Wake me when standard JPEG files support alpha channels. The "powers that be" should have solved this 30 years ago.

As many or as few as you want, as long as you're not forced to use them all.

Before anyone gets snippy with their comments, first consider people with physical disabilities that may need customizations you never even thought about.

Props to a fellow Pale Moon user. I hate how much people dump all over this browser.

Speed is nice and all, but you just can't dismiss the importance of trust. Every time I update Firefox, I wonder to myself, "What did they break this time?" Every time I've updated Pale Moon, it just works with no surprises. At this point, after so many years of using it, it's the only application I update with no hesitation.

In other words, good ol' not putting all your eggs in one basket.

I had the same policy during my career, and I'm glad I didn't invest in my own company, because I would have been hosed. There's nothing better than a diversified portfolio... which is why I'm only middle-aged yet retired. 8)

But "living standards" are hot right now! Why not bring the stability and robustness of web development practices into operating system kernels?

Seriously, I tried messing with Rust a while ago, and just getting the environment up and running was a nightmare. It's not just a language, it's an entire ecosystem, and with that comes shitloads of politics. No wonder people are pushing it with such religious fervor.

Corvette... isn't that the brand that had a totally useless 6th gear for... a few decades?

I have the same issue with my manual Subaru WRX, where 5th and 6th gear are practically the same ratio, rendering 5th gear useless. I always shift from 4th into 6th because 5th makes no sense. Some manufacturers are so desperate to stop making manual transmissions, that they sabotage them with bizarre gear ratios and cable linkages.

Here's an idea: if you want to sell something, don't make it suck.

So now AI thinks up the ideas and writes the specs, and real people do all the work to make this crap work.

That's it... AI has now graduated to being the new pointed-haired boss.

Complete government deregulation of the market is what has lead to tons of incompatible chargers that require you to install an app on your phone to use them.

Most of the time the government screws everything up is because the biggest corporations own the government and can buy whatever regulations will force their competitors out of business. Rather than whining that the government can't do anything right, perhaps we should start breaking up all the corporate monopolies and refuse to allow 50+ billion-dollar mergers.

Sorry, but in my experience electric anything is far less reliable. Over the last 25 years I've had exactly one gas lawn mower, one gas snowblower, and one gas trimmer. If you can't be bothered to change oil and a spark plug every few years, that's your problem.

I can't even count how many battery-operated cordless tools I've had to throw away because their fully-sealed battery packs have been discontinued. Except for power drills, I only buy corded tools these days.

Every battery pack I come across today is glued shut, even if there are standard cells inside. Good luck rebuilding that. Are you still living in the 90's?

So it took nearly 20 years to settle on a 0.04 percent reduction that is only temporary. Sounds legit.

Think about how much money it costs to develop a game. Now consider that the 30% retail equivalence fee is probably as high as the entire game development budget.

Bandwidth and sales arbitration does not cost that much.

I like using old floppy drives because they make interesting noises, and it's cool that you tell how they work and what they're doing by listening to them. It's a novelty.

Fuck CDs. They just suck.

This is the USA. We can politicize anything, including medicine.

I noticed this once a couple weeks ago. While I was viewing in private mode, the page flashed the usual page of recommendations, and then promptly removed them all with the message "Search to get started!"

YouTube is just taking a page from all the social media giants, and heading in the direction of a gated community. For some idiotic reason, more and more sites on the web are blocking you from accessing content unless you sign up. Gone are the days when you needed an account to participate, now you need one just to observer. Yeah, you might think I'm overreacting as usual, but we really are heading towards a society where there is no public access to content, despite everything being available on free accounts paid for with advertisements. I shouldn't need to have 200+ accounts all over the web just to "surf".

I see this as a very bad thing, as it implies that the only content you can see is the stuff that's been "tailored" just for your preferences. Sometimes, I want to see the same content that everyone else does, just for a bit of perspective. I don't want to be trapped in a bubble, and certainly not the bubble the marketeers want. I think it's kind of sad how people say this is a good thing, whether they're being sarcastic or not. It is NOT good to build an infrastructure so that everybody is treated differently by default, and you're not allowed to know what kind of content other people are watching. It should always be possible to view baseline content. But, again, we don't live in that world anymore. So much for the information superhighway and the accessibility of information to everyone.