An interesting aside to that though. Even your description was better than shortly before that when computer was a job title and the whole company depended on rooms full of people clacking away on mechanical adding machines. All of that got replaced at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Yet businesses that ran profitably for decades like that have now cut customer service to the bone, never reduced prices, and employee pay hasn't kept up with inflation for decades but still they cry poor.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

Depending on uncertain imported oil and gas is already not profitable and has a higher probability of becoming fantastically expensive every time some kooky world leader sneezes.

I prefer AppImage. Flatpak feels like it went way past the point of diminishing returns for efficiency and functionality vs. complexity.

Perhaps you need to run the 'testing' release, currently forky. That gets you much more current software versions.

Something other than a single continuous infrasound might. That wasn't tested, just one particular not well described sound.

They showed that the particular infrasound they used did nothing with a handful of people.

It's more nuanced than that. There may be some particular characteristic of infrasound that cause the issue.You would need to look at the infrasound in places that have reports of the phenomenon and try to replicate that first, then try to find commonalities in the sound characteristics and come up with a wholly artificial sound that replicates the phenomenon.

The Mythbusters showed that whatever particular Infrasound they used in the test did nothing statistically significant is their small sample.

Consider, I propose that sound can make people afraid. So I get a group of 10 people and one at a time I put them in a room for 5 minutes. 2.5 minutes in, I play the sound of a kitten mewing at normal volume. Nobody shows signs of fear or panic. Myth busted? Might the results have been different with a bicycle horn? Bear growling? Gunshot?

And that's why so many are skeptical of our court system.

So AI will be training itself on stuff generated by itself, the ultimate self licking ice cream cone. Reminds me of the game of putting a paragraph repeatedly through translation software back and forth between to languages until you got gibberish,

The crazy thing about that exemption is that critical infrastructure has the highest need to be independantly repairable. You need it back up and running yesterday, there's no time to play salesman games where they try to get you to buy a forklift upgrade instead of repair.

The lobbying is IBM and Cisco declaring openly that they intend to profit from holding critical infrastructure hostage.

Only badly written right to repair. A good right to repair law should block you from contracting a special variant only sold to you, or require you to stockpile spares, but shouldn't require you to stockpile a commodity part. Of course, small businesses are unlikely to be ordering custom chips with pins swapped around compared to the commodity part like Apple does. More likely a small business' design will not feature anything not available from DigiKey or Mouser.

If you decide you no longer wish to support a device at all, publish schematics, gerbers, and CAD and you've discharged your obligation.

I still remember many many years ago, I had to use a hacking tool called burglar to get in to a netware server that had expired every password including the admin password. Novell support wasn't at all helpful.

True, but can an online only store survive? I know several local specialty crafts ( needlepoint) stores that sell online but that alone would not enough to cover inventory and other costs. A lot of sales occur in store, and that helps turnover as well as sell threads with a canvas. Turns for online only would be a lot slower. Granted, it’s different than books but I suspect the economics are similar.

I agree. Part of the value is wandering the stacks and seeing books you might like but never heard of, and independent shops’ staff recommendations.