You should start taking your meds again. You mental illness has taken over again.

Vladimir, I had no idea you knew about Slashdot. We know you're a coward, but their is no need to try to pretend to be anonymous.

but it sounds like the question, "why would anybody need more than 640k?"

For the kinds of computing typical of most businesses, quantum computing has little to offer. Most business options are basic integer arithmetic or algebra. For data analysis problems you want massive parallelism with the winner raising their hand first. We've had that for years and better solutions are being added all the time. You need event based computing tied to parallel data stores that can detect and report events as they happen. You want smart memory that can interact directly with the CPU - which we've had in some form for over 40 years. String operations in main memory? None of this requires quantum computing. Do you want something non-binary? Well in physics things reduce to an either one state or another at the time of measurement so you can represent pseudo continuums with larger bit fields, etc. Business computing is relatively trivial. Your consumers can barely understand concept introduced 40 years ago and they're always misusing data. Security applications and complex simulations seem to me the most promising application areas for quantum computing and you don't sell hundreds of servers to accomplish this. So it's an important niche.

When you pay people under the table then you are not paying the FICA tax. The FICA tax is paid 50% by the employer and 50% by the employee. In the short term both benefit from this; however when it comes time to collect on your social security the employee will find that've not accumulated any benefits for all those years. They'll end up collecting the minimum payment - a few hundred dollars a month - instead of what they would have been entitled to if the wage was reported and the FICA tax paid. The maximum social security benefit is a few thousand dollars a month greater than the minimum payment. Granted if you work in retail you wouldn't likely qualify for the maximum, but you likely to qualify for at least twice the minimum. So in the long haul, paying under the table is wage theft.

It was somewhere on Long Island. I went because I was curious about whether their prices were really that good. I was an audiophile so I was picky about what I'd buy. For commodity brands they were a bit better than other stores, but they couldn't deal some to the most prestigious brands. What I really noticed was how hard they pushed "extended warranties". Sound familiar? Yeah Amazon and Best Buy do this now. The trick was they would sell a product at or slightly below cost and the make it all back plus from the extended warranty. Yeah that's what Amazon and Best Buy do. Ever try to use one? Some things never change.

Who are you trying to kid? The CCP has proved time and again that they won't allow independent thought or anything that smacks of western freedoms in HK. They've completely reneged on their promises. Ask the activists - who keep disappearing into the CCP's gulag - how safe they feel.

Thank you. Finally someone who knows what he/she's talking about.

political viewpoints. As far as I know, no one has been banned from any of the big social media sites for their political viewpoint. Some (not enough) have been banned or suspended for repeatedly posting falsehoods. Your opinions about how big governments should be and how much control they have are viewpoints. Your assertions that your opponents are led by baby-eating pedophiles or that vaccines are part of a conspiracy to depopulate the earth are falsehoods. When you assert something as a fact then the fact can be tested and judged as true or false. When you say something even as extreme as you don't think some other ethnic group should have the same rights as you do, that is a political viewpoint. if you say that same group is genetically inferior, you better have some facts to back that up.

Ordinary users want the OS to be stable and as bug free as possible. It is not something they think about as an upgrade. It's just what they expect as a basic requirement. Beyond that its all about what new things the device can do for me. I expect you to fix what is broke, but what makes me want to upgrade are new capabilities. You don't seem to know any non-geeks - which you may be surprised to know constitute the overwhelming majority of people. Ordinary people don't know what a kernel is or the difference between the OS, drivers and built-in apps. They don't care. Microsoft's entire business model was based on adding features to drive upgrades and never fixing or refactoring the underlying OS. That's why Window is so inelegant compared to other OS's.

"And the operating system mostly doesn't care" completely misses the point. People want the operating system upgrade for the additional features it supports, not because of the kernel. All these features which comprise the "user experience" are implemented in some combination of code and hardware. If the hardware isn't there then there is more code to write. Software implementation usually cannot keep up with a hardware implementation. A feature that depends on Bluetooth 5.0 capabilities cannot be implemented using Bluetooth 4.x hardware. If you don't have a Secure Enclave built into your chip, an emulation cannot duplicate it. You would only get the appearance of comparable capability, but you would not get the security improvement and Apple would have to write and maintain a stack of code that duplicates what the chip does. "And even the 2017 iMac Pro blows the doors off the M1 in multi-core CPU performance, though the M1 wins in single-core performance". What a non-sequitur. The Mac Pro doesn't use the same I7 as what is in the mini and air. It's also completely irrelevant. The features depend on hardware that is simply not there in the earlier models. "Secure enclave might be nice for DRM, but I'd hardly call that better for streaming. :-D " You have no idea what Secure Enclave does do you? It's not about DRM at all. You are quite the ignoramus. You don't have a clue about how Apple products work or the relationship of the hardware and the OS.

Dropping older Macs from support by the latest and greatest OS is not arbitrary. There is more to a Mac than the CPU and the RAM. My 2019 intel mini has a T1 chip for security and other features that its 2014 predecessor does not have. Both have Intel I7 4 cores with 32gb RAM, but not the same generation. Also, the 2019 Mac has Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 support as does my 2020 M1 mini, but the 2020 M1 mini runs my Intel programs and graphics faster than the 2019 Intel mini. M1 includes a lot more than the CPU and RAM on just the 1 chip. Its graphics processing is way more powerful and capable than what is built into the Intel chips. Plus there is the neural net engine, Secure Enclave and other capabilities of the M1 which make it better for video and audio streaming. Apples's decisions have more to do with implementation, performance and reliability than anything else. If your new computer's does something fast using built in chip capabilities, why implement a slower and probably less reliable version that doesn't have the hardware support?

What are they doing or doesn't this site accept them? Asking for a friend.

Right because a nation as large as the USA can't do more than one thing at a time.

Sorry, but you'll have to point out the alleged factual errors or you just a lying troll. You may be a lying troll in any case.