I don't use an ad blocker because I hate ads. I use it because it is now an essential security tool.

Ad companies started getting VERY unreasonable about running megs of scripts downloaded from all kinds of 3rd-party sites and doing all kinds of nasty cross-scripting BS. You don't need to be a genius to understand how dangerous these practices are, but... there's almost zero ethics in this industry. Banks have warned us for decades about phishing attacks, but these days even official bank correspondence looks exactly like phishing attacks due to the amount of 3rd-party tracking and marketing analytics going on.

The irony is that if ads were self-hosted, it would be impossible to block them. This industry only has themselves to blame for the pushback.

For running a PC title like Doom, it absolutely was. The system was built around an 8-bit CPU and tilemaps and sprites, and the Mode7 stuff was hardwired only to the background layer. The machine was totally inferior for running anything that required rendered graphics. Everybody wanted to play Doom back then, but releasing it on every platform under the sun was just a bad idea and disappointed many, many gamers.

Hardly. Both the NES and SNES were designed to be dirt cheap to manufacture, and were based on early 80's designs. Nintendo was always famous for their philosophy of "withered technology". The N64 was an anomaly and one of the few times they tried to push technical boundaries.

Indeed. A far more pressing matter is why Slashdot took away all my mod points again.

That, and everyone here in the USA has already completely forgotten about Venezuela and the flat-out execution of all those mariners.

If the situation in Iran drags on longer than US citizens can tolerate, Trump might decide to blow up Mexico if it would provide a sufficient distraction. He knows he can get away with anything now, so he's not going to stop threatening the rest of the world any time soon.

I still haven't forgiven Mozilla for proposing Lightspeed.

The new Firefox UI looks like Thunderbird. Big surprise. Setting up Thunderbird was a royal pain and didn't make any sense whatsoever, and I don't suspect the new Firefox to be any easier.

A way of locking down Windows without actually locking down Windows.

I don't like using Linux, but I have to wonder... would all Windows and MacOS PCs just be glorified smart phones at this point if it weren't for Linux?

Sorry to deviate from your point, but I get a good laugh at all those Tesla Cybertrucks getting stuck in the snow.

I love those arguments that plug-in hybrids make no sense, because you need to lug around an engine that you never use. Meanwhile, EV fanatics never question lugging around an extra 1,000 pounds of battery you never use.

Handling isn't the only argument against extra weight... and I do have a Lotus.

That's not been the experience of everyone I know personally who bought an EV. Everything I've seen has just screamed, "stay away."

This is why I'll always trust my own experiences over random people on the Internet.

I'm a low-mileage driver, and in my use case, owning an EV would be purely idiotic. It's a phenomenal waste of money and would likely increase my carbon footprint significantly.

But, hey... thanks for lumping me into the same category as climate-denying bigoted rednecks who can't handle change.

I remember the massive push in the 90's to move to text-less icons. In the early days, developers figured that standard icons would save on having to make a zillion language translations. That, and it would help to show off all those fancy new graphic color display modes.

These days... I dunno. Tradition and habit?

Depends on the culture. When I went to see Iron Lung, the theater was packed, and yet through the whole movie you could've heard a pin drop.

Anyone can claim to end a regime by killing a leader. The "Classic Blunder" is trying to stabilize the country over the next few decades, especially without putting yourself into trillions of new debt.

Price fixing and collusion has been a thing in the tech market for a long time, especially for LCDs and RAM.

Almost all the retail stores in my area are closed, and half of the local shopping center is empty. The malls are dead. Way too many of my [far younger] online friends are out of work. There's lots of "help wanted" signs in store windows, but everybody is accepting applications and not actually hiring.

Oh, and I live close to Boston, not in some rural backwater in Oklahoma.

From what I can see in my community, I can't take any of the employment numbers seriously. Not everybody is working from home typing out meaningless reports. Things are getting bad.

Then again, I am retired, so I'm a bit out of touch.