Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Or simply walking/driving...

US citizen detained by immigration officials who dismissed his Real ID as fake
Family members outraged as U.S. citizen detained by federal agents in downtown LA on way to work

Even after proving they're U.S. citizens, many are still detained because they "assaulted" the usually masked, unmarked officers refusing to identify themselves as LEO and/or their agency, which make things seem more like a kidnapping. The "they assaulted/resisted us" excuse is getting a bit old, especially when there are usually 5-10 "officers" attacking someone. But, you know, as long as they're only going after "very bad criminals", and not people going to work, simply because they're brown ... /s Stephen Miller, with his 3,000 people/day quota, is the worst.

Sure, but the quality isn't. Everything's a trade-off. My point, though, was that your estimate of a music CD's capacity was way off.

Standard music CDs can hold 74 minutes and the average pop song length is 3.5 minutes. Even at 4 minutes, that's 18 songs. The CD Louder than Bombs by The Smiths, at 72m 44s, has 24 songs on it, most between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes long. I'll note that one of my devices can't play the last song -- it's probably to depressed by then. :-)

Google: average length pop music
Compact disc

Unless the studio wants a tax break and the series gets Willow'd.

Microsoft tried to do something like that before with the Windows Experience Index in WinSAT. It didn't last long: the GUI was displayed only from Windows Vista through the first release of Windows 8.

If next to nobody signs up for Microsoft's curated store, this curation will be ineffective. The only thing that encouraged third-party developers to publish through Microsoft's store is that Xbox consoles are cryptographically locked down not to run games from anywhere else.

Plus the cost of buying the rest of the computer around it. This can prove more expensive if you want a case that looks more attractive in the living room than a big noisy tower.

I'm curious why it took over 14 years after Red Dead Redemption was released for Xbox 360 for it to get a PC port. Rare Replay and several other respected Xbox One games still haven't been ported.

In 2012, the consensus was that most users were unwilling to either build a second PC, cart a gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the computer desk, or run cables through the walls, to use Big Picture mode in Steam. (Source: adolf's comment) When did this change?

The incentives to collecting are 1. ability to watch if you rely on wireless Internet (satellite or cellular) with a harsh monthly data cap, 2. ability to watch a particular movie or TV episode again after you have switched to a different streaming service for the month, and 3. ability to watch a particular work again even after its publisher has destroyed it for an "impairment" tax deduction or the service it's on has ended (particularly for game consoles).

Oh come on.

We've been saying "Thanks, Biden!" for years as a joke, and you blue haired legbeards always got riled up with your "source????" and "citation needed???" cries.

(FWIW I don't support Trump and have never voted Republican).

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Rather, "not allowed". Sure, my Dell XPS 420, that a friend gave me, is old, but it runs Windows 10 like a champ - though I did replace the HDD with a SSD; I imagine it would run Windows 11 just as well if not for the (arbitrary) hardware "requirements" Microsoft imposed for Windows 11. Same for my other systems. Instead of buying something new(er), I'll be switching to using my Linux Mint 22 system full-time instead - which is also old, but works great (i7-3770, ASRock Z77 Extreme3, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD).

Good thing SSDs can't be replaced. /s

I've read that dropping X11 in favor of Wayland goes beyond GNOME and reaches all of GTK. This means developers of other GTK-based desktop environments (particularly Xfce) and users of distributions built around those environments (I have Xubuntu and Debian Xfce in mind) will have to make hard decisions.

I think what happened with FOSTA is that some of the more conservative states or the federal government redefined "sex trafficking" to include not only sexually-oriented human trafficking but also all other sexually-oriented commerce.

True, higher-priced prepaid mobile phone plans have unlimited text. Lower-priced plans do not. SMS-based 2-factor authentication is not cost effective for a subscriber making do with a lower-priced plan.