edit: directly to the Steam account you want *via the Steam account's* email.

I should have read it closer. Back on the naughty list for me I suppose.

I get $100 every Christmas from my wife's 70+ year old aunt, and am very happy when it occurs. Christmas 2024 though, since she couldn't find physical cards at a store, she went to Best Buy's website and bought them. I got them and tried to redeem them, and one of the $25 cards didn't redeem. I contacted support and gave them the number and they said it hadn't been activated correctly. I never got that $25. She tried to reach out to them, but either it went nowhere, or she secretly is playing some $25 game on Steam.

It would be great if Steam just let you buy them digitally on their site, and send them directly to the Steam account you want email. They could even have it only pop up on Christmas (or Christmas Eve as an option chosen by the buyer). It would be fun to open Steam and have it animate Gaben Clause putting them in my virtual stocking.

Just a thought.

If the fire sale discount is deep enough I would love an AI server for my home running a local open source model lol.

Tickets should be assigned to the buyer like airline tickets and be non transferable to anyone other than back to the venue owner for resale. A fee could be charged for refunding to encourage people to not speculate on their own attendance by buying a ticket anyway while banking on returning it in a way that prevents the venue from reselling it in time.

I actually would have no problem with that so long as those tickets were then assigned to the purchaser and their explicitly named cohort (in the case of a group going) and only redeemable by them. Like an airline ticket. If they could no longer go, or no longer wished, they would have to surrender them back to the venue owner for another auction for some level of refund. This way they (initial potential customer who won the auction) can in no way profit from buying and reselling.

I would also support some small penalty or fee for the return system to encourage people not to speculate on their own ability or interest to attend a limited event.

I haven't had any problems with them for the last 10 years with my personal modems, but I luckily haven't had any modem problems either, so that may be the saving grace.

In my neighborhood they are by far the best choice, because sadly no one else wants to come here. I get 2100/40 Mbps (up says up to 300 but I've never beat 42, my speed test always hits 2100-2300 down though). I pay $85 on an older plan and I DO have a data cap, but I paid ~$40 last year in total overages. I do see if I swapped to a new plan it would be $130/mo and no cap. I'll stick with what I got.

I thought this was a good podcast. I really enjoyed this episode, which covers the story mentioned.

https://darknetdiaries.com/epi...

Not the exact same thing but: Right click the clock, choose "adjust date and time setting", expand "Show time and date in system tray" section, and there is a checkbox to display seconds in the system tray clock. You don't even have to click the clock to see them.

SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) isn't a private company. It is a publicly owned, not-for-profit electric utility. It is a governmental entity that is community-owned and governed by a seven-member Board of Directors. Those Directors need to be held accountable, and not replace with worse Directors, which I fear is what may happen. I live in Sac and love SMUD, as it is reliable and far less expensive than PG&E. I am sorely disappointed in hearing about this, I certainly thought better of them. I do worry that this will turn into lawsuit(s) that end up costing all the customers money via raised rates to pay for the costs. It is a shame.

As a customer for 5+ years, I can log into the website and change it without talking to anyone. I won't, because my plan is $35/mo cheaper, and I only used $20 in total overages last year. I could though, as that is how I got on my current plan, which I changed 3 months ago, without talking to anyone. Maybe try the site and see if it works for you?

I am on the same plan but I only ever get 2,000 down and 42 up lol. Its fine, I don't need more up, but I would have liked to hit 100+, just in case.

It seems more like a cash grab to me. I got excited at the headline until I looked at the new plans and they are +$35/mo from my current plan. I currently am at 2,100Mbps down with a cap and swapping to the uncapped 2,000Mbps down increases my bill by $35/month (after factoring in a -$10/mo for paperless billing which I already use). The site would have let me add unlimited data to my plan for $30/mo but I though in the past it was $10/mo and so this looks more like a way to increase monthly income from plans by a significant percentage and less like a company competing for customers. I only paid the overage fee last year once, at $20 for 100GB, when I was setting up new computers for Christmas, so not worth paying more to me at this time.

