What can a $2000 phone do that a $200 phone can't (gimmicks like folding screens or ruggedized aside)?

You mentioned in another comment IT folks are surprisingly fine with "clunkers" - But in my experience the simple explanation is, performance is not a metric by which most IT folks measure phones. The speed of a phone is utterly irrelevant. We have gaming rigs at home that would probably violate ITAR if taken out of the country; we have dedicated VMs at work with so much horsepower the underlying hardware must have cost a substantial fraction of our annual salary. Why do we also need a supercomputer in our pocket at all times?

I use my phone for email, SMS/IM, light web browsing to look something up in a pinch, GPS when I'm not in my car, and cheesy games while waiting for an appointment. Occasionally I watch a YouTube video or the like, and have yet to see a stutter not caused by the network itself. All of that works perfectly fine on a $100-200 phone. The primary metric I do care about is battery life (and maybe storage to a lesser extent); and on that axis, weaker (but still modern) CPUs often have significantly longer battery life.

Now, I realize I've given you an easy "must be nice to be you" here, and I'll admit that if everyone else is approaching this from the perspective of "this is my only computer", I can appreciate wanting somewhat beefier hardware. But again, we're talking about blowing $2k on one of these; just get a decent laptop and a cheap phone, and it'll still be an infinitely better user experience.

1) $Company has a contract with $Vendor to never let AI anywhere near their data (e.g. PHI);
2) $Vendor (along with 99% of companies on the planet) has a commercial Facebook account;
3) Facebook unilaterally changes its TOS to allow AI to hoover up all their customers' data.

IANAL, but how is that not the textbook definition of tortuous interference? Facebook is making it impossible for $Vendor to honor its preexisting contract with $Company, and neither $Company not $Vendor can do a damned thing about it.

You misspelled "proud". You have 90% of the functionality for 6% of the price and 0% of the risk of your screen cracking in half from normal use six months from now while Apple refuses warranty claims on the grounds you were somehow holding it wrong.

I love the idea of folding screens, but what we have available so far just isn't worth the hassle or price for a tiny bit more screen. Meanwhile, $2k will buy an amazing tablet or a pretty decent laptop. If the sole feature that puts a phone ahead of a tablet or laptop is being a phone - Just get a $100 phone and a $1900 laptop.

Don't get me wrong, How does that contradict my thesis? If there's a 100% chance of being caught, that has zero effect on "impulse" crimes, and in the transactional case where the reward exceeds the punishment, it's still "worth it".

My comments about the level of punishment were primarily for emphasis on the cruelty of our current imperfect system - The "deterrent" effect is meaningless if we have a 100% success rate. More to the point, if we wanted to live in that world, we wouldn't have the third through eighth amendments. It would be a heck of a lot easier to catch criminals if the police could randomly bust down our doors with zero judicial oversight, or hey, why not mandatory body cams for everyone all the time?

But we do have a bill of rights (in the US), we don't allow police unlimited discretion, and we have quite a few laws around where, when, why, and how surveillance is allowed. The facts speak for themselves - We very clearly don't want to live in that world.

Except... We don't. Our laws, and in particular their associated punishments, are explicitly designed around low-probability enforcement. If every crime were guaranteed to be caught, "sending a message" and the entire concept of rehabilitation become completely irrelevant. There would only be two reasons to commit a crime: Passion / impulse; or, it's worth the price. In the former, fear of punishment isn't an issue. In the latter, the punishment is baked into the ROI.

If we as a society really wanted 100% enforcement, the design of our criminal justice system is nothing short of sadistic.

Never mind the Linux World - For a good example of a well-behaved taskbar, they only need to look as far away as... Windows 10! It handled all four sides of the screen and at arbitrary thicknesses perfectly well.

Much like the start menu. Worked fine from 95 through 10, then how many years did it take MS to finally let us make Win11's behave like, y'know, some kind of "menu" for "start"ing installed programs?

I dare say the only reason people have finally started saying "Y'know, Win11 is halfway usable" is because Microsoft finally started letting us revert the look and feel back in the direction of XP.

And on the other side of that coin, the OCC just accused BOA along with the other eight largest US banks of discriminating against customers based on "reputation risk" rather than clear and objective criteria.

Which is the polite way of saying Trump threw a hissy-fit over being debanked as a 34-time convicted financial fraudster, and decided to punish Moynihan and Dimon and the rest for daring to hold him to the same standards as every other human on the planet. The core accusation itself is the most telling - OCC is primarily accusing banks of using political criteria, which despite what Team Red might want to believe this week, isn't a federally protected class. Refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding? "Right to free association". Blocking a convicted criminal from accessing a company's financial services? Waaah, unfair, make 'em suffer, Daddy Gould!

