Must really suck that Apple wont let you run interpreted code, huh?

That hasn't been true in nearly 20 years. Python on my ipad runs just fine. I mean fuck, half the problem with modern apps is all the javascript shit in them.

Nearly everybody I know buys them for sheet music

Which is a whoops move. I brought a tablet exactly for that, a samsung. Almost none of the software standardised in the music industry for sheet music actually runs on android (and thats partly because android historically had terrible audio apis, though it has gotten better). Ended up having to get an ipad. About the same price all up.

Somewhat counterintuitively, often broadening access to healthcare, and reigning in prices ends up reducing the amount of money spent on healthcare, and I suspect its because when people go to GPs earlier, they end up heading off more expensive diseases later. If you catch a prostate cancer early, its *relatively* cheap to intervene. if you catch it late, it can cost hundreds of thousands. Likewise catching and heading off type 2 diabetes before it becomes diabolical and preventing it via dietry interventions is vastly cheaper than dealing with it when its a full blown crises. Warning signals for Emphysema can be picked up years before it becomes the dread disease it does when it fully kicks in, and can be treated with various interventions.

Coupled with keeping people in the taxpayers pool for longer , it just ends up with a reduced taxpayer burden and personal health cost burden.

The US spends ridiculously large sums on healthcare and ends up with a system thats internationally notirous for leaving vast swathes of people unable to access healthcare until its really too late. By contrast euro UHC countries end up spending much less.

An interesting case study is US vs Cuban health outcomes. The Cubans are dramatically poorer people than the US, and its health care spend is around half, vs GDP,, meaning the US spends around 4 x more per person on healthcare. And yet the Cuban healthcare system, for all the countries poverty is widely considered world class and life expectancies sit squarely in the middle of averages for first world countries, rather than the much lower rates found in other developing countries. Its kind of the countries point of pride, and tthey like to show it off by exporting doctors (The cubans train a LOT of doctors and use the surplus for foreign aid)

It seems paradoxical, but the secret is the Cubans focus on preventative medicine. Doctors will visit houses on rounds regularly , and do health checkups on pretty much everyone , annually (its compulsary) for healthy folks, and more regularly for folks with condition or elderly folks. That way they catch developing issues early and put people on programs to head off diseases before they manifest into much more costlier conditions to manage.

Now, I'm not suggesting the mandatory regular checkup sort of stuff the cubans do. Obviously that wouldn't fly in the US. But a UHC or UHC adjacent system with a focus on preventative medicine and regular checkups would absolutely reduce the burden of health costs. Like, for all his insanity RFKs concept of getting everyone in the US to eat healthy is not a terrible idea at all. Its the bizzare implementation thats the problem. But an actual scientific approach to health recomendations, coupled with some interventions to making sure poorer folks actually have access to good foods, and spending on community health centers to make sure poor folks are able to get regular checkups, I suspect it would go a long way to in reducing the sort of money the US is spending on health care.

If you look at the climate change denial page you can see the hive mind in action.

Seems pretty factual and unbiased to me?

People keep thinking truth and science should be "balanced" and "fair" , but reality doesn't work by that. A scientific truth doesn't have sides and it doesnt function by debate. A thing is true or it isn't, and while the scientific process is a fundamentally statistical beast, its always been a process of pushing the knowledge curve against well defined asympotes. Its never had an obligation to pay attention to the opinions of the illeducated or dishonest. Because science doesnt deal with opinions, it deals with experiments and results.

Debates are for social media not scientific discourse. Sure there are robust exchanges of conflicting papers and studies where uncertainty exists, but it bears no resemblance to the shouty name calling and exchange of thought-terminating cliches that dominate social media. Science doesnt debate, and neither does wikipedia. The truth is not democratic.

Some of Ubi's earlier games where fantastic. The earlier entries in Assasins creed where straight up great games. Kinda went off the cliff in recent years though. Far cry was pretty great too.

Real men hand configure sendmail configs to configure their home email server.

Remember when we all used to do that?

It wasn't fun.

I don't think it'd technically be illegal to write up the counterclaim with prompt injection attacks

As amusing as it is to think about I can think of multiple ways that would not just be civilly unlawful, but criminally illegal. Our hypothetical scumbag lawyer would well be in danger of triggering all sorts of wire fraud, contempt of court, and tortious interference claims and charges.

Then what you are describing is not at all a license.

316 years of copyright legislation and litigation since the Statute of Anne says otherwise.

They sort of have been doing with the steam deck. I've had one for around six months and I'm consistently surprised at how well the thing runs. Not everything runs superbly, but those that dont I just run on lower settings, and my eyes are too shit to tell the difference half the time.

