I've been wondering for many years before the first traffic camera appeared, why the toll-roads aren't enforcing the speed limits automatically. The time you enter and exit the highway is recorded down to a second. The distance between these two points is known — your average speed could be computed on the spot even with the early 90-ies technology...

The polite police officers would be standing right behind the toll-booths issuing tickets without the drama of hiding in the bushes, then chasing you at highway speeds...

And, yeah, you could lower it by stopping at a rest area — but it'd still be a tremendous disincentive to speed.

I was and continue to hope, that such universal enforcement, affecting all voters, would cause the limits to go up to reasonable figures — or even be abolished completely...

I've run into these people, they're the worst

When have you last checked your compiler's output?

Used? Why stop? Others and I still use mutt!

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

That's the point, they want to rent you access to a computer too

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

*ow!*

uh, found it...

Not only have I seen that, but I have experienced it.

My socket set and ratchet isn't trying to convince me to be in a relationship with it, to be in love with it, to be something of an equal to it.

Even our pets as living beings capable of expressing themselves are not able to communicate at our level.

Large language model AI is attempting to spoof being human, to mimic being us. There are already examples of people becoming very, VERY upset when their AI-boyfriend or AI-girlfriend is taken away by companies revising the AI standards and interaction rules. This is unhealthy. The relationship needs to remain that of tool user and tool, because anything more than that is one-sided and subject to terrible abuse by anyone that managed to co-opt that system.

The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough. Machines should be useful tools serving us, where our emotional connections to them are still based on tool-user and tool.

produces higher quality sperm

That's really important for the sperm destined for the septic system, sure...