I think there have been a few reasons for this.

I think the biggest one is that nobody could meaningfully agree on a form factor. Now, *I* always thought that a great option would be to have a 'zombie laptop' that had a keyboard, trackpad, webcam, and a battery, with a slot to slide your phone into. The phone would connect to the peripherals and give a 12" screen and a keyboard, while charging the phone in the process.

The devil, of course, was in the details. Even if Apple made such a device and molded it to the iPhone, the problem then became that a user couldn't put their phone in a case, or it wouldn't fit in the clamshell's phone slot. There would also need to be adapters to fit the different sized phones, or different SKUs entirely with per-device slots, which then also pigeonholes Apple into a particular physical form factor. That begets the "use a C-to-C cable" option, which is better, but makes it ergonomically annoying to use if one isn't sitting at a desk. A wireless option solves both of these problems, but kills both batteries in the process. Finally, there's the price point: the cost for the end user would need to be low enough that it doesn't just make sense to have two devices, AND the first-gen owners would likely feel some kind of way if they were stuck with their old phone because it meant buying a new clamshell. It works well on paper, but pretty much any real-world testing would show the shortcomings pretty quickly.

Supposed that was solved somehow...while the Samsung Fold phones are helping justify time spent in adding a multi-window interface to Android, try installing Android x86 on a VM for a bit and watch what happens. It's been a while since I tried, but the experience was pretty bad - the inability to open e-mails in new windows was particularly infuriating; many apps take exception to having multiple concurrent instances for side-by-side usage, and window focus gets pretty tricky to navigate. It *can* be done, but it ultimately felt like all-compromise, no-improvement.

Finally, there *is* such a thing, at least to an extent. Many, MANY apps are just frontends on a website. iCloud is like this, the whole Google ecosystem is like this, Salesforce is like this...for a solid number of apps, there is a browser-based frontend that works just as well, if not better in at least some cases. Data is commonly synced with Google or iCloud or Dropbox. The number of apps that are worth running on a phone, without a desktop or browser analogue, that would justify a user getting a clamshell to run that app in a larger window...is small enough that it is seldom worth dealing with all of the *other* compromises involved.

So, how does anyone enter the workforce?

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

It has been a VERY long time since I've seen such a textbook definition of the phrase "a distinction without a difference".

On an Intel x86 PC, even the most locked-down iterations of Windows give users a means of running whatever code they want. If the user doesn't want to run Windows at all, a user can download an ISO of Ubuntu or Fedora or Proxmox or VMWare or GhostBSD or Haiku, make a menu change in the BIOS, and install those OSes instead. Done and done. Windows can be replaced in 30 minutes or less if a user wants to, with nothing but GUI tools and youtube tutorials that are universally accurate (admittedly with slight variations on where to disable secure boot in the BIOS).

On an Android phone, one must unlock the bootloader (which some phones prevent through artificial constraints), then hope that some Good Samaritan has made a different OS for it...and then go through 101 steps involving CLIs, recovery environments, and ADB interfaces...AND those steps and software downloads vary with each model of phone, AND Google gives app developers a means of telling users "sorry, I won't run on a phone you have control over", AND that assumes that a replacement OS is available in the first place...otherwise, the user needs to replace the phone, or go all the way to doing their own compiling of AOSP, which is its own rabbit hole.

So yeah, the argument rings incredibly hollow: "we're not constraining what the hardware can do...but we ARE constraining what the software can do AND constraining your ability to replace that software if you so choose." If the argument is that the constraints are purely related to software, then Google needs to put way more effort into streamlining the ability for users to depreciate the use of whatever software those constraints are implemented to protect. If they aren't going to do that, then they are being disingenuous.

If, in a court of law, they cannot produce documentation regarding the means by which the hardware can be used to run unapproved code, then I would deem them guilty of perjury for making this statement under the current climate.

$5-$10?! What a bargain! I'd probably order a mixed drink with my meal if it was still only $10.

Most of the restaurants I've been to in the past year have bumped the cost of cocktails to $15-$20 for standard stuff. I might accept it for drinks that have several different ingredients, but even a rum-and-coke goes for $15 around me - and I'm not in NYC or LA. One brunch spot I went to had a memosa flight that was champagne and four different fruit juices, each in MAYBE 6oz. glasses, and they wanted $40 for it.

Not to be outdone, the last time I *did* visit NYC, I went to a restaurant that made mocktails...and while my blueberry mint lemonade was indeed delicious, it was NOT worth the $10 my friend paid for it.

