>"Honestly I'd only ever heard of her in some clips of South Park; I had no idea it was a real person."

LOL, me neither. Just South Park. Never heard actual Lorde music, not only because I didn't know it existed but also because I probably wouldn't detect any good music present. A lot of stuff out there people listen to, I would hardly even define as music.

I have been buying CD's since they came out and have many, many hundreds. I think only once have I ever encountered a disc I could not rip. And I think that was just a production run error and had the disc replaced.

>"Why do you need to own a song? It's a form of entertainment. It is fungible and easily replaced with another song. "

That entirely depends. Music quality has gone down steadily my entire life. The older songs can't just be replaced by some other song if you are picky. Much of it is truly excellent and unique. I hand-screen and rate every song I listen to, deciding what to keep "forever" and what to not even bother ripping. Even carefully selecting which artists to screen, my rejection rate is currently probably over 98% (meaning I would never want to hear it again). In my collection, maybe 2/3 of the songs could never be replaced by something else as good.

Nothing wrong with having different ways to "consume" music. But mine is to spent a crap-load of effort carefully screening every now and then, buy only what I like, carefully store it permanently with lots of backups, and then generally listen to my collection at random, locally-stored on all my devices.

"TDS" is simply the reflexive response when you can't defend him.

And the tragic thing about this is that the possibility isn't really that far-fetched, and indeed is precisely the type of thing the climate deniers would do to thwart climate science.

Actual slavery involves forcing people to work, and your comparison depends largely on pretending you don't understand this.

>"A car's repair history matters, as does the odometer."

The funny thing is, the odometer-only-metric is so outdated. I have wondered for decades why it hasn't been updated to at least include number of engine starts, and total runtime hours. Combined with distance, those three metrics would say a hell of a lot more about the vehicle.

Anyway, it is true that something like that on a laptop is likely some elaborate excuse to manipulate the market or screw the consumer. The SSD and battery wear/health, we can already read. I am not sure the CPU or RAM actually "wear" like other components do. Fans and power supplies, maybe? But I can't even remember the last time a power brick failed, outside of a cord or plug being accidentally damaged. They are easy to replace, and now that they are all moving to USB-C, they are fairly universal.

I wouldn't ever buy an HP laptop, anyway, being a Lenovo Thinkpad snob, myself. It is my favorite brand/line for loading Linux. Especially fond of the newer AMD ones.

>"Windows 11 has alienated users with perfectly functional older machines, prompting some to stick with unsupported versions or abandon Windows entirely." ...by installing Linux. There has never been a better time. Funny how the entire article (and summary) glossed over that.

But fear not, the same Tom's Hardware does has a separate, earlier, article on that: https://www.tomshardware.com/s...

On one of our major cloud apps at work, I have been trying for many YEARS to get them to support TOTP. They have only SMS or Email (and I don't allow Email for this particular one because of several factors that are out of the scope of this posting, but Email is fine for many other less-important 2FA applications). And it isn't just the security issues, it is just too unreliable and slow. Most of the time it is fast and fine, but sometimes it takes a minute or more to get the code. Other times it never arrives. And occasionally, the entire gateway they use for this crap is down and NOBODY can use it.

TOTP should be support by *all* 2FA systems, period. It just works. It is a well-known and non-encumbered technology. It doesn't require any network connection. It costs NOTHING to use. Doesn't rely on any particular vendor. And the response is instant. I use a completely FOSS authenticator for it and it even displays the codes on my watch.

>"What about existing equipment? Will it be banned?"

Different countries have different frequency requirements and they do change. Most all modern WiFi routers have frequency tables that can be updated with firmware to enforce restrictions to prevent conflicts and comply with the country in which they are being used.

I suspect the lack of 6Ghz WiFi protection was either a mistake, or something inserted without knowing it would stop on existing WiFi commitments. I guess we shall see.

>"I've noticed lately that the person starts by saying something engaging and personal, "Hi, how are you? What shall I call you?" or something like that, before going on script. It helps disarm people too used to dealing with automation."

What it should start out with is "Hi, I am an AI, how can I help you today?" Pretending to be a human should be a red line that we should stop NOW. Not lying to customers/callers right off the bat, and then actually being helpful will determine the success of the interaction.

The other problem is that anything that is an AI should TELL THE HUMAN they are an AI at the start of any "conversation". It is rude and misleading, and often infuriating to the customer, to have AI on the phone that pretends to be a human.

My car dealer did this- I call and it answers the phone "Thank you for calling XXXX, my name is Lora, how can I help you today?" (As if it needs a name). When it should say "Thank you for calling XXXX, I am an AI, how can I help you today?" And if the customer asked if this is a human, it should respond "no, I am an artificial intelligence, but I can get you to a human if you need, is there something I can try helping you with?" If we standardized (or even mandated) this type common-sense, then people would be far less hostile with actual humans.

I can understand women (or men) not wanting to change their last names. Although in most cases THAT IS YOUR FATHER'S NAME, not your mother's, so it is already a bit strange. But fine. Keep your maiden, take your husband's, pick a totally different one. Whatever.

What I can't understand and don't like is all this ridiculous hyphenation stuff. It makes everything very long and complex. I suppose it was meant to be some type of strange compromise, but it is more of a kludge. I don't care what your last name is, I just wish everyone WOULD JUST PICK ONE NAME. At marriage, my mother changed her middle name to be her maiden name.

And if you have a hyphenated name, what are you going to name your children? This hyphenation stuff? And if so, what are THEIR children going to be named? 4 hyphenated last names? And their children, 8? Then 16? A better plan would be, everyone keeps their single/original last name, male children take the father's name and female children take the mother's. Done.

In any case changing your last name to your husband's with marriage is not a sign of "subservience", it is a just a practical way to keep a single name for a family unit. And usually done in love and dedication. Good grief.

>"Not tested here yet, but this exists: https://github.com/sedrubal/br... [github.com]"

My Brother printer can check and update the firmware itself from the web admin page. I just queried it and there is an update...

>"I'm a bit hesitant as I don't remember the outcome of the Brother toner lockin scare a few months back. I think it wound up being overblown but I'll check before updating."

I was wondering the same thing (or some other breakage), which is why I didn't just automatically click on "update".

>"Now if I could just find a device driver for my wife's laptop..."

You can. It's called "install Linux" ;)

Kidding aside, that is actually a thing. At least for basic printing, you can make just about any printer work under Linux without "finding" or "downloading" or "installing" "drivers". Now, if you want all the MFP bells and whistles, it might be considerably more difficult/complex.

I have an 11-year-old Brother MFC-L2740DW (networked, duplex, touchscreen, single-pass dual-sided scanning, etc) and just love it. Every machine I have, from ages ago to brand new just work immediately with it (everything I have runs Linux). It was cheap, has been 100% reliable, and I use inexpensive third-party toner. Office Depot on sale from $300 to $200 and then another $50 free gift card. So it was effectively only $150!! I alerted several friends who also got it and still love them.