4K BASIC was in ROM, not RAM.

As I recall most Disc-based OSes of the ROM Basic era required 16K of RAM to support the disc operating system...

Please, explain why that advertising campaign isn't winning over more converts? Have Linux usage numbers gone up dramatically since Win 10 went off-support?

Real people that care about security updates (a small minority of the computer using population) don't complain that their 7-10 year-old computer is no longer supported and needs to be upgraded, and people that don't care about security updates won't update their 7-10 year-old computer and happily run Win 10 a few more years.

Apple introduced a $600 iPad with a keyboard.

It's (Mac) Netbook 2.0, nothing more than that.

Kernel support for an architecture does not translate to distribution support for that architecture. Just because a Linux kernel supports a 486 CPU, but that doesn't mean the latest distribution of a given flavor of Linux will run on a 486.

For example, can Ubuntu 2024 LTS run on a 486 machine?

Hasn't this already happened? From 2025 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

For instance, the article mentions that the median price of a home is about $500k. This likely isn't enough to buy a studio apartment in lower Manhattan.

Manhattan isn't considered "typical" by most measures. 'Middle class' Americans don't buy apartments in Manhattan, wealthy American buy in Manhattan, middle class Americans rent.

But, but - what about the wage gap?!?! I hear it's worse than ever...

So, to be clear, that means Senators & Congressmen are "upper middle class" by virtue of earning about $175K/yr, right?

"Punative taxes" on EVs? Explain.

When the federal gov't stopped SUBSIDIZING EVs folks called that punative, it's not, it's prudent.

When states talk about assessing road usage fees on EVs to make up for lost road taxes that would normally have been collected on gasoline purchases, some call it punative, it's just prudent.

People aren't 'owed' $7,500 for an EV purchase, nor are EVs entitled to use our public roads for free - so please, don't try and claim treating EVs like ICE vehicles as "punative."

There is always that one guy that needs to raise his hand and say "Oh ... look at me! I'm ignorant too!" Don't worry, everyone sees you little boy.

The AI editors and AI "fact checkers" will have been coded by the same people (or, eventually, the same stupid AI programming code) and trained on the same data and will therefore not SPOT the errors, not require the retractions, and almost certainly "fact check" the errors as "true", thereby becoming the obstruction to actual humans correcting things.

AI is likely to produce a new world in which people can believe NOTHING in electronic format, and they need to return to being trustworthy and honest and getting information, and doing transactions, on a handshake with a trusted human, face-to-face.

Congrats to all you people working on stupid large language models and lying to everybody by mis-representing this form of "AI" to the general public as though it were Artificial General Intelligence. You are on the cusp of destroying modernity and forcing society to step backwards 80 years or so. Those of us who worked to bring about the computer revolution INTENDED to build a bright future where computers made everything better, faster, more-efficient, more factual, etc but you are in the process of flushing it all down the giant cosmic toilet. Oh, and before you ask: NO, no additional algorithm can fix this. Algorithms cannot fix human nature, and human nature defaults to abusing every new technology. The current generation of AI is the most-powerful yet least-understood-by-the-public tech to come along. It's already mis-leading people by the millions - just look at the MOUNTAINS of AI slop ruining the YouTube experience already. It only gets worse from here...

We need new drugs for cancer, diabetes, vascular problems, liver problems, rebuilding nerves, destroying proteins and collagens that build up in eyes and blind people, etc. and we have a bunch of drug researchers who are, instead, working to supply a bunch of new (almost certainly addictive) mind-altering drugs to keep people with addictive personalities properly numb?!?

Sheer madness. Probably driven by cash - people will ALWAYS pay for a "high", and some will pay any price to any low-life vendor to live a strung-out life. We'd be better off to create some gated communities and tell people who want to get high to go there and do all the drugs they want within the gates, as long as they never leave without being "clean". Then just legalize all the tried-and-true mind benders for use in those places. Have at it folks! cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, lsd, whatever you want... you just cannot leave and hurt innocent people.

We need drug researchers to be working on serious medications for people with actual serious medical conditions.

Sorry for the rant, but the longer you live, the more decent people you will have known who suffered (and often died) for lack of help with actual serious medical conditions. I no longer am able to muster an ounce of sympathy for anybody who just wants to destroy a few brain cells over a weekend for recreation, and little patience for anybody dedicated to helping them.

you want human beings to ever be anything more than scurrying about on Earth becoming gradually better at killing each other until they eventually succeed or the sun burns out (your choice).

Here's the thing: ANY human voyage to any other place in the universe will be vastly more difficult and dangerous and require more time away from Terra Firma. Therefore, the Moon is a perfect place to learn what we need to learn, and to practice (and get good at) the things we will need to be excellent at in order to manage ANY further exploration. If we cannot get the toilet right on a lunar mission, then any other space destination is right out. We could learn all the same lessons with a destination like Mars, BUT that would be vastly more expensive, and take a huge amount of additional time (each flight would take months vs days, and the launch windows are years apart rather than weeks apart). This is what even Elon Musk has recently surrendered to. When we have mastered the regular lunar flights with sustained time on the lunar surface, we will finally know how to learn to do Mars without going bankrupt and killing lots of crews.

If you think psychedelics make people stupid then you are ignorant.

An employer trying to figure out how little they can offer an individual seems like a lot of work, which will blow-up in their face if/when the employees compare compensation packages.

I can't imagine an employer doing this on any sort of large group of employees. Unless you have a mono-sexual, mono-racial workforce, different individual compensation for the same job is just a shit-storm waiting to happen. What if Women are, generally, paid less then men in the same position? Or if minorities are paid less than Caucasian workers?

I've worked in places where one worker ;an older woman) learned she was paid about $5K less than her colleagues, but that was because she came to the job with no experience, the others had 5-10 years industry experience when they were hired. She felt she was 'cheated', it affected her work and her relationships with coworkers. Ultimately they quietly bumped up her pay, but she still complained - it turned out bad for her (impacted her review, cost her a performance raise at year-end).

Bottom line, the worker is owed what the employer offers and the employee accepts. If the offer is too low, don't accept it. It isn't anyone's fault but your own if you accept a too-low offer.

I don't understand the outrage of using publicly-available information to make a business decision - in realpage scandal a company used computers to determine the maximal rent a landlord/owner could charge a tenant, and in this case an employer is using a service to create a profile of a worker from public information to figure out how low an offer the candidate is likely to accept. These are things that have been manually done for decades, but somehow automating it makes it bad?

Employers look at candidates, review their job history, and arrive at a number they think the candidate will accept. That a candidate has gone and used payday loans is (apparently) publicly-available info - the issue is to maybe make the info private?

Employers do background checks, criminal record checks, and, I would assume, some sort of financial background check before hiring certain workers - it's labor-intensive, so probably not very common, but for certain occupations, I'm sure it's standard.

At no point in the link you provided is any such claim made (that it is one of the most popular choices among players.) Would you like to play again?

It said your choice was "unusual", not "poor". I would wager that AI has a better idea what actual choices most players make playing that particular online game than you do by basing your belief on the idea that your choice is the usual one.