In a balanced budget, taxation exceeds spending, like it did at the end of the Clinton administration and just before George W. Bush went to war. The highest federal income tax bracket at the time was about 40 percent. What broke the budget was a misguided attempt to stimulate private business by cutting income tax on the richest American taxpayers.

That created a problem for dial-up users and laptop users back in the day. That was solved in two ways. First, Valve fixed the bug in early Steam that was causing it to fail to store purchase receipts for offline mode. (Users at the time were experiencing this as a need to be online for switching to offline mode to work.) Second, the home Internet market as a whole phased out dial-up, and even in areas not served by fiber, cable, or DSL, dial-up users largely switched to satellite Internet.

Unless it's something like DuckTales Remastered that gets delisted from Steam after a couple years on the market. This particular game was an adaptation of a Disney product identity, and Capcom's license from Disney had expired.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

Other than that new versions of mainstream operating systems and web browsers make it harder for the owner of a device to trust the root certificate of a particular private CA. I seem to remember, for example, that iOS and Android put a scary warning on the lock screen if one or more user-trusted root certificates is installed, and Android application developers have to opt into user-trusted root certificates through a "Network Security Config".

Different machines can respond to the same IP address as seen from the Internet vs. from a coffee shop's guest WLAN. Let's Encrypt sees only the former when evaluating an http-01 challenge. If you associate to a guest WLAN and connect to https://42.42.42.42/ and it offers a certificate issued by Let's Encrypt, that means you're seeing the same server that Let's Encrypt saw through the Internet, not a server on the guest WLAN that's intercepting your connection.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.

I still think we need, given the microamps involved, a hamster powered cell phone charger.

Yes it is. Radioactive materials are made in the planet's core, and float up in the magma. Radon Gas is a normal and natural resource from decaying uranium.

It's as renewable as sunlight and wind.

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

Unless the studio wants a tax break and the series gets Willow'd.

Microsoft tried to do something like that before with the Windows Experience Index in WinSAT. It didn't last long: the GUI was displayed only from Windows Vista through the first release of Windows 8.

If next to nobody signs up for Microsoft's curated store, this curation will be ineffective. The only thing that encouraged third-party developers to publish through Microsoft's store is that Xbox consoles are cryptographically locked down not to run games from anywhere else.

Plus the cost of buying the rest of the computer around it. This can prove more expensive if you want a case that looks more attractive in the living room than a big noisy tower.

I'm curious why it took over 14 years after Red Dead Redemption was released for Xbox 360 for it to get a PC port. Rare Replay and several other respected Xbox One games still haven't been ported.

In 2012, the consensus was that most users were unwilling to either build a second PC, cart a gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the computer desk, or run cables through the walls, to use Big Picture mode in Steam. (Source: adolf's comment) When did this change?