Please tell me you're mistaken. Bit rot is always a concern. I've had plenty of problems with SSDs developing weak blocks even though they are continuously powered. Maybe some drives will do "maintenance" to prevent this, but my experience with Samsung 830 series drives in particular showed massive losses in performance with old files if you don't do a full drive refresh every year or so.

You've got that backwards. The exemptions from fuel efficiency standards demanded larger vehicles. That's why the auto makers lobbied so hard for the current system.

It's all psychological. Big vehicles are worth more money. They make the doors and wheels huge, raise the hoods, and make the windows tiny, to make the vehicles look bigger than they really are. Then they tack on an extra $20K for no reason.

Same reason we put fins and chrome on cars in the 50's, and made land yachts in the 70's. American cars were always crap, but we pay good money for crap that's huge (or at least looks like it).

Oh, there's plenty of real encryption, security, and privacy in our software. It's just not there to benefit the end user.

No, agreements are legally distinct from contracts.

What good does that do? The companies can change the terms whenever the hell they want for any reason. The text means nothing.

Software licenses should be contracts, not "agreements". Then the terms actually mean something.

I wonder how many real programmers you could hire with that kind of money. Heck, for the same amount of money, you could outsource to 100 times as many foreign vibe coders.

Well, I think it all started with the EV fanatics screaming, "All gasoline cars need to be totally banned, RIGHT NOW!"

After more than a decade of that nonsense, and all the lies EV fanatics have been telling about their experiences, there's kind of a broken trust. Like it or not, there's good reasons why EVs haven't completely overtaken the market yet.

So... to keep using the product you already have, all you have to do is update to something totally different?

Sorry, I grew up in an era before the Internet, so I'm having a hard time understanding why people simp so hard for things that don't make sense. Back in my day, we chose to update software only if we felt it was in our interest, which allowed us to vote with our wallets. Things shouldn't break if you DON'T make changes.

The real problem is not the lack of native 64-bit hardware, but that most of our infrastructure is built with languages that won't let you use 64-values on 32-bit hardware unless you do all the bit-twiddling manually.

I mean, I thought to whole point of a compiler was to do the grunt work for you. A lot of this could have been fixed decades ago.

I'm in a similar position with the Playstation 4. I've barely used it since I bought it, and it's been collecting dust for years. But, I do own one.

The catch is... I don't own a Playstation 5.

They're just trying to keep up with printer drivers.

I think I got confused by what you meant by "networking". Networking, as in social networking in the workplace, not computer networking as in working from home.

I apologize for that.

I still find it hard to understand why people are dumping all over Ol Olsoc. He's not wrong. Whether we like it or not, people are social beings, and if you lack those skills, you're going to have a really hard time getting by in life. Companies will always favor people with good social skills even if they're not good at doing the job. That's just the way people are, so work environments reflect that. You either accept that and get by, or fight against it and remain unemployable.

Or they're like me, and have Schizoid Personality Disorder. We work well on our own and can't "schmooze" like normal people. Or at least, we don't tolerate all that dramatic office bullshit.

But yeah... weird people who do well in remote settings are "manipulative". Form my perspective, it's the exact opposite. It's a normal part of the human condition to manipulate the feelings of others... for better or for worse. Some of us don't care about your feelings and just want to get the job done.

Yeah, go ahead and call us assholes. So sue us. We need to eat, too.

Yeah, not just for manufacturing, but also for licenses and patents. When there's this few companies in this market worldwide, it's too legally complicated and risky to try to disrupt the existing consortium.

Dark matter is not common matter that is simply sparse. There's lots of ways to see clouds of gas or other sparse particles, such as by spectral absorption.

The trouble with dark matter is that it only seems to interact with gravity, and thus it does not qualify as a traditional form of matter. Calling it a "material" is speculation. It could be a form of energy we simply haven't discovered yet.

Until we have a better explanation, it's pretty close to magic, and it certainly does violate physics... at least, the physics we have currently defined.