I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Britannica has been around for over two hundred years. I sold a LOT of sets i my day. Unfortunately, there are huge numbers of people who can't or don't read. In my old age, I find myself tutoring/coaching people on how to think and how to study. This last year, I have been coaching 4 people, WITH MULTIPLE DEGREES, who read only about 150 words-per-minute and can't remember what they read. (In my generation , boomer, the average reading speed was 200-250 wpm w/70% comprehension.) A report by abtaba (https://www.abtaba.com/blog/59-reading-statistics) says that 42% of college graduates never read a book after college. Judging from what I see in this forum, I suspect that a lot of them haunt /.

This is a waste of resources! If a person reading 250 wpm reads for an hour a day they could easily read a 100,000 word book each week. If they did that every week that would be over 50 books in a year. If only half those books were on a subject they were interested in, they would have acquired the knowledge/book requirement for a BA/BS degree about every two years. (Assuming they learned how to think somewhere along the way.)

However, letting AI set the standards for learning come with compliance, not thinking. Encyclopaedia Britannica is a proper name. (Notice how I spelled it EncyclopAEdia?) However much a writer tries to include the ligature "ash" (ae) in his text, Ignorant spell-checker, ignorant editors, and ignorant AI will insist on changing it to a simple "e".

Britannica jumped the gun: AI is not ready to improve on an encyclopedia designed to accumulate facts for reader's consumption.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.

It is true that the rich got richer. The question is: "Did they get richer by creating more wealth for others and shaving a portion for themselves? or did they get richer by plundering the resources of other people?"

It is not like the very, very rich keep their money in a huge money vault like Scrooge McDuck. You can only do two things with money: Either spend it or invest it. If you spend it, you are creating jobs and making things better for the people who make those products and services you spend money on, whether it is the lower-paid worker who has a job or the higher paid executive and investor that puts the process together. If you invest it, you are providing the resources that enable others to produce goods and services, which provides jobs and income for other people to who can circulate the money through the economy by buying the goods and services they need or want. Being rich does not automatically make you guilty of exploitation, and stealing someone's wealth by government intervention of force should be reserved for those who are guilty of exploitation or theft.

So some smarty is going to say, "Well, what if the person DID keep it in a vault instead of spending it? What if he kept it under his mattress? What if he burned it? From an Economic point of view, those are simply bad investments....

Thanks.

The cost of ALL electricity is going to go up in Texas when new measures are required to provide backup for wind and solar power generation.

This is simple Economics: The current level of reliability is not adequate for the more extreme conditions, and statistical judgements made in the past are apparently outdated. Higher reliability = higher costs, and those costs get passed on to consumers.

Consumers of wind- and solar-generated electricity have been getting a free ride due to subsidies, so the suppliers have been acquiring as much of their energy as they can from the "cheaper" sources, and the delivered cost to the consumer has been lower than actual costs. Those companies that get most of their power from these alternative sources will, in fact, have to pay some of the costs for providing the backup, and this will drive up their prices out-of-proportion to the prices of conventional energy. But, overall, the costs will spread out over the grid. Those who get the subsidies will still be able to market their energy at lower rates than those who don't get the subsidies.

The Author is too ignorant to use analogies. He can't even understand That the name of the company is "Encyclopaedia Britannica". He must have been educated on Wikipedia. I'm sure Britannica know how to spell its own name...

There were multiple conditions that seem to have caused the outages. (I say "seem" because not all the data is in yet. A definitive explanation might be weeks away.)

But here is the gist of it: When wind and solar power failed, it took parts of the grid below its "baseload" level, and that started bringing down parts of the grid. Period.

Wind and solar only work about 20-30% of the time. When they aren't working, there needs to be back up. Energy on the grid MUST meet the demand, or the grid goes down. In this case, the backup systems couldn't be brought online adequately due to poor maintenance, poor planning, and poor policy. Bingo! The grid started failing.

The backup necessary to keep the grid up for say, 30 days, if wind and solar went down, would cost about 1/3 of what it would cost for the wind and solar installations they were designed to back up. Consumers have been reaping the benefits of wind and solar only because these have been massively subsidized. The actual cost of wind and solar is expected to level out to much higher rates than from other sources if subsidies ever end.

I believe that wind and solar have a place, especially for niche markets like home and ranch energy independence, but the massive investment in Texas was a mistake. Politicians bought the solution without examining the Science.

Yes, Steffansson lived at a New York hospital and lived on a "meat only diet" for over a year, and was in better health after that year than before he went in. The maintenance of life for people with ciliac disease was a "meat only" diet up until about the last 60 years or so.

AFAIK. there has never been a study that substantiated the need for carbohydrates in the diet. (After a certain amount of protein is digested, the liver supposedly makes a base carbohydrate compound through a process called, "carbolysis" from the excess protein.) The main use of carbohydrates is for providing energy, which can also be derived from fats, and burns ketones instead of sugars. However, if you don't take in enough fats and/or carbohydrates to supply the energy needed for daily living, you could starve on protein-only diets. This is why diabetics and people on a very low-carb diet should make sure to eat larger amounts of healthy fats. Diabetics do have to worry about "keto acidosis", which is something that occurs when the ketones and sugar levels in the blood both rise beyond the capacity of the available insulin to handle it. This makes the blood acidic, and can be very dangerous. (This is a highly-simplified explanation, so consult a good Physiology or Microbiology book if you want to know more.)

https://downloads.aaronia.com/datasheets/solutions/drone_detection/Aaronia_AARTOS_DDS_FAQ.pdf

What Comcast is doing is reducing their services. They are suspending some TV services and reducing broadband speeds from around 300mps to 50mps, and adding a $15 charge to each subsequent month's bills for their "Assistance Plan".

...Prices will get so low that Exxon-Mobile will have to lay off some of those Democratic Congressmen...