If you didn't whine then, why are you whining now?

Gen-Xer (barely) here who made it, at the tail end of when people generally still could. I'm thankful every day for the luck I've had. Yes, it's been hard work for many years. Yes, I was incredibly lucky to benefit from the opportunities that were once plentiful but become rarer every year. The generations that came after us have gotten a raw deal. The downturns hit them differently than they hit you and me. They didn't have any kind of safety net built up and they are still recovering as the next wave hits. It's our responsibility to help them so that society as a whole can succeed. It's the greedy choice too, because helping them will help ourselves.

Excessive Garlic: Check
Higher than usual annual sunshine: Check
Nearby forests for ample stake construction: Check
Moderately close (Two week journey on horseback) to abandoned silver mine: Check

Yes... This will do nicely.

People can get a replicated cheeseburger anywhere, okay? They come to Quark's for the atmosphere and the attitude. Okay? That's what the flair's about. It's about fun.

Seems like it should be part of our constitution that any technology developed with public funding can not be sold to private companies except via a super-majority vote, and then only to non-profits corporations. Likewise, no exclusive access licensing agreements can be made that would prevent access to those technologies by the general public.

There are some classes of software that should be regulated. Take for instance the Sony copy protection rootkit from 2005 that was auto-installed on windows computers when you inserted a music CD into your CDROM drive. You could argue that the offense was the auto-installing nature of the rootkit. I would argue however that even if the user agreed to install it via the EULA, it should *still* be illegal and a federal criminal offense to install rootkits on computers as part of some completely unrelated product. This is especially true for products where the user is intentionally being deceived and is likely to have no idea what a rootkit even does.

Debate about whether or not TikTok should be regulated is fine, but I'm absolutely in favor of certain classes of abusive software being regulated at the Federal level. It's just a question of what should be regulated and why.

(1) via contract. Most states are at-will, but you can override it:
https://www.justia.com/employm...

(2) Who knows. There has to be some kind of consideration and meeting-of-the-minds for it to be enforceable though.

...And AIDS, and DRUGS! D.A.R.E to be different, just so no kids.

Yep. I suspect the people making these comments weren't enterprising kids/teenagers back in the late 80s and early 90s. Most parents were far too preoccupied with MTV, the Simpsons, and eventually games like Mortal Kombat to even remotely be worried about the internet, assuming they even knew what it was at that point.

I was dialing into BBSes playing LORD on my cobbled together 286 with a 1200 baud modem when I was like 10-12 years old. "Internet" access was pretty much limited to certain BBS gateway features but it was still there.

We did tell our kids when they were younger that we didn't want them getting sucked into social media. Having said that, our approach over the years has been much more about open communication and discussion rather than trying to control the content they accessed. Even though I'm far more capable than the average parent of locking things down, that plan always seemed like a losing proposition. Instead, we told them about 4chan/8chan and why they should be careful. We told them about how social media can screw with your emotions. We told them they *deserve* privacy and would have it from us so long as they didn't do anything that was unhealthy/dangerous/illegal. We talk regularly about law, politics, society, and morality. We watch Rick and Morty and play Cards against Humanity together. It hasn't been perfect, but given the stresses today's youth face I think they've done remarkably well and I'm really proud of them. I wouldn't do it differently.

Seems a number of us still check in from time to time. I only sort of tangentially knew Malda through the afterstep/enlightenment communities on IRC though (back even before slashdot started). No idea where most of those folks are these days.

Eh... you could argue he did that for himself while he still existed: The thought of persistence gave him comfort when he was alive to enjoy it.

Oh, I realize now you might have meant more emphasis on the "almost" part. I don't know what the parent specifically meant in this context, but Chess is partially solved:

"Fully solving chess remains elusive, and it is speculated that the complexity of the game may preclude its ever being solved. Through retrograde computer analysis, endgame tablebases (strong solutions) have been found for all three- to seven-piece endgames, counting the two kings as pieces. Some variants of chess on a smaller board with reduced numbers of pieces have been solved. Some other popular variants have also been solved; for example a weak solution to Maharajah and the Sepoys is an easily memorable series of moves that guarantees victory to the "sepoys" player."

It means that you essentially can reduce the game to win/lose/draw based on who goes first assuming perfect players on both sides. Tic-Tac-Toe for instance is a solved game. Checkers was solved in 2007. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Because the actual cost to run 181ft of copper is nowhere near $27K. Why do you think the internet service providers have gotten laws passed in states so that cities can't create their own municipal internet service even when it's in their best interest?

https://broadbandnow.com/repor...

My experience has been that inspections basically have three functions:

1) Convince the bank to give you a loan.
2) Give you an out over some ridiculous infraction if you change your mind.
3) Make you feel good about your purchase.

I caught way more things wrong on both home inspections I had than our inspector did. Blatantly obvious things too. Want a good inspection? Go buy a flir thermal camera (or phone attachment) and a moisture meter and make the rounds yourself. You can do everything from looking at heat build up in the electrical panel and any exposed high current wiring, to looking at insulation and heat loss, to looking for signs of water intrusion. That alone is already far more than either of my inspectors did.