Not sure I can grant that, chief. Plenty of prior art.

DC resident here. There's zero problem finding the cars. They're almost all recovered within a day without any special tech, because they're being carjacked by teenagers looking for a thrill or wheels to commit other crimes, and they're being dumped relatively quickly. And it does nothing to deter potential carjackings because they're taking your phone, too, so by the time you can even think to track it (and assuming --hah- that the DC police bother) it's already dumped and probably stripped. This is all largely a result of the DC government deciding to essentially pat under-18 criminals on the head and blame it on racism/the economy/the lack of afterschool programs, as if somehow you're left with no choice but a crime spree if you can't play youth basketball. Although one has to wonder if this is also an unintended side-effect of the recent handing out of steering-wheel clubs to owners of easy-to-steel cars, since the hoodlums now can't just boost the nearest Kia or Hyundai and so figure if they're going to commit a crime, may as well jack a BMW and do it in style.

Yep. Years ago when I worked retail sales on big-ticket, low-margin things, we were encouraged to try and sus out how the customer would be paying before we quoted a final price. They even put the 'we accept ' sign for the most expensive one where it wasn't easily visible, so customers who wanted to pay with that card would be prompted to ask "do you take X" at some point.

I don't have the reflexes i did when I was a kid, but I can play the games I mentioned without any issues. And I don't do FPS for the most part because most of them make me motion-sick pretty quickly. But as a GenXer who still games a lot, whatever input lag there is either wasn't noticeable or I adapted so quickly I didn't really notice it.

I was part of the Stadia beta, and then six months ago, when gifted a couple games my now almost 7 year old rig couldn't really handle, started using Nvidia's GeForce NOW. Cloud gmaing mostly works for non-competitive twitch gamers. With a 200/25 Mbit connection, I could play action-y games like the recent Tomb Raider games, Jedi Fallen Order, etc. with little to no perceptible lag. Yes, there were occasional lag spikes that made me miss a jump or something, but that happens playing locally, too, when Windows decides it's going to start an update or someother background process goes nuts. It wasn't a frequent thing. For anyting else I played, performance was never an issue. Since it syncs with my Steam library, it was easy to go back and try things at full 4k glory without upgrading a PC, and at $0 a month vs $3k for a new computer, it's not that unreasonable. There are downsides. It doesn't have every game I own, and there were a couple notable "damn, I'd like to play that" moments (eg Jedi Survivor). It times out relatively quickly if you're inactive, and that was a pain in the ass as I'll often have a strategy game or RPG running the the background and switch in and out between work tasks, and getting disconnected when I forgot to save sucked. And mod support is iffy; I fired up the old Conan Exiles, and going through the process of reloading and reactivating mods every time i started the game was a monumental PITA. But the imepdiments aren't really technical at this point.

I use my Samsung tablet as much as my Pixel 7 Pro or high-end PC. The PC can't be beat for working and gaming but I already spend 8 hours a day in front of it and don't want to spend all my time in the office. The phone can't be beat for portability and taking pictures. But if I'm sitting at home on the sofa, the tablet is 100x better for web browsing or playing stupid games while I'm watching TV. I use it as a backup to my Kindle if I've forgotten to charge that, or for reading stuff that's graphics-heavy and better suited to a larger screen. If I'm just idly flipping through YouTube I'll do that on the Android TV, but if it's a hyperlinked video from a web page or a link a friend sends, it's much easier to watch it on the tablet than futz with finding it on the TV, and more enjoyable than watching it on the phone. I can use it for voice and video calls, and If I'm traveling I can use it to do minimally complicated work that would be impossible on the phone. There's plenty of use cases for tablets for grown-ups, and while the new Google tablet isn't enough of an upgrade to get me to buy one now, it or its successor will certainly garner a look next time. And hopefully the OS and UI improvements from it and the Fold will trickle down.

How exactly is an employer knowing when an employee is in an employer-owned space a privacy instrusion?

Wondered what was new; I am particular about one type of Colgate, and it's hard to find, so I always buy a year at a time. New batch the tube was noticeably different. It resists compression, slightly, and doesn't want to stay squished. It makes getting the last 20% out much more difficult. Not a fan.

A few months back a buddy and I were at a hotel bar. They handed us a drink menu with a variety of things printed on it and a QR code tucked away at the bottom. We found what we wanted on the printed menu, ordered, and when the waitress brought the drinks, I handed her the credit card because we were going to take the drinks back down to the lounge instead of sitting in the very crowded bar. She comes back, and when I look at the bill, instead of being the $50 I expected for two whiskeys, it was $170. She substituted my friends $25 order with a $125+ replacement. When I confronted her, her excuse was "Oh, we're out of what he ordered. You should have scanned the QR code to see the up-to-date menu." No, honey, you don't upcharge somone $100 on your own initiative. Get the manager. And that's not the first time I've seen a restaurant pull that kind of shit, just the most egregious and obvious. tl;dr Fuck QR code menus.

This is what you do when you don't have a case or a business model.

I was a casual user of Stadia (and probably would have been a better customer if it had more of the games I like to play). It was perfectly playable; as one example, I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey and it was smooth, lag-free, bug-free, and almost instant-on, much better than Assassin's Creed Origins played on the same computer at a lower resolution and graphics settins. It probably wasn't good enough for competitive gamers, but for running graphics-intensive games that my nearly 7 year old PC would balk at, it was great.

The DC AG is far more interested in tilting at corporate windmills than in actually enforcing laws that really affect people. Coincidentally (or not?), he just got slapped down by the courts over his antitrust suit against Amazon.

'Reading the number' is just proof that you have it. They could just as easily say 'we need you to stick your Yubikey into your PC', and people would still fall for it.

Yes, and they broke the law to do it. Nearly every illegal is engaging in some form of documentation fraud and/or identity theft. And you're fucking high if you think they pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits. Illegals would have to average >$50,000 a year in income *and pay taxes on that whole amount* just to cover the education costs of their children.

Mom just got her third (Moderna) and it was about the same as the second -- lots of fatigue, some arm pain. Gone within a day or so.