So yeah, I definitely share your sentiment - a nontrivial portion of the reason people aren't drinking alcohol at restaurants is due to the pretty significant cost to doing so...and I'm pretty sure that those higher priced drinks *also* have less alcohol in them than they did ten years ago, too. Given this, it makes way more sense to get a 1L bottle for $20-$50 that I can use to make my own drinks for a month...and as much as restaurants have always used bar drinks as a source of high-margin revenue, it's not really justifiable anymore to spend that kind of money on a single drink.

I'm not sure I entirely buy this. Even as recently as the 1960's, the incidence of STIs was somewhere around 1:35, and that's inherently including all of the STIs that made the jump from animals to humans in the time after the time of Christ (or Paul, who was more outspoken about it, or Moses, if you're going that far back). Yes, STIs undoubtedly happened, but with a less than 3% chance of getting one, a person had to either be "well traveled" or extremely unfortunate to get an STI in that era. We also have to discount the asymptomatic STIs; this line of reasoning might hold water with STIs that have visible scarring in genital regions, but not all STIs fit that description. The clearest symptom of chlamydia is difficulty in conception and birthing, but there were many, many virgins-on-wedding-night who had trouble with giving birth throughout history.

I think there were other, more practical reasons for this system. For starters, a faithful, single-partner wife would ensure paternity in a time prior to DNA testing. In addition, a virgin woman was deemed more desirable by the men and were able to attract more desirable suitors. Promiscuity after marriage was a poor social reflection on the husband as well.

Well, the Mosaic law managed to outlast the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and the dozens of "ites" listed in the Old Testament narrative. I'm not saying that presenting the Pentateuch to Congress to put it into law in 2025 to be enforced with police and military is something that would benefit modern society, but I *am* saying that its staying power reflects some sort of a societal benefit. I submit for your consideration that even if one disagrees with the mandates present in the Mosaic law, it might be overly reductive to assume that the rules came into existence through a concern for relatively-rare STIs.

Well, somebody recommended them to me. At high doses, too.

I remember hearing, years ago, that the EU no longer recommends beta blockers as a first-line treatment for hypertension (high blood pressure) for a similar reason: They don't seem to do anything. Sure, they lower your blood pressure numbers, but (as I recall) the meta-study showed no appreciable difference in outcomes. That is, people who received beta blockers experienced the same number of heart attacks, strokes, and other hypertension-related problems as the group that didn't take them.

And if games were an $80, one-time purchase, nothing-more-to-buy, multiplayer-over-TCP/IP-forever investment, yes, you're right. I have no problem paying even $100 for such a game.

Except most of them are not. There are a handful of exceptions (Elden Ring, Baulder's Gate 3, and so on), but the majority of games are $60-$80 for the standard edition but $100 or more for the deluxe edition, and then there are the season passes, battle passes, in-game purchases (they're not 'micro' anymore...), lootboxes, multiple in-game currencies, and the fallout76 mechanic of "pay for your purchased items to not lose the stats you bought them with" mechanic...oh, and all of this only lasts for as long as the company keeps the servers up - even though one can technically play FIFA 21 in offline mode, one is stuck with their current roster and cannot unlock additional players through gameplay.

So no, $70 isn't a problem for a complete video game, like what was being sold in the SNES era. FIFA 08 was the last release of the game to include all of the players in the box. The estimate to unlock every player in FIFA 25 is 100 million in-game coins, which cost about $50,000.

So yes, video game prices ARE gouging players right now...we've just somehow accepted that $80 for an incomplete game is the same as $60 for a complete game, as it was before video games became casinos on the internet.

Because Corel doesn't aggressively market the fact that WordPerfect 1.) still exists, 2.) is less expensive, 3.) is much faster and more stable, because 4.) it's not sold as SaaS, and 5.) it can open and save Word documents natively.

Unfortunately, even if they did, there are too few people who perceive WordPerfect as a "big name" anymore; nobody wants to be the first to shift away from Office or Google Docs and be the office that everyone hates sharing documents with, so it's a classic case of "everyone uses it because everyone uses it"

Real question: What would be the point of that? Even hoarded gold would have no value if nobody but a select group of people could do anything with it.

This country's government is designed to have checks and balances on power. Congress isn't supposed to rubber-stamp every suggestion the President makes about spending -- they're the ones in charge of those decisions. Judges, particularly at the highest levels, aren't supposed to be partisan stooges; they're supposed to follow the law, but that doesn't seem to be what we have now. Nobody outside of the executive seems to want to exert their power, for fear of losing it. Apparently, it's enough to be able to claim having it.

Based on their press release, it looks like it's just the case that Chinese automakers are using them more. On their "ecosystem" list, you don't see any Waymo/Jaguar, Tesla, or other companies making cars for the U.S. market (except Volvo).