I've been pleasantly surprised that covid still hasn't hit us. Given my wife is a nurse, I really expected her to bring it home at some point - but, despite multiple tests over the past several years, nary a single positive.

On the other hand, it seems like recently more of the stuff we've purchased on Amazon has turned out to be absolute crap quality - or has other problems - and ends up being returned.

We've easily done more Amazon returns in the past year than in the previous 20.

Exactly. Give us units that are useful to grown-ups!

So how many football fields is this? How about Libraries of Congress?

The next stage (speaking from experience) is "How can I be 60? In my head I still feel like I'm in my 20s! My knees, on the other hand, ..."

You think they've still got some 40-year-old computers hidden deep in their datacenters, still using the 2-year dates that used to be the norm back then?

I switched from Dell to Mac back around 2003 - in part because of OS X, but also because my Inspiron with its power brick felt like I was carrying an extra 20 pounds on my shoulder. My first MacBook Pro, with its relatively tiny power brick, weighed half what the Dell did.

Of course those Macs were still somewhat user upgradable. I remember some of them made it trivial even to replace the hard drive.

I'm conflicted. I don't really believe there's a grand conspiracy here, but I did like being able to work on my machines. However I also loved my MacBook Air (circa 2008-9) - you didn't even feel it in your bag.

... that it's a side-sleeper.

I don't think Apple Pay is tied into iCloud at all. I do know it works with no network connection.

I imagine the argument is that treaty was specifically targeting space-based "weapons of mass destruction" designed to fall to earth, detonate, and kill people on the planet; while these new weapons typically would not kill anyone at all (unless a space station had the misfortune of being in the weapon's vicinity).

I use bitwarden for my passwords, at least - admittedly it is their cloud-based service, but I regularly dump a copy to an encrypted sparse disk image I keep locally (something you can't really do with Apple's Keychain).

It was painful getting 15 years worth of passwords moved out of Apple's Keychain, but ultimately worth it. The bonus is not only platform independence, but also a significantly superior tool.

I am a bit confused by the reporting here, though - it would be annoying, but given Apple doesn't do cloud-only storage (to the best of my knowledge), it's not like people wouldn't still have access to the local copies of their stuff during the outage.

That's all well and good, but server CPUs are not the bulk of the market. Apple moved all of their devices over to their own ARM chips, and now it looks like Microsoft is heading the same way. Intel could keep 100% of the "server CPU" market and still have lost the vast majority of their business.

The base issue here is that our tax system is needlessly complicated - thanks, Congress! But if the government is going to insist on a stupidly complicated system, most taxpayers shouldn't have to pay even more money just to hand the government what the government says they owe.

Whether it hurts the employees of H&R Block is irrelevant.

Nothing new, but I always find it funny here how so many Americans and Europeans like to point out each others' shortcomings, convinced that it demonstrates the other group is living in a hellhole.

Given the legal climate in America - yes. Altering my existing job description without my knowledge could make me a very rich man.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that the The Foreign VPS Incentive Act will cause domestic VPS vendors to lose business?