It's not often I side with banks on any issue, and the much-reviled BOA even rarer; but if they're going to be punished either way, may as well just do what they want and earn the fines.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for Steam here, but am I missing a key detail in this story? We're talking about the launcher here, nothing to do with the content itself.

"Cold start to store" is a metric that I literally couldn't give a subjective opinion on, because once Windows starts, Steam is just there and ready to go. And "to store"? Seriously? Give us "Tray icon to loading a game" and we can have a discussion. "Thing that doesn't happen to thing that only happens rarely", not so much.

If Facebook wants access to European users, Facebook will be paying for EU-based data centers to comply. Same goes for Amazon, Google, and the rest.

This isn't a condemnation, it's an admission by the Megalomaniacal Seven that they have zero interest in building out EU versions of the very infrastructure their "services" require; an admission that the money is only supposed to flow in one direction, and it ain't East.

I was one of the haters on initial release, but Hello Games 100% redeemed themselves over time and are still actively maintaining the game with new content - free new content, not paid DLC - every few months. And today, I'd rate NMS as one of my favorite games of all time.

That said, from the two comparisons you made, I suspect you're thinking of NMS as the wrong kind of game here. It's not an "escape room" style survival game, and base building is mostly meant to be a simple place to keep / display your stuff, not Factorio-in-space. There is no real plot or long-term goals beyond what you set for yourself and a few "story" missions to encourage you to at least leave the starting planet and check out the neighborhood.

If you haven't seen it since 2016, it's a radically different, and better, game. And if you have - Hey, it's not for everyone and that's okay. Some people like open world exploration, some people like puzzle games, some people like FPSs.

There's effectively no difference between single and multiplayer in NMS. Multiplayer isn't so much a distinct mode of gameplay, as merely hanging out in the game with another player. Think "playing Legos with a friend". Same activity, just more than one person. There are a few features intended to focus on multiplayer, like the nominally co-op Nexus missions - But I'm not aware of any exclusively multiplayer content, and even the Nexus missions are IMO easier to solo than trying to coordinate with someone else. And even in purely single-player mode, you can still see/visit bases/etc from other players, you just won't see the other players themselves.

I suppose a proper answer to your question depends on what you really mean by single-vs-multiplayer, though. There's a core storyline that's honestly more like a long tutorial mode, and they put on events roughly every two months (which are again often about showing off new features); but there's not really anything you'd call a proper "campaign mode". It's fundamentally an open-world exploration / survival / building game, from start to there-is-no-finish.

And just in case anything I've said here sounds negative - NMS is a mind-blowingly good game. Strongly recommend, particularly in VR.

Sure, we'll just assign "master all things x509" to engineer #78 of 205... in our four-person shop.

Everyone in this conversation seems to be assuming every company has a massive IT department with folks just standing around picking their noses waiting for real work to show up and break the monotony. Outside Silicon Valley and Fortune-500s, that's an extreme rarity.

There's also an implicit assumption we're all running major-vendor enterprise-grade software written within the last twenty years; rather than an actively automation-hostile "best of a bad breed" industry-specific solution cobbled together by the nephew of a paranoid former CEO around the time I was graduating high-school, and it's sadly still the top tool of the trade.

Those who enjoy the luxury of never needing to leave Entra to do their jobs should stop throwing stones, take a step back, and realize their world isn't representative of the real world of IT.

You realize you don't have the power to "press charges", right? Whether or not Flock is happy with the situation, they have zero ability to compel the police to do a damned thing about it. Now... Sure, nobody can promise the feds won't investigate (though they wouldn't even have jurisdiction without abusing something like interstate commerce), but most colleges "are" their containing town, including the local PD. Remember why Cornell is currently in the spotlight for how poorly a particular investigation went down? Why would a purely external police matter reflect poorly on Cornell?

As for what I'd tell anyone who did investigate - Nothing at all, because 1) read the above, 2) absolutely nothing we ignore our fifth amendment rights to say will be used for our benefit, and 3) we'd need to be a complete moron to show our faces while cutting down a flock pole; and while I may be no genius, I'm also not a complete moron.

The poles are 20lbs of high-quality aluminum - Ironically, jokes about letting tweakers know about the gold in the e-waste Flock keeps leaving on the side of the road aside, the poles themselves are the single most valuable part of an installation (as scrap).

More importantly, a simple hacksaw will go through them like butter.

Maybe not, but this is a college campus. Simply make it known nobody's going to investigate their disappearance, and they'll be gone by morning.

I'm actually surprised this played out as long as it did - Had the same battle taken place at my alma mater, I can promise you I'd personally have cheerfully harvested them for parts the same day, and I'm by no stretch unusual in that regard.