I'm sure that's true.

The Micro Center I go to is the one in Yonkers, New York, not far from New York City and two hours south of where I live. There are quite a few other stores where computer parts can be purchased in every direction except north of the Yonkers store. For me, it's the closest "real" computer store to where I live; but in every other direction from the store, it's not. So it stands to reason that the demand would be spread out.

The last time I went, which was a few weeks ago, they had Intel i9 9900K's on sale for somewhere around USD $300.00. That quite a respectable processor and (I think) the top of the LGA 1151 line. I was a bit pissed because I'd paid about a hundred more for one in the spring. Today they have it for USD $329.99 as an in-store only item.

I didn't check on the AMD line because I really wasn't there for that. I just noticed the i9 display while browsing the aisles.

I also noticed that the video card section was showing some shelf on the high end. I suppose a lot of them went to gamers (who have much more time to play at the moment) Bitcoin miners, and possibly architects, engineers, and others who need high-end graphics and who are working at home. There were still a lot of very respectable GPU's in stock, however. It was only the extreme high-end selection that was thin.

Motherboards and RAM showed some white space on the shelves and pegs, but it didn't look like anything was completely out of stock.

The pre-builts were still flying off the shelves in both Mac and PC, with a constant wagon train of dollies trying to replenish the departments. But it wasn't the near-riot atmosphere it had been in the spring. Monitors seemed a bit thin, but not bare. All the other aisles I walked down looked pretty much normal.

I also noticed the other day that the Best Buy in Kingston, New York has permanently closed. It pretty much sucked anyway. I used it as a place to pick up loss leaders or price-match stuff once in a while, but rarely anything else. I suppose it says something about how badly that store sucked that even during the highest demand for computers we've seen in a decade or so, they couldn't make enough money to stay open. But their problem had always been lack of inventory even during "normal" times, so it's not that big a surprise.

Maybe I'll go to Micro Center this weekend just to look around again. I don't need anything, but maybe I'll get a sudden craving for a can of Bawls. Or I'll call it research and justify the trip that way. Any excuse to go to Micro Center is a good one.

The BYO department at my "local" (two hours away, as I live in the boonies) Micro Center has been pretty well-stocked throughout the pandemic. I was able to fill a cart with the exact parts I wanted to build a machine dedicated to video editing in one trip. This was shortly after Governor Cuomo locked down everything in the state except his mouth, triggering the mad rush for pre-built computers (among other things, like toilet paper).

The pre-built department was a madhouse the day I went. I fully expected fistfights and riots to start any minute. People were buying up anything that would boot up.

Business at the BYO department, on the other hand, was pretty much as usual. Everything I needed was in stock, and I didn't have to make a single substitution or change to my build plan.

The same was true when I went there a few weeks to pick up a UPS and some other odds and ends. Pre-builts were flying out of the store so quickly that they may as well have lined the customers up at the truck to buy them. But things were normal at the BYO department, with the exception of the selection of high-end video cards being a bit thin. I still could have filled a cart and built a very respectable computer the same day if I needed to.

For those with the skills (which are pretty modest), this may be an opportunity to make some extra cash building computers. I may just take out an ad myself. The selection of pre-builts near me is basically non-existent, so there's probably decent demand. Whether the local folks have the money to make it worth my while is another question.

Well... Considering that a literal tap of the finger is all that's needed to re-follow, I'd say that those who get annoyed about it may be overreacting just a bit.

I've sometimes wondered how well a country whose legislators and executives were chosen by a random draft of citizens would function. I know that's not what you're suggesting, of course. But I think it reflects a similar sense of disillusionment with the permanent political class as that which I've come to feel.

Would a random draft effectively exclude (or at least reduce the percentage of) people in positions of power who are motivated by undesirable personality traits such as arrogance, narcissism, and a need to control others?

If so, would that necessarily be a good thing? Maybe traits that usually would be considered annoying or undesirable in most contexts are assets in those who govern.

Would people who had no desire to serve in office resent being planted there by a draft, and deliberately devise bad laws and policies as a form of revenge? Or would they just ignore their responsibilities and party together every day at government expense?

Would the continually-changing pool of people result in creative thinking and novel solutions to problems? Or would it compound them because of the absence of collective learning and experience, with each new cohort making the same mistakes all over again?

It's just hypothetical musing, of course.

Engineers are highly-educated, creative professionals of way above-average intelligence, who apply known science in novel ways to solve carefully-identified and clearly-defined problems.

All else being equal, I prefer that kind of person to someone skilled in spewing legalese.

But that's just me.

Drunks rarely stagger in front of 747's while they're in flight.

Drivers of 747's don't pull over to the side of a cloud because their kid needs to pee.

747's don't stop short because a deer runs across the sky.

It's a rare thing for the driver of a 747 to back up in the sky because they missed their exit.

Drivers of 747's typically don't run stop signs, tailgate, cut each other off, or fight over parking spaces.

It's pretty unusual for a newspaper, black plastic bag, or stray umbrella to be blown in front of a 747 at altitude.

Few pilots will admit it, but the real reason why airplanes had autopilots generations ago is because flying is easier than driving. I'm one of the exceptions. I fly (though not 747's) and I drive. It takes a lot of study to master the knowledge part of flying -- most of which will never actually be used in the air -- but flying itself is easier than driving.

Even landing is easy once it dawns on the pilot (hopefully while he or she is still a student) that landing is just flying to a point on the ground. That's why there have been actual cases when people who'd never piloted an aircraft in their lives were able to successfully be "talked down" to safe landings when the choice was to do so or die. It's simply not that hard to land an airplane. Complete novices who were scared for their lives have done it.

Driving... That's another story. I learned to drive in New York City. I also drove a cab in Manhattan for a while when I got out of the service, and drove a truck hauling hazmat to put myself through college. Wanna know about some of the stupid shit drivers and pedestrians do? How much time do you have? I have stories.

What it really comes down to is that flying is predictable. Most flights are so uneventful that both pilots could (and sometimes do) fall asleep without anyone noticing unless they overfly a waypoint. Driving, not so much.

You also have someone watching over the situation when you're in the air. Even if you are flying VFR and haven't requested flight following, you're still on someone's radar (quite literally). They may not talk to you unless you do something exceptionally stupid or they have reason to believe you're in danger (or creating it), but they're watching.

In short, there's really no comparison between self-driving cars and planes on autopilot. Driving is much more difficult, requires much better reflexes, and is done in a much less-predictable context. That's why rudimentary aircraft autopilots were already in use during WW1, but we still don't have self-driving cars.

There are a lot of reasons depending on which cache you're talking about. In general, however, they reduce latency and page load times by allowing sites to "share" commonly-used resources. They also simplify access to resources that are not shared, but which would create a filesystem mess of ponderous proportions were they all stored separately.

I think Firefox is going to take a serious performance hit with this. It will make running multiple tabs in Chrome seem lightweight by comparison. And it's really unnecessary. If you're really that concerned about being tracked, use a portable browser and destroy it after every session. Or run your system cleaner of choice to clear out the caches. We're just talking about ones and zeros in the end.

Seriously. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all in the data-mining business anyway. It's not as if this malware is infecting something pristine.

That's not to say it shouldn't be aggressively dealt with, mind you. No need to add insult to injury. But realistically, the software the malware infects is already violative of users' privacy, as is Win10 itself. I suspect that more data is mined by the combination of the Win10 OS and the uninfected browser than by the extensions.

I think the outcomes would be highly variable. If the community happens to have politicians who are both honest and reasonably tech-savvy, then sure, they'll know and do what's best for their communities. If they're ignorant and/or crooks, on the other hand, then probably not so much.

This article actually has me thinking about building some honeypots exposing databases with tantalizing names, of staggering size, and containing utterly useless, weakly-encrypted data. I'd get a serious case of the giggles every time I thought about the end buyer spending the time and resources needed to decrypt something like the 1961 Sears Roebuck catalog.

I certainly hope not. Considering the fates of other projects and services that Google took under its wings -- and then killed -- I hope they stay as far away as possible.

Respectfully, all of that is drifting rather far from the subject of this discussion. It's also lost on me, I'm afraid, because I hate all politicians. I think they're all pathological control freaks with narcissistic personality disorders and paraphilic domination fetishes. Holding that belief as a baseline as I do, Trump doesn't elicit much more than a shrug from me.

I think you're overestimating the degree to which most people care about what Trump has to say. Even most of his ardent supporters (at least those whom I know) tell me that they pay attention to what Trump does, not what he says.