I used to always own at least one console, despite mostly being a PC gamer. I felt like the console was more of an appliance, really. Power it on and it has one job. Even if I came to accept the idea of buying games digitally on Steam or elsewhere for my Windows gaming PC, I never felt like it should be the same experience on a console. It's nice to own a physical library of game titles your friends or family can look through on a shelf and decide what they want to pop in and play. It has "permanence" - even if the game itself requires an Internet connection and supports online multiplayer gaming.

I guess I could be swayed to be less concerned if the manufacturers would play fair with all of it, but IMO, they really don't. As one example? My wife's kid bought an XBox 360 and owned a number of digital games on it. Microsoft decided to ban him from their network permanently, and without any warning or real explanation. He wasn't running hacks or cheats, and he wasn't threatening other gamers with violence or anything of the sort. He did have an odd nickname/handle (something about killing a unicorn?), so he finally decided that's what offended some people and got him banned. After all that money was lost on the console and digital purchases - the entire family decided to never again buy an XBox of any type.

My wife had a similar hassle involving the Nintendo Switch and her favorite game, Animal Crossing. To be honest, I don't even play the Switch so I'm not even that familiar with the whole thing. But it had something to do with her buying the game on a physical cartridge but then Nintendo trying to move everything to digital games only. They provided a means to use the physical copy to authorize your account to download and play the digital one, but that wound up hampering how she wanted to play the game across three different Nintendo Switch consoles she owned while retaining her saved game.

No... nobody I know thinks we're "leading the world in banking technology". We're well aware how backwards the systems are. That's likely a big motivator for people to dabble in crypto and to use all the electronic payment systems that popped up, from Venmo to Cash App.

It's endlessly frustrating. At least 20 years ago, I was sure paper checks would vanish because of the utter lack of security they provide people. It seems like they came from an era where one's signature meant something? (If you think about it, that theme runs deep in our Financial system. Every credit card transaction prompts you for a signature. Yet if you ever have to challenge/fight fraudulent charges, you'll find the card companies don't give a crap if your signature matches what they show was scribbled for the transaction. You're still just as liable for it. Sign with a stick figure .... doesn't matter.) But yeah, give me a paper check and now I have your home address, likely one of your phone numbers, a copy of what your signature looks like (should I want to forge it later) and your bank's routing number + your account number. It's pretty common to ask the person paying to write down their date of birth on the check too. How are people ok with this?

Credit card processing is pathetic too, really. I was selling some 3D prints just a few weeks ago at our booth at the local Farmers'/Artisans' market, and a guy gave me a card that only worked with a mag-stripe. I had to run it with Square by manually keying in his card digits! I thought mag-stripe was rendered obsolete by now!

Poor guy reminds me of that goofy uncle in the family who means well, but just has no clue how anything *really* works.

Historically, I'm not sure there's ever been a situation where some kind of "sovereign fund" was created to collect taxes, where it didn't wind up getting raided or re-purposed in some manner by politicians down the road?

But even beyond that? There's really zero reason to mandate a huge, 50% tax, on AI companies doing more than X amount of annual revenue. You know what will happen then? It'll drive them to break themselves up into a number of smaller businesses that avoid the tax. But it'll be business as usual otherwise. You can't stop someone from owning 50 smaller AI companies instead of one big one.

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".

The Texas grid which is separate from the rest of the US has a size issue with balancing and peaking that ha shown up from time to time. Their grid collapse a few winters ago would (probably) not have happened if they were connected to the big grid like everyone else is.

There are two other US grids, the Eastern and Western Interconnects. They are not frequency synchronized, and there are minimal AC-DC-AC interties connecting them.

The big collapse in Texas involved about 30GW of generation going off line. Even if Texas were connected to the Eastern grid, it is unlikely that there would have been 30GW of spare capacity and 30GW of available transmission to draw on.

Perhaps relevant, ERCOT and the Texas PUC have approved the Southern Spirit 3GW HVDC transmission line that would connect ERCOT and the western edge of the TVA's transmission network. The other states that would be affected have refused to approve the project because they believe Texas will screw them over and drive their electricity prices up.

While it constitutes a weak argument that "it won't be worth making a new StarGate series because only the original fans would watch" ... I can't argue it may not have been the best series to do more with right now.

I used to love Stargate, as did some of my good friends. But this wasn't one of the sci-fi shows that only got a couple seasons and then got canned too early. This was a very successful show that arguably ran its course, with a LOT of material to watch.

I'd say there'd be more justification to bring back Firefly, or even just do one more good season of "The Expanse" that does justice to the last novel in the series of books.

