enough* money. A little thing like "our privacy policy says we won't do that" would never get in the way.

What you're talking about is YOST.

https://yost.com/computers/RJ4...

The problem with it isn't the signaling at the port, it's getting the serial part to work on the host PC or other device being used. Almost nothing has RS-232 DE-9 port anymore, and even USB-A is becoming less common. Plus the FTDI scandal with cloned chips and nonfunctional drivers is another major problem.