My high school had a computer room I spent a lot of time in my junior and senior years. I graduated in 1977. Still have a program on paper tape from junior year, and an 8.5" floppy disk from senior year.

Actually, (speaking as one who has been practicing law for 40 years) I have rather fond memories of working at a pizza restaurant when I was in my teens, mainly because of the interaction with customers. I also did some construction work during summers, and liked the fact that I could go home and not have any work problems hanging over my head. There is a certain satisfaction in getting something tangible accomplished. Even menial jobs can be engaging, provided that the managers/officers appreciate the employees and provide a decent work environment.

Ah; since I prefer to buy something and own it rather than rent things for a monthly fee I'm akin to those who supported slavery. Thanks for demonstrating why I am less and less likely to enter into any discussions online, especially on sites like Slashdot. My mistake.

That's the problem right there: Software As A Service. I suspect you're quite a bit younger than I am, and may not remember the old days where one would actually purchase a piece of software for a set cost, and use it indefinitely. Often new versions would come out, which might offer improvements, and you could pay for those (for what it's worth, that is at the *beginning*, not the end). This software would be installed on and reside in your own computer. Unfortunately, some years ago software providers realized that they had pretty much reached peak optimization of their products, and there were no significcant improvements they could charge for, so came up with the idea of basing everything on an Internet-verified connection that had to be paid for monthly or annually. Now, I'm perfectly okay with paying for an *actual* ongoing service, like Internet access, telephone services, power services, and the like. That is ongoing. But, in my experience, I am still happily using billing software, accounting software, and word processing software that I purchased years ago and still works. I would be glad to pay for an improved version, if it enhanced my productivity, but nowadays the only option is to transition to a subscription model. Many years ago, my wife and I bought our house, and we paid off the loan a while back. Sure, I still need to pay real estate taxes, but I like actually owning my house versus having to rent something that can be pulled from me at any time by the person renting it to me. Same deal with lots of things, including software that I rely on.

foobar2000 with the Facets extension, in my opinion, has always been far superior to Winamp. And, although VLC has its uses, I've always found Media Player Classic the easiest for playing videos. YMMV.

That's a much more manageable number, being the amount of energy exerted by an Irish dance troupe per second.

I've never figured out why aspect ratios for screens need to be so weird. 16:9 is a major standard, but for this one it's a widescreen 21:10. Why exactly can't we just settle on a simple 2:1 ratio? That would seem so much simpler and allow for more cross compatibility. (I guess one answer to this is common attempts at vendor lock in, something Apple has been very successful at, but one would think *someone* would have gone this route.)

I think a lot of people just do not consider the implications, or are not concerned about them. For me, the turning point was a couple of years ago when I was chatting with a friend on their porch. He said he had bought a certain brand of western boots and really liked them: they were comfortable and reasonably priced. The very next day an ad for those exact boots appeared on my Facebook page. I dismissed that as a coincidence until I mentioned it to my son, who works in digital marketing. He said, matter of factly, of course, that is how the system works. Google Assistant on my phone picked up on the keyword. Sure, Alexa, Siri, Bixby, and Google Assistant are (probably) not storing your conversations and spying on you. But they *are* constantly listening for not only triggers ("Alexa", "Siri", "OK Google") but keywords to market to advertisers. If that does not bother you, that's okay. But I disabled Google Assistant on my phone after that, and do not want anything like it monitoring me in my home, even though there's really nothing untoward or unusual going on. I might consider something like Alexa if it demonstrably processed keyword monitoring locally, only going online on request, but who would make something like that? No particular profit potential.

I am quite aware that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. And, per my physician's recommendation, I have been fully vaccinated.Yet I still find it troubling that the response to people "spreading misinformation" is no longer "I believe you are wrong, and here is why: please refer to these peer-reviewed studies [include citations here]." We have lost an essential element of civilized discourse, that being the premise that those who disagree with you still deserve respect. I'd say about 80% of the population thinks those who disagree with their worldview are either (a) bad, horrible people and/or (b) utter idiots who do not deserve any respect. And it goes both ways.

For the record, I had COVID in January. Since then, I have been fully vaccinated with both injections of the Pfizer vaccine. I did not say ANYTHING for or against vaccination issues: I was just commenting on the general nature of discourse.

Interesting, isn't it, how today anyone who propounds a belief contrary to the accepted narrative is "spreading misinformation" and needs to be silenced. I remember a time when diversity of opinion was generally viewed as a strength of our society. But then, I'm old.

Um... trying to think of the most popular and profitable export from Scotland... it's on the tip of my tongue...

In the United States, in almost all cases the price is the same whether you pay with a credit card or with a check or cash. Yes, it is certainly foolish to run a credit card balance, but when you always pay off the entire balance every month, it is quite convenient, a useful way to track expenses, and you pay no interest. Sehr gescheit.

Um.. speaking as a lawyer, sure, a paying customer can sue for damages. That's not a great deal of consolation after having your e-mail and address book shut down and inaccessible. Even if you must rely on cloud services (and, admittedly, GMail can be pretty handy), always, always have local backups. I know it shows my age, but I want to be able to get work done for clients even if my ISP, hosting service, and/or Google goes down or is inaccessible.

We've had an old iPad 2 sitting around the house that our son used in high school. It works fine, and I thought it would be useful to use Chrome Remote Desktop to control our media PC, and also to load Google Home on to control lighting. Nope: neither of those apps will even download because the version of iOS is too old, and there is no option to install an older version. (I've looked it up: if I had an iPhone I could figure out a workaround by downloading the apps elsewhere via iTunes. But I do not have an iPhone. And I'm even less inclined to get one now.) It just seems a shame that perfectly usable hardware becomes artifically obsolete.