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.

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.

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?

The incentives to collecting are 1. ability to watch if you rely on wireless Internet (satellite or cellular) with a harsh monthly data cap, 2. ability to watch a particular movie or TV episode again after you have switched to a different streaming service for the month, and 3. ability to watch a particular work again even after its publisher has destroyed it for an "impairment" tax deduction or the service it's on has ended (particularly for game consoles).

I've read that dropping X11 in favor of Wayland goes beyond GNOME and reaches all of GTK. This means developers of other GTK-based desktop environments (particularly Xfce) and users of distributions built around those environments (I have Xubuntu and Debian Xfce in mind) will have to make hard decisions.

I think what happened with FOSTA is that some of the more conservative states or the federal government redefined "sex trafficking" to include not only sexually-oriented human trafficking but also all other sexually-oriented commerce.

True, higher-priced prepaid mobile phone plans have unlimited text. Lower-priced plans do not. SMS-based 2-factor authentication is not cost effective for a subscriber making do with a lower-priced plan.

Then you must not have followed FOSTA, a 2018 US law weakened the protections of Telecommunications Act section 230 with respect to sexually explicit material. This made it easier for acquiring banks to get away with debanking sellers of erotica.

How do minors (children and teens not yet old enough for a bank account in their own name) pay for things in Sweden?

When did these advantages of "a locked down hardware BOM" go away?

- Easier for the audience to compare a game's system requirements to a particular device model
- Console maker's imprimatur makes it easier to sort through Theodore Sturgeon's 90 percent crap that fills more open online app stores
- Restriction against software modding reduces likelihood of cheating in online ranked play against strangers
- Restriction against software from unidentified publishers eliminates need for intrusive real-time anti-malware
- Console game discs and cartridges can be resold and used even if you are stuck on slow satellite or cellular Internet with its low monthly cap
- A GPU for a desktop PC costs as much as a console, and then you still need to buy all the other parts of the PC if you want to be able to use the console for something else while someone else in the household is using a PC for gaming
- Consoles have historically had more couch multiplayer games than PC

As for tablets and phones, how many people carry a Bluetooth controller with them? A virtual gamepad on a flat sheet of glass offers no tactile feedback as to where the player's thumbs are. Not all games adapt well to that.