The golden age of TV ended when the scripted age of TV gave way to low-effort 'reality' TV.

Yes, they could try to locate everyone that manages to use banned technology like this, but as commodity-level technology designed to be used by even unskilled individuals, they're not going to be able to stop people from using technology. All they'll be able to do is to punish them after finding them.

Don't misunderstand me, my wife has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from MIT and has worked in the aerospace and defense industries for her whole career, and through her alumni club I've been friends with a bunch of other engineers and materials scientists. They have just about all done very well.

On the other hand I know two people with masters' degrees that are basically doing white-collar clerical work. I have no college degree, most of the people on my team don't have degrees, and I'm on the same team and at a roughly comparable role with those that do have college degrees. And I have a technical job too.

My point is that having a degree can be lucrative, but it can also provide nothing of additional value. If it provides nothing of additional value then it's an expense that isn't providing a return, so it's actually a detriment, not an advantage, and the degree of detriment is based on how much it's saddling the individual with debt.

I was rather impressed when someone got DOOM to run on a color printer.

And of course the frame-rate jokes were pretty damn funny even though it wasn't running by printing a frame at a time on paper, amusing as that would have been.

But can it play Crysis?

I didn't need more tchotchkes. Putting a CD in the microwave for a few seconds is amusing the first time, possibly even the second or third, but the novelty wears off very quickly.

It's not just that, it's a problem of too many students compared to the positions in the workplace. For some occupations there are more graduates annually than there are jobs in the whole profession. Communications and Journalism immediately springs to mind.

For a lot of college students, they go to college because due to societal pressure they're supposed to go to college. That doesn't mean that they'll end up any better off in the workforce after college though. And more insidiously it causes employers to place requirements or preferences for college graduates on jobs that are not served by that educational experience.

...when many of the most over-exposed techbro billionaires didn't finish college?

What do they expect when the narrative that people have gone into deep debt in order to pay for college tuition for degrees that get them the same positions as those without college degrees have is so widespread and frankly, true?

What do they expect when so many states are basically violating their own public institution charters for affordable education and allowing tuition, or add-on fees in lieu of tuition hikes they aren't able to make, cause the cost of even a supposedly merit-based, public education has gotten to the point that someone can't earn enough to pay for school?

What do they expect when even having a college education doesn't provide a living wage to let one afford to buy a house or to have a decent apartment without requiring roommates in order to get by?

What do they expect when even with a degree and with experience, employers treat them only like liabilities and look to shed workers whenever possible, regardless of what sorts of ongoing contributions they make exceeding their salaries?

AOL was the catalyst but since the etiquette pre-Eternal-September was not codified and only enforced through browbeating new users into feeling uncomfortable to get them to comply shunning them if they did not, it was going to happen regardless of what service provider expanded offerings to the general public. It was just that AOL got there first.

I've moderated on forums before. It's a pain. It's thankless at-best, and at-worst one has to respond to schmucks that won't accept that they're out of line and will try to evade bans. And that's with moderation tools that make it possible, on a forum that's privately owned and tightly controlled.

I remember attempts to moderate on Usenet, and it really didn't work. It was too decentralized, there was insufficient central authority to enforce or to delegate to moderators, and then the volume of garbage got so bad that it simply wasn't worth it anymore.

yeah. I'm having a difficult time believing that, but then again I don't know what products or services are offered under the AOL brand either.

Last time I paid attention to AOL, it was being annoyed when they switched from 3.5" floppies to CDs for distributing software for their service, because the new medium was no longer reformattable for reuse for whatever I needed it for.

My supposition is that it would make it harder to hide when the cash-flow has exceeded the revenue and reserves. It would allow insolvent firms to remain operating for longer because it's harder to verify that they're out-of-whack. Entities they do business with that might well end up being creditors in a bankruptcy would possibly be deeper-in with failing firms because it wouldn't be so obvious that partners need to pull back against a firm that might not be able to make net-90 terms.

No. They tried that for OEM-licensed Windows on new computers where the purchasers wanted to run other operating systems. Didn't work then either.

The thing to keep in mind is that the march of technology has always been oriented toward reducing the number of people required to do something. Arguably the single most significant development that led to the modern 'digital age' was Guttenberg's movable type printing press, as it basically took the work of scribes painstakingly rewriting books by hand into new physical volumes and turned it into a process that could mass-produce (for the time period at least) the text of the same works in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the labor.

This had downstream effects on recordkeeping and led to the development of other tools like the typewriter, itself ultimately leading to digital records systems and the modern computing age. At each step along the way, the number of low-level clerks has reduced, and I've seen it firsthand in my own lifetime, where a department's office would have an executive secretary, an administrative secretary, and a receptionist, slowly eliminate to just a single person because so many of the clerical records duties or other secretarial duties were reduced or eliminated by technology.

Now, that said, these tasks were not typically oriented towards decision-making so much as following procedures. That's why these tasks were able to be automated or otherwise condensed or shifted to different personnel, because they were just performing rote steps that were able to be automated. AI could end up being different in that they're now trying to replace creative or conclusion-drawing tasks with it, something that may or may not work out in the end. Right now it's definitely not ready for it, and given how easy it seems to be to poison AI's fundamental dataset, I am left wondering if it ever will be, or if so many jobs will be needed to 'curate' that dataset that it draws upon that in the end it won't really save money. It'll just transfer that money to contractors instead of local staff.

And that's partly because there hasn't been a market for their services. It's difficult to justify costs when there's no use for the thing.

I could see airships being useful if they can deliver turbine blades without even requiring the local resources of that airstrip capable of handing this proposed plane. It could be especially handy if an airship could deliver more than one blade at a time. Undoubtedly a construction yard of sorts would be required for depositing the cargo, which itself is presumably going to be under-slung, but it could even be that the construction yard's mooring tower itself would eventually serve as a wind turbine pedestal, giving even more utility to the site once the rest of the construction is complete. Or if the construction yard is too far from the actual windfarm in order to be where the air is less challenging to aircraft, might well remain so that later lifecycle can use that infrastructure again.

Figures I found claim that 3000 wind turbines are built in the US each year. Even if only 5% of those would benefit from an airship providing delivery over road and rail, that's still 150 turbines, or 450 blades, per year. A small fleet of airships running regular deliveries from manufacturers to the field could probably handle that where enough of such vessels would be needed to amortize development costs across that fleet, but without producing such prolific numbers as to blot the sky with airships. Presuming delivery of two turbines a week one would need probably a fleet of four or five airships, but if it turns out that oversized blades are popular then it wouldn't be unreasonable to build more as demand grows.

I have seen native-USB-C keyboards, but they're typically mechanical keyboards with lighting effects or are intended for desks where the overall look and feel of the laptop connected to peripherals is important and when there's no docking station involved.

I haven't yet seen a USB-C mouse, nor have I seen a USB-C headset.