Um, okay.

... will be this but priced at $99.

People who are too young to have used a Commodore or who were adults when it came out and who never had one at home, university, or work come to mind.

But yeah just about any American who was school-aged between the late 1970s and the late 1980s probably used a Commodore computer or gaming system somewhere. Throw in the Amiga users, K-12 teachers, and it's a whole lot of people.

"Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussions" has been a corner case for well over a decade now.

Most people don't need free speech because they have nothing to say.
Most people don't need guns because they have nothing to shoot.
Most people don't need to worry about housing soldiers because military personnel have taxpayer funded housing.
Most people don't need to worry about their stuff being unlawfully searched because they have nothing to hide.
Most people don't need to worry about incriminating themselves because they don't commit crimes.
Most people don't need their trials to be public because they don't get put on trial.
Most people don't need the guaranteed ability to sue someone because most people don't file lawsuits.
Most people don't need to worry about excessive bail being imposed because most people don't get arrested.
Most people don't need to worry about any of those rights being used against other rights.
Most people don't care whether a right is granted by the state or federal government.

Fortunately for those who DO find themselves in a place where the government would cause issues in these matters, a bunch of old guys a few hundred years ago had the presence of mind to realize that the point of rights isn't because "most people" need to exercise them regularly, it's to create limits so that "most people" *don't" need to exercise them regularly.

On phone unlock and frequently thereafter, have the user prove they are over 18.

If they can't or won't, then the phone reverts to "text only" mode, where the only images you see are those provided by the OS or compiled in the apps. Web sites load with placeholder images. Images stored in the camera roll and in the SMS app are replaced with placeholders. The camera is turned off. You get the idea.

I call it a "temporary workaround" because ideally it will result in a political compromise.

It has nothing to do with "AI" at least for me. It has to do with being good corporate citizens. I'd make the same arguments if an aluminum smelter or other heavy-electricity-user was causing grid problems by suddenly turning the power demand from very high to very low in ways that are known to harm the grid when there are commercially available, economically feasible ways to ramp power up and down without hurting the grid.

While the grid operator has the primary responsibility to care for the grid, all users have a responsibility to "play nice" with the grid and not do things that are known to be harmful to it.

It's reasonable for the grid operator to say "99.x% of the time we will be operating within y% of specifications, see that you behave well when we are operating within these specifications. When you do disconnect and reconnect, see that do do so in a manner that is no more harmful than throwing a switch (e.g. limit rushes of current)."

The problem with the data centers is they are disconnecting and reconnecting in ways that harm the grid even when the grid is operating within the specifications provided by the grid operator.

Going from using 100MW to using less than 1MW (or zero) in less than 1 second is going to harm the network. It's reasonable for the grid operator to tell you that you as a matter of contract that you are only allowed to do that if 1) you have a bona fide emergency, or 2) the grid itself is operating outside of specifications. Instead of going to zero in less than 1 second, it's reasonable for you to be required to ramp usage down slowly, in a manner that does not harm the grid.

There will no doubt be anti-theft/anti-tampering measures in place.

My hope is that if someone opens the case without the right key a stink bomb explodes on them.

More realistically, there will be technical measures in place to make the computer hardware useless to thieves. Once word gets around there won't be any incentive to steal them.

For all the positive, pro-consumer elements of Steam, unless Steam builds some sort of generic network abstraction layer into the Steam client, I don't think that swapping out "a dependence on Gamespy" for "a dependence on Steam" is really the answer here...

Back in 2004, *everyone* had to port forward in order to host a game server. That's the alternative to "let EA host it until they don't feel like it anymore". The point is to give the control back to gamers, but responsibility comes with that - specifically, "how to do a port forward". More to your point, it probably would have been smart to see if you and the friend capable of hosting the game could get a session going with just the two of you, then invite everyone else once you had the procedures in place. Again, the logistics aren't Epic's problem.

There will always be a group who favors simplicity over capability, but it's not like, in the case of UT2004, Epic added some sort of technological barriers to actively prevent you from playing the game, because it DOES still work perfectly once the port forward is in place. Similarly, the expectation isn't that a game is going to still have millions of players after it's EOL, it's to ensure that the few-thousand who *do* still want to play it aren't limited explicitly by the absence of server-side code. "My friends and I can't port forward" isn't that limitation - "the server-side code was never publicly released and the enthusiasts who attempted to reverse engineer it got DMCA slapped" *is*,

Also, there are still some public UT2004 servers you could mostly-one-click (copy/pasting an IP address would be close-enough to what you're describing, I'd hope):
https://pwc-gaming.com/game-se...

And, if you were a bit more interested, a cheap VPS can run LinuxGSM, a Linux build explicitly designed to be a game server for dozens of games like UT2004 that have the capability of connecting to custom dedicated servers:
https://docs.linuxgsm.com/game... ...the thing is, UT2004 is kinda the textbook example of what these games *should* look like - entirely playable in single-player mode *today*, and shipping with both map creation software and dedicated server software, including a Linux build...and it was so well built, that one need not even emulate Windows XP to do it; the game runs just fine on Windows 11 and on GPUs that didn't exist at the time. The Crew was a powder keg precisely because it was the opposite of UT2004 - dependent on central servers for no technical reason.

The issue is that the disconnections happen when grid power quality drops below acceptable levels.

A poor-power-quality-tolerant UPS doesn't have to be disconnected from the grid when the power quality dips.

Therefore such sudden cutoffs would be much rarer.

The biggest complains from huge data centers are noise, traffic, water use, and power use/impact on the grid, without the economic benefits that a large-energy-using factory would typically bring.

Depending on location, a bunch of smaller complexes spread over hundreds of square miles vs. one big one might have tolerable noise and traffic levels, particularly if they are in non-residential areas. If you can get the data center down to under, a few thousand square feet, you can literally disguise it as a house.

Water is becoming a non-issue with closed-loop systems.

Electricity is still an issue. On-site power-generation/storage can mitigate this. This is one area where a single big complex may be better than a bunch of smaller complexes.

As a sidebar: Data centers do bring in some economic benefits, the most obvious one being through taxes paid (assuming the companies didn't get any sweetheart deals to avoid taxes). But after construction is complete they don't have the ongoing payroll/head-count that a big factory has.

Texas knows all about 'ZZZzzt *poof*'.

Sorry. I need decaounces of caffeinated liquid.