Seriously. I mean... $500, or *maybe* $600 for the Pro; that'd be fine. More than that, and I may as well just get back up to speed on PC gaming gear and build another PC of Theseus. Then... congrats Sony, that's better than a decade of buying NO consoles.

Then again, maybe it's just time for the gaming pendulum to swing hard back towards real computers anyway. It's been stuck on firmly on the console side for quite a while, and certian genres have definitely suffered for it.

> Trump's tariff war

Don't forget trump's ACTUAL war. I've had six figures scooped out of my retirement accounts and burned to ash since he decided to do at least ONE traditionally republican thing and launch us into yet another middle-eastern quagmire. The rest of the country is seeing the gas prices they used to attack California for. And it seems that the media is just now finally waking up to the fact that there's a shit ton of OTHER things that we make out of petroleum that are about to start to skyrocket.

Well, this WAS the Apple of: "1984 won't be like 1984" and earlier refusals to bend over and backdoor the iPhone so that the FBI could snoop at will.

So, for the fact that they've dona a 180 to whore themselves out to MAGA and become big brother and do the bidding of dear leader and his henchmen... yes, they absolutely should be scorned and condemned.

No. Actually he wasn't political from day one on the Late Show. At first he shed his Colbert Report persona and tried to do the typical "make nice with everyone" late night host a la Carson, Leno, and Letterman. Thing is, times were changing, audiences were expecting and demanding sharper wit, speaking truth to power, and takedowns of the high and mighty. And ratings started to slide. So Colbert adapted, brought elements of the Report back, but more overt and open than the playing th coy in-character persona from the old days. And ratings recovered. That worked swimmingly until COVID and malevolent mega media manipulation blew ups the entire television landscape and installed their minion to purge CBS of anyone who's not a true believer.

In his personal life, he's catholic and raising his kids as such, conservatively but not to be bigots. He's also a HUGE nerd and MASSIVE Tolkien and LOTR fan. He'll do fine as a writer on a LOTR movie. He havs the chops for it, and he "gets" the material. I knew the MAGAts were delusional from the outset for thinking they could silence him and that he'd bounce back. Though I must admit it's kind of a bummer he'll be holed up in a writers' room instead of back on air immediately on another platform.

Well then, I guess it's a good thing that the sort of big brother wannabe thugs who would demand your passwords under the guise of law would absolutely respect actual correctness and are not in any way the sort who would just toss you in the gulag for your stunt or just beat you with a pipe until you talk in the first place.

OTOH, who the hell responds to, or even reads or engages with in any way, random unsolicited emails from total strangers? If it were me, I'd never have even known anyone had their panties in a bunch in the first place, partly because my email is spam-filtered to hell and back, and I usually don't even bother checking the accounts that aren't my fiends&family, job-hunting, or banking & buying stuff ones in the first place.

Same for WhatsApp and any of its other contemporaries. I don't even answer real phone calls if the caller is not in my contacts.

When did spam filtering and call screen stop being... well... pretty much universal?

Yes. Absolutely. Let's look at that. So... copyright 2002? Then it should have become public domain, 17 years after publication, seven years ago. And no, the term length for patents should NOT have been extended either.

Any other questions?

> Kars for Kids

The weird thing is that they ARE somehow successful. Because for me, that godawful racket may have made me plenty aware of the brand; but every time I hear that noise it fills me with a burning hatred that, every time, reinforces my conviction that they will never, under any circumstances, get one red cent from me, regardless of...

... by the way it's not even a children's charity. It's actually some religious organization masquerading as a children's charity to scam people into giving money to their church. That makes them extra-double-super loathsome.

Well, in all fairness though, the airport securitygoons, of all persuasions and sub-categories, have been little more than a value-less pack of tin-plated wannabe dictators with delusions of godhood since well before trump. Mostly trump merely unfettered them to be the massively gaping dickholes they've always aspired to be. But make no mistake; they were scum and guttertrash before trump, just like they are scum and guttertrash now, just lke they will always be scum and guttertrash even after trump and all of the rest of his magatrash are consigned to the ash heap of history where they have always belonged.

'Not the point. They're citizens, full stop. No ICE thug has ANY business detaining, arresting, interrogating, quesitoning, laying hands on, speking to, or in any other way darkening the day of ANY citizen fir any reason for any length of time. They made themselves irredeemable the day of that very first "immigration" raid in Newark, not even a day after the inaugeration, when they... YES... attacked and held US citizens who were working in that plant 100% legally. And then there was when they started ordering US citizens... in at least two cases, immigration lawywer for a double-dose of scumbaggery... to "self deport." Oh, and what about all the people with green cards and education visas they have attacked and kidnapped? Or how about the people they've straight-up murdered whilst they've been rampaging around?

So yeh... Fuck all the ICE thugs and fuck you for simping for the scum.

Was Claude, or any other Anthropic product, developed and paid for under a "work for hire" contract? If not, then you have no point here.

They're not. The word you're looking for is microcomputers.

The PC, short for Personal Computer, was IBM's entry into the microcomputer market. And, as you might expect from Big Blue, the terms were trademarked to hell and back. I don't know if IBM let them lapse since they existed the market. But PC has, from the very beginning, meant a microsoft OS running on intel or intel-compatible CPUs.

Honestly? ALL electronic communication should be E2EE. Compute is cheap enough now that there's no excuse anymore.

> There are lot more parents that want to be
> responsible, but lack any effective tools to do.

Well, gee whizz... If only someone had thought of this problem already and created toolsets that can remotely manage devices. In fact, it'd REALLY be nice if *multiple* companies had already thought of this and rolled out multiple competing products. Of course... that's last-century thinking. Now that laptops and smartphones are ubiquitous, someone should ALSO have thought of a way to manage these mobile devices.

Too bad that no one ever thought of a need for these tools and they do not exist, amirite?

Or maybe, instead of going full-Big-Brother and doing away with privacy, personal control of our own hardware, and freedom of speech and expression for EVERYONE; you could do one of two things instead:

1) Vote your own trumpscum out of office and make sure their replacements.

2) Just wait a few years until the trumpscum are gone and the country is run again by people who've read the constitution and watch these local yokels get slapped down by the interstate commerce clause.