Most of the people that go to Vegas know they're not going to win anything. My grandparents used to go every year, and that vacation was their annual highlight. They set aside a budget, enjoyed themselves blowing it on the tables, then enjoyed the hotels and the shows. This was the early 60's, mind you, the height of the Rat Pack era when Sinatra and Dean Martin were still playing there, and there was a mobbed-up mystique about the place to the WWII generation. My grands knew they weren't going to win anything. They just enjoyed the thrill of it all. It was the "adult" Disneyland, a bit of naughty fun for people that survived the skies and fields of Europe and Asia, and as far as they were concerned, "fuck you, I'll blow my spare money as I see fit".

Most men still have a PC simply for gaming, if nothing else. Women don't give a shit about gaming. And the phone is the natural instrument for their Instagraming.

My wife has a nice laptop that she barely touches. She'll pull it out every once in a blue moon, but she and all the women she knows use two things primarily: their phones, and their tablets for reading. The smartphone was the perfect product for females. It fits the way they communicate. A lot of men would be fine with plain texting, email, and maybe some IRC. Women crave that constat, content-filled social connection.

The shrinking userbase doesnâ(TM)t have jack shit to do with 11â(TM)s requirements, and everything to do with women using their phones for everything now. It was silly to even attempt that argument.The writer went on a Windows rant when this shift has been predicted for 25+ years. There are kids with $500+ smartphones that have never touched a computer.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

I won't be impressed until the AI has better recommendations than 4 out of 5 dentists.

Of all the things an elite group of people could do to control everyone else's lives, geoengineering schemes have to rank up there at the very top.

This was a pre-emissions model (the car wasn't new when I got it). The only pollution control I remember it having was a PCV valve. After adjusting net vs gross HP, the 5.7L engine was rated for similar power as my current (non turbo) 2.5L. It also probably burned through 2.5X the fuel, and produced orders of magnitude more smog.

The new car is probably heavier, but I assume that a wider power band and more efficient transmission give my current car the overall edge in performance specs. The old car probably had better bottom-end torque, so it could do burnouts easier. That, along with the loud noise, rattling chassis and very scary handling characteristics probably made it feel faster than the current car, but that's nothing but psychology.

What a load of bunk.

The 0-60 time of my base-model mid-sized family sedan with a naturally aspirated 4-banger beats the 350 cubic inch 4bbl equipped muscle car that I had 45 years ago. It has no problem merging onto highways.

This ought to be really easy to rectify:

Netcraft hasn't confirmed yet.

Data Centers are no different than any other complex facility: once built, they have to be physically managed and maintained. There has to be some people there.

404 was created by a bunch of ex-Vice guys after Motherboard went Tits Up. It's a political advocacy group fronted by a blog. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can't write things that turn out to be valuable or insightful, but know up front that their agenda comes first, the same way agendas come first in any politically-centered enterprise (Jacobin Mag, National Review, the New Republic, etc etc). They are, without fail, always going to play their particular angle first and foremost.

Oddly enough, my 30-year-old stereo amplifier has one. I'll finally have a use for it!

1/100 the speed of compiled languages is typical for interpreted languages.

Non-ancient implementations of Java are fully compiled. Toy benchmarks and Java programs carefully written as if there were no automatic memory management (and don't call standard libraries) can run just as fast ac C code.

Java can't directly support features that depend on dynamic typing and similar flexible run-time behavior that interpreted languages. However, many Java developers sorely miss those features, so they heavily use the reflection APIs and various "beans" frameworks to work around the pre-compilable static typing. This can actually end up running *slower* than Python because many of those Java features are dog slow.

You can already get implementations of Python that do JIT compiling like Java. They often run in the ballpark of about 1/10 the speed of C.

"History" won't give a flying shit. Great men in history... and women... have rarely been "good". Steve Jobs will be remembered far more than Torvalds ever will, and he was absolute garbage as a person. Like it or not, history cares about winners. Genghis Khan will always be remembered more than, say, Mother Theresa.