Hmm. Not so fast. Part of the value equasion with the steam deck and steam controllers is they get to exploit the control scheme mappings already in place for the steam decks. The big thing tthere is the twin touchpads that replace the mouse on the steamdecks (Though they also have touch sensitivity, but the screens on the decks are a little small to make that particularly accurate). I'd hold out for an alternative that better maps onto the control scheme.

What keeps me up at night, is the fate of Tim Smith from the Cardiacs. In my view possibly the closest pop music ever got to a Frank Zappa league songwriter. The man wrote crazy complicated , surreal and energetic music that admitedly is an aquired taste for people. Anyway, at the height of the bands fame, he was out one night at a sisters of mercy concert, and he got robbed for his wallet, and immediately had a massive heart attack. Rushed to hospital and clinically dead for 7 minutes before they revived him. This triggered a stroke of sorts. When he came too he was completely paralyzed down one side of his body, completely mute, and suffering massive pain signals up and down his body.He was fully cogniscient of what was going on around him ,the stroke did not affect his cognition, but unable to function at all. He never left hospital and stayed in limbo in hospital, for a decade before another heart attack kileld him. Ten years in hell. Fucking nightmare, and popular music lost one of its greatest songwriters.

Look after your tickers people. A full coronary heart attacks can be horrifying what it'll do to you, and thats if you survive it at all. And contemplate buying one of those Apple or Samsung watches that'll call an ambulance if you collapse.

The real annoying thing about the climate stuff, is in 2026 we have all the knowledge in place to actually solve this cursed problem. Its literally cheaper to get power out of renewables than almost any other means, and if we are prepared for a lead time and a bit of cost, we are quite capable of going nuclear too, if we sort out the red tape and bullshit. But 50% of the population vote for parties that campaign on "DIG BABY DIG! PHYSICS IN THE SKY IS A COMMUNIST PLOT" and the other 50% of the population are content to let their slightly less mouth foaming prefered party move deck chairs around on the titanic and not a knob of goatshit ever gets done.

Theres a bit of a magic trick with a lot of it.

These things are *realy* good at drudge work. Shitty reactjs sites. wordpress themes. The kind of stuff you give to the fresh recruit from university, whos still got enough vigor in him to tolerate working on mind numbing web shit all day. But you give it a hard problem, race conditions in a multithreaded code, cache chaos, or worse mashing it all together and debugging memory leaks in a cached multithreaded system across multiple language translation layers in a system designed by insane architecture astronauts on meth, and they fall to pieces. I mean, its impressive, but its not going to be replacing senior devs anytime soon.

Probably one of the most brilliant people of the century who we lost due to bigotry.

Sadly, one of so many. Recently found out my best friend in highschool had suicided likely because he had been outed as gay. All I can think of is he should have told me, I'd have supported him, he's hadly the only gay friend I ever had. And in retrospect it should have been bleedingly obvious, the man would practically run from any woman who showed him affection, and he was pretty dandy. Singing in a hair metal band and being kinda..... camp with all the frizzed hair and leather tassles and shit. Think motley crue or poison or whatever. But it was the 1980s and people where pretty brutal to young gay people back then.

Even if I go back to the 1990s and boxed retail software, you were never actually buying the software, your purchase was for the license to use it.
The real issue here is the gamers being sold software whose functionality is tied to third-party servers and denied first sale doctrine (the ability to transfer/resell their license if they want to someone else).

Thats always been a gross simplification of the rights generally involved with a software sale. While yes, technically its a license to use software, rather than the software itself, license sales have always had a series of expectations associated with them in law, common law and in user expectations. And those expectations matter in a courtroom.

Most of the world consumer law is very clear that if you give a license to use something, and its sold as "buy" rather than "rent" or "time limited" , its not revokable and its subject to the same sort of consumer protection laws buying a toaster or a car has. Most importantly that it remains fit for purpose for the natural lifetime of the product, and that term "lifetime" is absolutely not "until we tire of letting you use that thing you paid for" but rather "How long would a reasonable consumer believe they can use this before its basically bitrot". To simplify that, assume it means "as long as the physical software is capable of running without a rewrite" and NOT "until we send the kill-command to the DRM".

The tension here is that software is attempting to move to a service model whilst trying to retain the language of a product model. You dont purchase a pool cleaning man, you hire a pool cleaning man. Well, unless your in a southern state during a terrible time in history, I suppose.

And thats where cases like this the complainant stands a good chance of winning. Because if California law has strong protections (A lot of america *doesnt* , but europe* and australia but apparently not canada for reasons that are mystifying to me, have strong protections) then if it can be shown that at the point of purchase it was not made clear that this product was time limited or was going to be made unavailable to people who purchased it, then the complainants have a strong case for deceptive advertising.

* I am aware europe just voted down a 'stop killing games' law. I am surprised by that, because honestly, it should have been the default anyway. I smell the acrid stench of industry lobbyists foul deeds