And those are used to excuse hating on many others who are just in a bad place.

I'm doing fine now, but grew up in a poor family. We were constantly judged for it. I recall hearing from a classmate that we couldn't be friends because his parents told him I would steal from him.

And yes, if you're seen having anything even vaguely inessential or middle-class coded, you're judged for that, too. Taking your kids to get ice cream once in a while demonstrates how wasteful you are. Or my absolute favorite was someone trying to shame me for wearing nice clothes one day. I was on my way to a job interview. So which is it, am I too stupid and lazy to lift myself up by my bootstraps, or am I to only get work at places that will hire someone in rags?

All of which probably helps explain why I can be extremely contemptuous about this sort of thing. People are complex, and the finances of many people at the edge of poverty are largely based on interpersonal relations. Without a fair amount of personal detail you simply won't have a lot of the time, you really just don't know how responsible they're being.

Most of these monthly payments don't charge interest they get their money from the stores similar to how credit cards work. However instead of a 3-4% back from the stores they are getting 6%+.
Stores are will to pay that extra amount because people who use these will purchase more items, and these monthly payment programs don't have the legal protections that credit card provide so as an example there is no charge back capability.

It's considered a sale when you purchase goods with it. You owe capital gains on it at that point. At least if you're a US person.

When I demoted my single Pentium 4 rig to workshop use
it noticeably raised winter temperature inside my
sealed 40ft High Cube shipping container machine shop.

It's not difficult to rack or shelve many computers near the ceiling or hang them off walls. I hang a 1U server off the wall of my office as one would a painting (and could cover it with a painting if I cared). Total cost is a couple of small lag hooks costing less than a dollar.

I don't do mini/tiny PCs for space reasons because there is more than enough unused space in most rooms to make that unnecessary, and for access a computer on the wall is hard to beat. Needing no desk my server doesn't clutter mine.

If I wanted mining rigs I could line walls with them high enough not to interfere with anything else with heating as a bonus.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Yeah, but hard to compare apples to oranges here....

These Nordic idiots are the same folks that ride fucking bicycles in ice and snow in the middle of winter too....

[sarcasm] Of course it can. Also cranial measurements are reliable indicators.[/sarcasm]

If nothing else they should not be allowed to call themselves a bank, including not a "trust" bank. Stick with crypto exchange or hascode pawnshop or whatever but not bank.

People are only annoyed because this is Apple.

If a clothing brand like Ann Taylor made an ugly $250 phone purse nobody here would bat an eye.

This particular thing has only been pushed recently, but various different visions of "interactive TV" has been a Thing for a very long time.

People were talking about it back in the 50s, probably earlier. But the earliest deployment in the US of something plausibly called interactive TV was Qube in 1977.

There's a parallel universe in which the US ended up with a cable-TV-based version of Minitel.

There are multiple reasons, but I think the biggest is that a different interactive screen ate TV's lunch.

The phone is superior in most ways, from the perspective of the pushers - usually maps to a single person, always with them, location trackable, etc. About the only advantage of the TV is being a big screen, but that doesn't seem to matter for much.

Another big one is there's no central player to lay the rails and the big players have competing interests. But I really think the deciding factor is just that the money folks don't see a need for a QVC "buy now" button.

People don't like having cameras streaming from their bedrooms and livingrooms. I'm shocked.

That's insane! Sign me up and ship me out.

It is always DNS.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz