I just bought a used, reconditioned Surface Pro 7 for under $400 to have something small for international travel. It has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is more capacity than the base model of the Surface Pro 12, and it was released in 2021. If you don't need the very latest processor, there are a lot of good options on Amazon and Ebay for reconditioned units at budget prices. The only caveat is that the batteries are extremely difficult to replace, so they have a finite lifetime. They could be so much longer lasting if the battery could be accessed purely by miniature fasteners rather than having to un-glue the display and various other components with specialized tools, risking destruction of the unit at every step. Most people aren't going to try this. I believe it's possible to engineer for thin and light without compromising that much on repairability. I'm happy to live with a few extra ounces or an extra ten to thirty thousands of device thickness if it means I can swap the battery out.

A friend had a perfectly good, almost unused surface book 3 with dead batteries (it has two, one in the detachable screen / tablet and one in the base with the keyboard) and after looking up the replacement procedure I decided there was no way I was not going to fuck it up, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. We ended up sending it to the recycler and I kept the docking station and charger to use with my reconditioned Surface Pro. Planned obsolescence strikes again.

Other than the repairability issues, they are neat devices, well designed, and run full windows for those of us who need it. Probably the best hardware offering MS has ever churned out.

No one ever mentions that this is an option. The tech media just screams, "Your computer will be useless after they stop supporting Win10!" For a lot of people, sure, I wouldn't recommend using legacy OSs. For a small group of us, it's perfect. Once I got a substantial number of updates, I disabled automatic updates via the policy editor, before it started installing nags to upgrade to Win11 and trying to trick you into it. If it ain't broke...

I make heavy use of the quick launch feature on a double height taskbar in Win10, and no it's not the same as 'pinned apps'.

There are some workarounds and third party options to restore that functionality, but again, why did you take it out? When it's disabled it's not bothering anyone who doesn't want it.

Movable taskbar....putting a feature back in that's been there since windows 95, until you deliberately removed it for no good reason.

You can keep your ads and B.S., I will keep using Windows 10 as long as I can. It works great and doesn't harass me.

The key point here is the ability to disable all telemetry leaving the car. We need open sourced EV car software that does not spy on you or sell your information. It sounds like they're on their way.

Guides to disable the cellular modem or antenna in all popular model EVs would be a good way to start as well. Using wrecked examples from a junkyard would be an economical way to experiment.

The cost of propane and electricity has become so expensive in California that we use our wood burning fireplace insert during the winter whenever possible. It's the kind that has a blower that will heat up the whole house quickly while exhausting all the fireplace gasses up the chimney. If you want to encourage environmentally friendly behaviors amongst us regular folk, make electricity cheap and plentiful, and sourced from non-greenhouse gas generation itself. Modern, safe nuclear as a primary, stable source backed by wind and solar, or eliminate the nuclear component if battery storage is sufficiently advanced and plentiful. (it's getting there...) We like our fireplace but would prefer to use it only when we want to feel cozy once in a blue moon, not consistently to save money.

When the price of owned solar comes down, that is an option as well. (leased solar is a scam) We plan to include owned solar in our next home, whether if it comes with it or we leave out money from the down to purchase it. We are in the process of selling our current home and it's easier financially to do that transaction when changing homes.

There are two camps out there, people who want artificial scarcity and a lower quality of life for no good reason, and those of us who think that energy can be both environmentally friendly AND abundant. Contrary to what you have been led to believe, those two things are not mutually exclusive. But the whole nature of how semi-public utilities (at least in California) are run needs to change, and decentralize. It's a huge mess.

LinkedIn is primarily a convenient platform for state sponsored IP theft, hacking and espionage via asset recruitment of highly positioned individuals, and funding of totalitarian regimes (North Korea) through remote work scams. And just when you think it can't get worse, video and audio spoofing by AI has made it much worse. You can pin the blame on the HR departments not doing their due dilligence, but LinkedIn sure is a big enabler.

Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.

Some intrepid sould would be forever thanked if they hosted a site (offshore, safe from DMCA takedowns) with user-contributed instructions on how to remove or disable the cellular modem on popular car models.

If they want my data, they need to pay for it. By, for example, making the car free or steeply discounted. Until then, fuck off.

This is something like The Face on Mars, where author Richard C. Hoagland went down a rabbit hole and connected the dots on a whole bunch of other landscape features nearby to back up his theory that the face was actually a face. Then a later mars satellite went by and photographed it from different angles in different lighting, and lo and behold it was just light and shadow. Along with the rest of the rocks that made up his 'alien civilization'. You see what you want to see, and find patterns where there aren't any.

In the case of the JPL scientist shot to death, that one is local to us. It involved a crazy guy who was known to be causing problems around the Crystalaire community of Llano in the previous week, and when he trespassed on the scientist's property, the cops were called, crazy guy was arrested, and then he bailed out and came back a few days later and shot Carl Grillmair, the scientist, blaming him for his arrest. It's the high desert of Los Angeles County and there's a lot of methheads and tweakers commiting breaking and entering on rural properties in order to find things to steal and fence for their next hit. A property we're involved with nearby has been broken into three times. Everyone here knows this one was totally random, and very unfortunate. Carl had the property for the unobstructed views of the night sky, and it's fairly convenient to LA, being just on the other side of the San Gabriels from JPL. It's very unfortunate, but there is no bigger story therein. Can't speak for the other cases.

We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mount a disk reliably from one PC to another.

I avoid going to the movies these days purely because of the insane amount of commercials shown beforehand. I paid money to get in. And you are showing me commercials on top of that. I don't do commercials. They are not something I want to waste my life watching. I am not your target market. If I can't pay for a commercial-free experience I'm not doing it.

There are precious few theaters out there that don't show commercials. And none near us. I am down to 1 - 2 visits to a theater per year for films I really want to see on a big screen. I didn't stop liking going to the movies, but they've driven me away and the at-home experience is now excellent.

Larger screens and better sound are good. But they're not addressing the elephant in the room. I'm happy to pay a few extra dollars for a commercial free experience.

does that mean they'll continue to manufacture the same old models for the US market, which will possibly become less secure over time due to advanced hacking techniques applied to the same old well known hardware? Will it then result in a net loss in security over time?

It might resemble Cuba with their 1950s automobiles, frozen in time. I do agree that there is concern about backdoors and surreptitious identifying data sent to servers under control of China. Would it be better to allow new models, but require them to be completely torn down and reverse engineered by teams inside the FCC, or for their firmware source code to be handed over for inspection? (there's still room for nefarious business....hand over one set of code and install a slightly different set, or install a backdoor with a firmware update....)

I feel there's a legitimate concern here, and there always has been. What's a better solution, if any? Or is this the right solution for digital sovereignty?

Since I'm still using windows 10, I can just lean back and chuckle. It's been a hell of a shit show to watch over the years. Glad I'm not in it.

...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've watched that market try to take off since the 80s and there's just not a compelling use for it. I thought they were mad for going down that road yet again. Maybe that day will come, but it was super obvious from the start that Meta plowing billions of dollars into it and changing their company name wasn't going to make it happen. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the pitch about the metaverse inside Facebook. Techbros deluding themselves. I think they were just scrambling to place a bet on whatever the next hot thing would be after the initial round of social media companies and they lost horribly. In the mean time, their original product, despite being enshittified repeatedly, remains somewhat useful and popular. (just install SocialFixer and ad blockers before you touch it, don't use their app....)