Anyway, mayhem the billionaires will make their own slaves.

ZoneAlarm used to be the go-to for this. Kinda like the NoScript browser extension for internet connections. Everything is blocked until you explicitly allow it. It used to be pretty comprehensive, but I don't know how much of the network it can control, as I know Microsoft has been disallowing easy network control access to 3rd parties since Windows 10.

Whom is pumping bitcoin? The New York Times? The journalist? Do they have significant positions in bitcoin?

What is the purpose of these articles? We think so-and-so is Satoshi. They deny it. Now what? I guess the NYT gets some clicks, but I don't see what useful information there is here.

My Kindle 3rd gen can read mobi, prc, azw, and PDFs you load in via the USB cable.

Because the US government doesn't make operating systems? They've taken Apple to court to get unfettered access to iPhones and have lost. It's far from perfect, but there is still a system of checks and balances happening.

Besides that, you can post a photo of yourself holding the bloody severed head of Trump, and the worst that happens to you is loosing a gig at CNN and a squatty potty endorsement job. If you call president Xi a silly name, you disappear.

There's an interesting story out of Detroit roughly related.

A long time ago a Detroit-based millionaire donated a big chunk of land and a bunch of money to start the Detroit Zoo, and to build an adjacent golf course. When Detroit was going bankrupt, the city tried to sell off the golf course to make some money, as it is in an expensive subdivision now, and would have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. However, in the deed, the millionaire put in a clause saying if the city tried to do anything other than maintain a zoo or golf course on the property, the ownership of ALL the property would revert to his descendants. A couple of his great-grandchildren showed up in court, and the deal was tanked.

Seems you're missing the point. The article says anyone over 133K was classified as upper middle class, and ignored the location. We agree on that bit.

They counted millions of people who are low income for their region and even potentially on welfare as being upper middle class. They said 10% of the population was upper middle class in 1979 by one metric, but then using a different metric that 31% were upper middle class in 2024. They wrongly and quite openly counted millions of households with welfare level incomes, lower class incomes, and middle class incomes and claimed they were in the upper middle class. Everything that follows from the conclusion that upper middle class has grown so much is fundamentally flawed.

A huge amount of the population are millionaires if we define a millionaire as someone with thousands of dollars. That's effectively what they did here. Count millions of household that middle, lower, and welfare-level as though they're upper middle class, and suddenly the upper middle class triples in size. The claims that follow that the lower rungs of the middle class are garbage because they just reclassified them as upper middle class, even though by the author's own admission they are not.

This. The lower end of those "upper middle class" numbers may qualify for welfare in some tech hub cities.

They do point out that it varies by location, but really their number range is terrible. "classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class." From the HUD Section 8 income limits, expensive places the lower end of that is considered low income, like San Jose 143,600 qualifies for Section 8, versus cities like Akron where 72,250 is low enough to qualify. Location, location, location.

As this is /. lots of us live in tech hubs that even though we don't like the costs, they're very expensive places to live. In my current city despite being a full hour commute from the city center 130K is still solidly middle class. Not poverty, but not upper crust either. That income wouldn't require a trailer park, but would have a hard time affording a 3 bedroom / 2 bath home (they'd add another 45+ minutes to the commute distance), one or possibly two small vacations per year.

In tech hubs especially, those household incomes can be very middle class, not upper-middle, and in some places, lower class lifestyles.

Statistically it is not the severity of the punishment, it's the likelihood of being caught and facing consequences.

When the likelihood of facing consequences is high, even frequent offenders comply even when consequence are minimal. Even something like line jumping, it's about if they think they can get away with it, not the seriousness of consequences.

Traffic violations are similar. When "everybody knows" a curve holds a speed trap people drop to the speed limit, when they are past it they lay on the accelerator. When I see a bunch of break lights ahead frequently I will hear GPS call out "speed trap ahead" right where the others started slowing. The perceived risk of enforcement, not severity, is the biggest factor.

Scammers know the risk is minimal. In India many of the big operators include people in politics and police, it doesn't take much of a cut to bribe officials.

In general they've been on the right trend of only playing after interactions.

Most of the time they're ads, and even if they do manage to slip through my ad blocks and DNS fliters, I still don't want them playing.

Waste of bandwidth.

It's one of those issues that often are easily ignored until suddenly it's game-breaking.

For many games that stream assets and build shaders on the fly, if there's a bit of blurriness and stuttering when you first enter an area there are many players who can forgive that. Having that same experience walking into a boss's lair and suddenly the game is choking and stuttering as resources are processed, that's a fatal flaw that can make it difficult to play, or even outright kill the player while loading.

The difficulty is that usually it's an all-or-nothing experience, a tradeoff, games can choose one or the other. There are plenty of games that do build them at runtime, and others that have the long slow progress bar at startup. Different choices give different experiences. As annoying as waiting a couple minutes at program startup is, having a cutscene or a boss fight stuttering for shader compiles is far worse.

Novas were 16-bit machines. I know because there are 16 select toggles on the front of mine :)

Soul of a New Machine was about the development of the MV line, which was the 32-bit extension of the Eclipse line, which was an extension (virtual memory, multitasking, etc.) of the Nova line. Similar to how VAXes were based on the PDP-11 architecture.

What do you mean? The main Hobbits are usually portrayed by younger actors. Gandalf should be portrayed by an older actor. Elves should be somewhere in between. If everyone is young it looks dumb.

The headline threw me, then I saw his son, whom is a screenwriter, is attached as well. Then I looked up his son's credits on IMDB. He was a production assistant on one of Colbert's shows and.... that's it.

I hope it will be good, but it's not looking that way.