The cost of propane and electricity has become so expensive in California that we use our wood burning fireplace insert during the winter whenever possible. It's the kind that has a blower that will heat up the whole house quickly while exhausting all the fireplace gasses up the chimney. If you want to encourage environmentally friendly behaviors amongst us regular folk, make electricity cheap and plentiful, and sourced from non-greenhouse gas generation itself. Modern, safe nuclear as a primary, stable source backed by wind and solar, or eliminate the nuclear component if battery storage is sufficiently advanced and plentiful. (it's getting there...) We like our fireplace but would prefer to use it only when we want to feel cozy once in a blue moon, not consistently to save money.

When the price of owned solar comes down, that is an option as well. (leased solar is a scam) We plan to include owned solar in our next home, whether if it comes with it or we leave out money from the down to purchase it. We are in the process of selling our current home and it's easier financially to do that transaction when changing homes.

There are two camps out there, people who want artificial scarcity and a lower quality of life for no good reason, and those of us who think that energy can be both environmentally friendly AND abundant. Contrary to what you have been led to believe, those two things are not mutually exclusive. But the whole nature of how semi-public utilities (at least in California) are run needs to change, and decentralize. It's a huge mess.

LinkedIn is primarily a convenient platform for state sponsored IP theft, hacking and espionage via asset recruitment of highly positioned individuals, and funding of totalitarian regimes (North Korea) through remote work scams. And just when you think it can't get worse, video and audio spoofing by AI has made it much worse. You can pin the blame on the HR departments not doing their due dilligence, but LinkedIn sure is a big enabler.

Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.

Some intrepid sould would be forever thanked if they hosted a site (offshore, safe from DMCA takedowns) with user-contributed instructions on how to remove or disable the cellular modem on popular car models.

If they want my data, they need to pay for it. By, for example, making the car free or steeply discounted. Until then, fuck off.

Plenty of trucks and other vehicles have little or any effective view directly out the back. To be blunt: If you need to look through your rear-view mirror to not kill someone, you either need better side mirrors or you need to learn to drive.

This is something like The Face on Mars, where author Richard C. Hoagland went down a rabbit hole and connected the dots on a whole bunch of other landscape features nearby to back up his theory that the face was actually a face. Then a later mars satellite went by and photographed it from different angles in different lighting, and lo and behold it was just light and shadow. Along with the rest of the rocks that made up his 'alien civilization'. You see what you want to see, and find patterns where there aren't any.

In the case of the JPL scientist shot to death, that one is local to us. It involved a crazy guy who was known to be causing problems around the Crystalaire community of Llano in the previous week, and when he trespassed on the scientist's property, the cops were called, crazy guy was arrested, and then he bailed out and came back a few days later and shot Carl Grillmair, the scientist, blaming him for his arrest. It's the high desert of Los Angeles County and there's a lot of methheads and tweakers commiting breaking and entering on rural properties in order to find things to steal and fence for their next hit. A property we're involved with nearby has been broken into three times. Everyone here knows this one was totally random, and very unfortunate. Carl had the property for the unobstructed views of the night sky, and it's fairly convenient to LA, being just on the other side of the San Gabriels from JPL. It's very unfortunate, but there is no bigger story therein. Can't speak for the other cases.

We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mount a disk reliably from one PC to another.

I avoid going to the movies these days purely because of the insane amount of commercials shown beforehand. I paid money to get in. And you are showing me commercials on top of that. I don't do commercials. They are not something I want to waste my life watching. I am not your target market. If I can't pay for a commercial-free experience I'm not doing it.

There are precious few theaters out there that don't show commercials. And none near us. I am down to 1 - 2 visits to a theater per year for films I really want to see on a big screen. I didn't stop liking going to the movies, but they've driven me away and the at-home experience is now excellent.

Larger screens and better sound are good. But they're not addressing the elephant in the room. I'm happy to pay a few extra dollars for a commercial free experience.

does that mean they'll continue to manufacture the same old models for the US market, which will possibly become less secure over time due to advanced hacking techniques applied to the same old well known hardware? Will it then result in a net loss in security over time?

It might resemble Cuba with their 1950s automobiles, frozen in time. I do agree that there is concern about backdoors and surreptitious identifying data sent to servers under control of China. Would it be better to allow new models, but require them to be completely torn down and reverse engineered by teams inside the FCC, or for their firmware source code to be handed over for inspection? (there's still room for nefarious business....hand over one set of code and install a slightly different set, or install a backdoor with a firmware update....)

I feel there's a legitimate concern here, and there always has been. What's a better solution, if any? Or is this the right solution for digital sovereignty?

Since I'm still using windows 10, I can just lean back and chuckle. It's been a hell of a shit show to watch over the years. Glad I'm not in it.

...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've watched that market try to take off since the 80s and there's just not a compelling use for it. I thought they were mad for going down that road yet again. Maybe that day will come, but it was super obvious from the start that Meta plowing billions of dollars into it and changing their company name wasn't going to make it happen. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the pitch about the metaverse inside Facebook. Techbros deluding themselves. I think they were just scrambling to place a bet on whatever the next hot thing would be after the initial round of social media companies and they lost horribly. In the mean time, their original product, despite being enshittified repeatedly, remains somewhat useful and popular. (just install SocialFixer and ad blockers before you touch it, don't use their app....)

Of course, I'm still happily using Outlook 2019 on a bought and paid for standalone office license. I see no reason to 'upgrade'.

Monster sure had a great run convincing everyone otherwise. It became something of a joke in the early 2000s. They definitely took from P.T. Barnum's playbook. A sucker born every minute.

Agree with another commenter, overall system noise becomes more critical at the amplification stage. Most cheap stereos in the 90s had a modicum of white noise in the silence when you turned it way up. But one day a roomate got an -amazing- setup and it was so clean, and had so much dynamic range, it blew my mind. Was just great to put on a well engineered CD and listen to it with your eyes closed. With CDs you had the best possible input for consumer grade audio, and if you fed it through something that kept it clean, it was just pristine and fantastic. I haven't heard anything like it in a long time. These days my Bose noise cancelling headsets deliver really excellent sound, but my hearing isn't what it used to be. Tinnitus and a little bit of high frequency hearing loss all around prevent me from appreciating that last 10% in quality, so for me to pursue a setup like that now would be kind of wasted money. But I'm glad I got to hear it when I could appreciate it.

I own a Mazda with the center console scrollwheel. It is completely awesome. No reaching whatsoever, and very easy to navigate. It should be a model for everyone else. It got high praises when first introduced. Nothing has changed. This sounds like they just want to lower the cost of the car by getting rid of the wheel, button and associated wiring. I'm planning on a replacing my current Mazda with a slightly used one anyhow, which will still have the scroll wheel. Unbelievable. So dissapointed at Mazda.

...that it can mimic a lenticular stereo display? If it can do eye tracking and adjust every other column of pixels to every other eye, it might be able to do that.