In the US public transportation, in general, sucks, and no one wants to pay for what it would take to fix it. The last time I took a bus I had to wait over 20 minutes in stifling heat (98 degrees Fahrenheit, that's around 36.6 C for you Europeans) and it sucked extra bad. Definitely not used to that kind of inconvenience, since I live in a rural area without public transit and have my own truck, and just took the bus while on vacation to avoid trouble with parking. Do not want to try that again. Ever.

Doesn't affect me as I don't have any pictures of myself on Facebook. Maybe it should concern my cat, but I heard that facial recognition for Siamese cats is notoriously ineffective.

I am horrible socially, I used to get panic attacks even thinking of something so simple as introducing myself. But I found it wasn't so stressful in online games (starting with Diablo II and Starcraft battle.net) From there I found my way into chat rooms, and eventually started to actually get better at communicating with others. I'm still awkward and prefer not dealing with people, but I have a solid network of friends online and off now, some of whom I met through old school battle.net all those years ago. So in my case video games are a clear positive.

Which isn't to say that all games are positive. Pretty sure League of Legends remains a cesspool of toxicity. But there's still some out there where you can find positive communities.

Windows is still stuck with iTunes, sadly.

Don't bother if you use Windows to manage the phone. You still have to use iTunes to manage it (worst software known to man) and it STILL will not load downloaded music without running it through iTunes on a PC first. My mom has one, I have to support it, and it's a royal pain in the butt.

Also don't bother if you like having control of your phone. It's a very locked down device, and Apple has the final say on what it will and will not do.

I do feel your pain on the third party apps, though. Fortunately, my Google Pixel just came with the Google apps and stock Android. After using it, no way in hell am I going back to the likes of Samsung.

So much this. I ran some small web forums for years, and without reCAPTCHA or other services like it (using the default CAPTCHA that shipped with the forum software) I would get dozens of spam accounts a day. On a small site that was more a hobby than anything else, not a big presence by any means. After reCAPTCHA, I was able to take a break and not mass clean the forum of (unactivated) spam bot registrations every day. I shut down the last of those about a year ago, but I seriously doubt the problem is any better.

Agreed, I can't stand that Apple devices don't "just work" when you download an mp3 file, or attach the phone to a computer via a USB cable. No, I had to install iTunes to manage my mom's iPhone SE. Which is pretty much the worst software available on Windows today, short of a ransomware infestation. I'm still happy with my Android phone (Google Pixel) and have no plans to move off of Android. That said, I also don't plan to ever buy a Samsung phone. Their update practices are so bad they're legendary. My Pixel still gets updates promptly, even with it so old that the battery is starting to degrade.

A person going 5 miles per hour slower than the flow of traffic is more likely to cause a wreck than a speeder. Additionally, if I in a motor vehicle can get a ticket for driving too slowly on a roadway (the law in my state says quite clearly "No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with the law.") why should a bicycle be treated any differently?

Simple solution to all these problems, if you are on a bicycle then pull off to the side and let those behind you pass. If there is enough traffic that you find you cannot ride when you do this, it's probably not a good place to ride. It may not be legally required, but use some judgement about where and when to ride. There's a lot of idiots on the road already, and riding a bicycle down the center of the lane of a major roadway during rush hour just adds another one to the mix unnecessarily. Just because you can ride in a way that annoys other people doesn't mean that you should.

If a person on a bicycle cannot show proper courtesy and respect for the rules of the road, well, perhaps they really don't belong on the road to begin with.

While there are free alternatives for a lot of software available on Linux, the simple fact is that there is a lot thatt is Windows, or Windows/Mac, only.

Games are a great example. While you could screw around with WINE and get World of Warcraft running, it's never going to run as well as it would in its intended environment, and there's every possibility thatt an update to the game that works fine on Windows will not work on Linux with WINE.

There are, however, many use cases for Linux where it can work quite well. For instance, if you're using Chrome to browse the web, Thunderbird to check email, LibreOffice to edit documents, you might do great on Linux. Just be sure it works with all your hardware (printers especially) before making the switch.

I have a laptop which runs Linux (Ubuntu Mate to be precise), and it's great as far as it goes. Getting my printer working with it (an older Canon multi function) was much more annoying than on Windows, particularly when I decided to use it with my Windows box and share it from there. It was doable, but very annoying figuring itt out. I still couldn't use it full time, however. I enjoy playing games on my computer, and not many of them come with Linux support.

Even when you are connected to the internet, the vast majority of land area in the United States lacks the level of connectivity needed to support something like the article implies things are going to. It's already annoying enough that games are no longer shipping on discs (a 24-hour download is not uncommon here) and I bet if they tried to do away with the desktop, the torches and pitchforks would come out extremely quickly.

Speaking of which, I have a few extra pitchforks in the barn if anyone needs to borrow one.

But wait, there's more!

For me, the client was using 8x more bandwidth than my pathetic internet connection was even capable of. I can only assume it was pounding my router trying to connect instead of having some sensible method of downloading. Needless to say, internet was impossible to use for anything else. I had to download a traffic shaping program from my motherboard manufacturer's website and throttle it to get things under control. And even at half my connection's bandwidth, it still downloaded faster than it was while hogging every bit of it. No clue why they can't do what every other game store does and have some method of limiting bandwidth built in.

At current time, all-electric is out for me. Considering that I live about an hour from the nearest decent-sized city, and regularly take a 3 hour drive to my vacation property, where there simply isn't the infrastructure for quickly recharging, I'd probably inevitably wind up stranded eventually. Just last week I had to drive 5 hours to get to my dying aunt, and at the other end, guess what, there wasn't anywhere I could have recharged. Certainly not at the hotel I stayed at, at least.

A hybrid would be better simply because of the distances I have to drive, however there's another proglem - I have other criteria that need to be satisfied, and don't have the money to buy an extra vehicle just for the times I don't need those things. Going to my vacation property I generally haul so much stuff that it fills up the back of my Ford Explorer easily, and sometimes will fill up the back of my F-150 (and sometimes I have to tow a trailer to carry it all, too). So until there's a solution that will serve my cargo, towing, and range needs, I guess I'll have to stick with gasoline.

Until it's as cheap as beef and as tasty as beef, I'll remain a member of PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals.

Without those of us in rural communities, people like you would not eat. You would get no steaks, no burgers, no grains, no vegetables, not even a can of beer to drown your sorrows as you starved to death. 99.999% of food production isn't done in the cities. Who'd have thought, right? Those "taxpayer checks" also tend to average vastly less than we pay in every year. The check I got to compensate for Trump's tariffs amounted to under 30 bucks, an order of magnitude less than the amount lost. Bright side, could have been worse with more land in soybeans.

We already do pay more for pretty much everything. Expensive internet (I'm lucky to have 10mbps dsl here, but I could get fiber for what I'm paying if it existed here), expensive satellite TV, long drives to get to a decent-sized city, etc.

Seems to me the ultimate problem is the limited available space. 14 comparison shopping sites all want that space. There's only, what, 5 slots in that all-important shopping bar at the top of the page? There's simply no way even a majority of them are going to get a spot on it in a given search. There is no solution to this problem that will satisfy these comparison shopping services, since Google would have to ruin the search experience by adding a godawful wall of shopping results before you even get to search.

And as far as search results go, when shopping for a product, you want a link to purchase the product. Search results SHOULD point you to retailers carrying such a product - not comparison shopping sites that refer you back to a retailer for an affiliate kickback.