I know quite a few people who refused to vote, in at least selected elections. Had zero to do with being cowardly or lazy. It's much about a realization that after studying the people on the ballot and what the candidates running are likely to do/support? None of them reflected anywhere near what they wanted to vote for.

If there's one thing I think that drug America down a slope to stupidity in politics, it was the huge push to "get out and vote, no matter what!" Swarms of totally uninformed people went to the polls and voted based on any number of ridiculous preferences -- more to get the little "I Voted!" sticker to wear around and feel good than anything else.

The "vote for the lesser of evils" thing isn't a great argument for voting either, ultimately. Sure, there are times when you dislike both candidates but feel like one is a "devil you know" and won't surprise you, while you may deem the other too risky of an unknown. But ... that's also a pretty strong reason Trump won re-election, if we're honest about it. Democrats didn't run a better opponent who people could "hold their nose and vote for" if they generally leaned more conservative in their political beliefs.

Our third party options are realistically non-starters, and that will continue unless one of them has their own huge financial resources to throw at running for office without needing their party's backing.

As soon as you start compromising with these people they've won.

I mean, come on... This one screams class action. I just got an email link to a list of current class action suits I could click on to see if I qualified, and none of them were over as clear cut a complaint as a company purposely crippling software initially promised to keep working.

Worth saying: In Texas, it's easy to find 3.75 square miles that's so desolate it's not useful for anything else. My local power authority here in Colorado has a power-purchase agreement with a solar farm about that size. The land it's on is so poor no one has ever trying either growing crops or running livestock on it. With the panels channeling rain water into narrow strips, it might now support enough grass for a small number of sheep, but probably not enough to justify the effort. Even more convenient, the land was adjacent to an existing transmission line, so the connection cost was a smallish substation. The authority's first battery farm is going in right next to the substation. There will probably be more.

This was back in the 2012-2015 time frame ... so "buy them bigger drives" wasn't always a reasonable solution. A lot of them were using Macbook Airs that were great for their needs EXCEPT for the SSDs not being as big as one might prefer.

I'm sure I'm just an outlier here. But I bought a cheap big screen LCD smart TV at Best Buy 3-4 years ago. It was a Westinghouse branded set running Roku TV.

At some point, they updated the firmware to consolidate the TV guide in it so it displayed all the streaming content and your over the air TV stations in the same guide. (Used to be, you had to pick a Live TV icon/button to look at your OTA content in its own place.)

Ever since that happened, the TV forgets all my OTA stations regularly so I have to go into setup and re-scan for all of them, to get them to reappear in the guide. REALLY annoying.

It would be awesome if a total UI makeover for it results in fixing this problem.

I used to work for a company that used the "Dropbox for Business" product. (I think they renamed it along the way, so that may be its former or current product name?) Anyway, my memory of it is that it generally did what you paid for it to do -- but was horribly costly when existing contracts ran out and went up for renewal.

They seemed to use the business model that once you invested in using the platform and they had your data captive in it, they could crank up the prices because it was cheaper to keep it than to go through the painful process of switching.

I also recall a really frustrating detail; We kept wanting DropBox to enforce a disk quota on client PCs. Instead, it would happily keep syncing more content until it ran someone's disk space down to around 0 bytes free, causing OS crashes and a big hassle cleaning it back up again. Their only answer was, "We added the ability to only sync the actual files and folders on-demand, the first time a user clicks to view/open/edit one of them." Great, but that's not the same thing as a disk quota. We had people working with huge video files and it only took one to wipe out remaining disk space on some machines.

This one's interesting on several levels. I mean, for starters? We already know most competitive sports involve people taking various drugs and supplements in an attempt to get an edge. So it's a lie and a farce when the Olympic committee or the Major League Baseball association or anyone else doing pro sports claims we're watching athletes who achieved everything they do 100% naturally.

Viewed that way, I can see how holding a "performance enhanced Olympics" challenges that and calls it out. Essentially, it's saying, "Hey... we don't just randomly catch and disqualify a few athletes, to keep up a facade that the rest of them aren't doing any of it. We let you see what people can do, period, in a world where these drugs and supplements exist and people take them."

Where it gets questionable for me is ethically, when you start asking if it's right to dangle large sums of money in front of people to encourage them to take dangerous amounts of drugs and push themselves into potential health crisis? I think most of us know that normally, athletes would limit drug usage to what they believe is relatively safe. (They're surrounded by others who have been doing the same and can make a judgement call based on what's actually worked and happened to that group.) Start changing things to huge cash prizes to win ONE event, and now people will get reckless. "I only need that $30 million this one year and I can quit the whole thing."