I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.

... and in 2020 it was "anyone but Trump", as it will be again in 2028, assuming we still have elections then.

Step back a bit, and you realize the real voting pattern is "anyone but the incumbent", because the system has deteriorated to the point where problems don't get solved anymore, so voters are just blindly switching back and forth from one party to the other in the hopes that doing that will somehow lead to improvement. American Democracy has devolved into the world's most elaborate ring oscillator.

He absolutely was hit by the shock wave from a passing bullet, which caused visible damage to his ear.
Yes the metal of the bullet did not touch him, if it had there would not be much left of that side of his head.

WTF? You think the US government trusted what the Soviets said?

Also that is "federal income taxes". The poor pay a huge higher percentage of their income on sales taxes and fees than the rich.

So the bottom 50% have 2.5% of the wealth, and pay 3% of the taxes. Got it.

Things are getting really bad when some of the top 10% are now considered part of the middle. There is a cutoff, maybe 5%, above which the effective tax rate goes way down.

That's true, but some people might be sad if they previously were able to pay their rent and now they cannot. Hopefully there will be other jobs available for them to move to.

Those articles just say that the gap between the richest and poorest in each country is growing, and that the US has a larger gap. The articles are not comparing the countries to each other so there may be different computation methods. In particular the CA article talks about the top 20% (at least for men, I'm going to have to assume for women) while the US graph talks about the top 1%.

It does look like there is better results for American rich, as the US graph allows me to guess as to what the top 20% are:

Top 20% life expectency in CA: men: 83 women: 86
Top 20% life expectency in US: men: 86 women: 87.5

That is waste heat inside a very small closed structure, which is different than any kind of Niven-style waste heat destroying an entire planet.

Life expectancy of the top quartile in the US does not exceed the the top quartile of CA. Yes life expectancy of the top quartile in both the US and Canada exceeds the average of everybody but you seem to have deliberately lied or misled.

The top 10% of earners have a lot more than 72% of the wealth.

I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.

IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.

Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.

My #1 use for ChatGPT is "show me an example of some C code that implements functionality (X)".

Then I can read that example, research the APIs it is calling (to make sure they actually exist and are appropriate for what I'm trying to accomplish), and use it to write my own function that does something similar. This is often much faster than my previous approach (googling, asking for advice on StackOverflow, trial and error).

If bottom-up coding is a fallacy, someone has forgotten to let evolution know that. Here we all are, bottom-up coded, for better or worse.