Older air conditioners. Over the years, they've kept changing the allowed refrigerant in air conditioners, each one requiring a completely incompatible system. Need your AC serviced.... Oooooh, sorry, you need the whole system tossed out and replaced with an entirely new one because the refrigerant can't be obtained any more. (Happened to us twice in our San Jose home.)

This isn't to say there wasn't good reason for the change. But it's sure have been nice if they just changed it once.

I thought that business model went the way of the trilobite way back when the Xerox patent expired.

I can't imagine this working out very well for HP. A rapidly dwindling population of ever more stupid customers.

Or, the tests are picking up naturally occurring substances and incorrectly labeling them as "microplastics."

Though, in that one, it was space aliens doing the recruiting.

Seriously.

How about, for a change, instead of imposing rules on people that they find burdensome, look at their use case for the bags, figure out a way to meet the perceived need in an *actually* environmentally friendly way, rather than "we did something, so it's all good, even though it makes things worse, it's the thought that counts."

My first thought was "That's stupid; rats have a lifespan of two or three years; they're dying of old age faster than you can train them." But, from TFA, these rats have a lifespan more comparable to dogs, 8 years or more.

There's a quote by C. S. Lewis that I read years ago, something to the effect that if the government fails to provide protection to the law-abiding from various sorts of two-legged predators, sooner or later, the law-abiding are going to be forced to avail themselves of something more primitive than the King's Justice.

And, apparently, "physical access" required using a card key to get in, but the card readers were all knocked offline by the same BGP changes. Rumors are they had to call in someone with an angle grinder to let them into their server room.

Not to mention -- "Selected Not Elected" for all *expletive* eight years of the GWB administration. The same dang people who say it's an affront to Democracy Itself to ever ever ever question the results of an election when a Democrat wins are all over the "The election was stolen!!" claims when a Republican wins.

Did Trump "really" win? I don't know. I think he was such a polarizing figure that an unprecedentedly huge number of people making the effort to cast "I don't care about anything but Not Trump" is ... not all that implausible. Them's the breaks. If Trump wasn't such a complete jackass, he'd probably have won.

I just have nothing but contempt for the blatant in-your-face hypocrisy of the people, only now at this late date, beginning to decry "casting doubt on the validity of the election."

And I'm sure the replies to this posting will have several of the most blatant hypocrites of that stripe on display below.

Facebook (and Twitter, and Amazon, and other "big tech" platforms) went all-in on the Biden campaign, and this is how they're rewarded for their unwavering loyalty.

Can't say I have any sympathy. Let the current regime make their political partisanship de jure to go with the long-standing de facto. The tech gadzillionaires should have read Aesop's Fables. "You knew what I was all along, so why are you surprised?"

With Android, no matter what anyone running Google thinks, I can side-load any app I want. (Like that nifty tricorder app that Paramount made them ban.)

Apple maintains totalitarian control over anything and everything to do with the iPhone. You're not a user, you're a subject. A serf.

At least, not for too much longer. I just retired, and am in the process of bailing from The Peoples Glorious Socialist Workers Paradise Republic. The Wokeunists can have it.

Beautiful scenery, nice parks, pleasant climate ... but I'm outta here.

(Going to make sure I get the plates on the cars changed to Texas plates before I show up in my new neighborhood.)

I said "Alexa, translate Spanish", then said "Buenos dias, como esta usted", and it replied with something in Spanish beyond my "took Spanish in High School 50 years ago and have lived in California for 40 years" knowledge of Spanish, such as it is.

I tried again, and it replied with some other Spanish phrase.

I suppose it's likely that my hideous accent in Spanish was giving it fits. A Salvadoran friend who left a message on Xfinity voice mail, in English, got transcribed as if it were Spanish, with hilarious results when I pasted the transcript into Google Translate, so this may well be the opposite problem.

I'd like to see this feature used to have the window I'm looking at be in focus. Countless times, I've hit ^S or ^Q or something, and *AUGH* the window that was in focus wasn't the one I was looking at!

"Hydrogen has a very broad flammability range—a 4 percent to 74 percent concentration in air."