These cryptocurrency payments can't be used to fund terror and evade sanctions since all the transactions are public on the blockchain! Also, would anyone like to buy a bridge?

As someone who's been using Samsung phones for about 15 years, I had no idea there was a thing called "Samsung Messages". I tend to tune out all the shovelware that phones come with (and take steps to remove or disable them).

I really like Samsung phones, but their software ecosystem is abysmal. Everything they provide is inferior to other options.

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

Yes, a fair voicing of "opinions" on labor conditions between one human and one globe-spanning immortal megacorporation. Very fair.

Only true for goods and services where there is perfectly inelastic demand, which kind of doesn't exist. Even demand for fuel is somewhat elastic. Health care has about the least elastic demand. Junk from Amazon has highly elastic demand.

This would certainly happen to a large degree, otherwise Amazon could price themselves out of competitiveness fairly easily.

If you make your money by owning rather than by working, that's true. Higher wages reduce business owners' income, at least in the short term. So next time someone has that opinion, find out what they do for a living. They'll probably say they "run" something.

That would add the requirement for the central repository as infrastructure which is probably not worth it bandwidth/storage-wise when so many gaming PCs are likely to be online at any time, but the possibility of a malware vector (or some kind of sabotage, maybe people would try to DoS a game by sharing corrupted compiled shaders as a form of protest) is worth considering with or without it.

BOINC protects against errors or sabotage in their distributed computing system by having 2 random different users both run the same task and ensuring that the results from both match before accepting the result. This requires centralized infrastructure, but a duplicated work verification system like this could work. Imagine the centralized system acts as a trusted private torrent tracker, only verifying a shader and making it publicly accessible once multiple uploads match. That would make uploading invalid shaders almost impossible since a group would need to conspire to do it with exclusive earliest-possible access to the game/driver/hardware combo.

Those aren't reasons for everyone to be compiling on their own. In a BitTorrent-like system nobody would be "keeping" shaders they aren't using, just sharing shaders they've compiled because they're using them. If nobody's ever done it before for the hardware/driver combination then you fall back to compilation and then share your results so others can benefit and the same work doesn't have to be done again.

Plus most users are probably on one of the latest driver versions so there would be far more hardware than driver variation.

Just like how WaPo eventually went from an assurance that nothing would change to blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris to no longer publishing any opinions that were insufficiently pro-"free market" for Bezos' taste:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/msn...

On a related note I thought the idea of an IT staffer having time to play CoD at work was a laughably retro idea. In the post-pandemic era anyone who still has an IT job is being worked to the bone.

Yep, The Island and Altered Carbon (also an excellent TV series) were the first two works of sci-fi that came to mind, but Altered Carbon is a much closer match where the clones were brainless vs. The Island (if I say any more it'd be a major spoiler for sure, even mentioning that it contains the concept is a bit of a spoiler).

> It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.

I did an experiment once. Windows NT 3.5 could boot with 12MB of RAM. You really couldn't do anything with it, but it did boot up. As I recall, the whole OS only took up about 40MB of disk space.

Probably humanoid robots, it's already happening in China:

https://jingdaily.com/posts/ch...

A bunch of stock-trading bots and quick-fingered suits probably just flinched and dumped a couple hundred billion into ARM stock though. See also: the company formerly known as Long Island Iced Tea.

> "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit.

No fault? None at all? That seems... counter-intuitive.

I get it that the technology failed spectacularly, and that this is a serious problem for which people need to be held to account, but my car is working just fine.