How often? Every bank website log in form I've ever used has a "Forgot Password" option which typically will reset it through the associated email address. Some go the next step of some sort of MFA (SMS, or through an app) to validate identity. I've never had to talk to someone. Admittedly I don't forget my passwords often as I use a password vault so maybe there is a threshold of issue frequency which necessitates a more rigorous authentication.

I certainly expect an AI could be as efficient and successful as a human to get data to authenticate identity, but neither seem necessary given the only way either are going to accomplish the task is to match previously authenticated and validated data points (card number, email address, mailing address, maybe [but hopefully not] social security number). A web form does this much quicker, and at far less expense than either a person or an AI system.

A quick Google search without much backup research shows lawns in California use ~5% of state water usage and Almond crops use ~14.5%-16.5%, so about a third give or take?

I guess it depends on the school, mine followed an Abet accredited program, which at times felt dated. The professors often spoke of the differences between CS and programming, not in a way that came across to me as hinting that one was better than the other. I certainly think my school could have focused more on SWE, but then again I loved the broad exposure we got to many CS areas. You had your basic Algorithm, C, C++, Systems Programming in Unix, etc. There were a lot of non programming classes though, they had some coding but not much, like networking class had some coding for sockets. I had to go to the Physics department to get any Python exposure, through a separate certificate program.

I think that was what the poster you are replying to was trying to get at. Computer Science isn't SWE. SWE is a subset of CS. However, as you said, those graduates did try and get SWE jobs with their CS degrees.

At my state college of no notable repute (class of 23), all CS majors took a pretty broad set of courses in upper division that were intros to areas of computer science. I am listing them below for context, but also because it was fun to reminisce. Titles are there, and brief descriptions, don't feel like you have to read them all to understand my perspective about breadth vs SWE focus. It was mostly just fun to remember what seems like an eternity ago.... been a busy couple years lol.

Upper Division courses:

Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis:
Specification, implementation, and manipulation of abstract data types and their structures: balanced trees, priority queues, sets, hash tables, and graphs; recursion; searching and sorting algorithms; asymptotic analysis; NP completeness; fundamental graph algorithms

Computer Software Engineering:
Single client for whole class, broken into groups to make competing projects - almost all ended up as web pages which we took 0 web dev classes

Networking: Network Architecture:
ISO/OSI reference model, TCP/IP protocol stack, layering. Protocol, encapsulation, socket. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, DNS, P2P, TCP, UDP

Databases:
Entity-Relationship (ER) model; relational model; relational database design by ER-to-relational mapping; design of applications using database technology; SQL

Computer Organization:
Simple logic gates through mux and basic cpu design, Harvard vs von Nuewmann architectures, combinational devices, sequential and synchronized circuits, memory organization, CPU architecture and organization, bus structures, input/output, interrupts, DMA, memory hierarchy

Object Oriented Computer Graphics Programming:
Mobile application development; implementation of event-driven systems; advanced object-oriented concepts such as inheritance and polymorphism; implementation of software design patterns; graphical user interface development; fundamentals of 2D graphics systems. We made a 2D game in Java using CodeNameOne. This was pretty fun and the most intense programming class

Computability and Formal Languages:
Automata and formal languages; regular expressions; pumping lemma; language recognition; parsing techniques including recursive-descent; Turing machines; computable and non-computable functions - this was THE fail out class where the prof bragged about how many students failed and how almost no one got an A and a few Bs per semester

Operating Systems:
  Processes, threads, concurrency, parallelism on multi-processor and multi-core systems, CPU scheduling, inter- process communication and synchronization, deadlocks

Senior Project :
2 semesters with the same group and a client. Gather requirements, run Agile sprints and must deliver at least Minimum Viable Project with documentation and get client acceptance sign off, or you can't graduate. Mostly web apps, I don't think any of my cohort did a C/C++ or Java project. They usually had some full stack elements. Ours had a web front end, used AWS and MongoDB and the client's own API for gathering data from sensors.

Choose 3 electives, you could go more SWE here with advanced versions of other classes such as Advanced Algorithms, Intelligent Systems, Compiler Construction etc. I went cybersecurity with Encryption, Computer Forensics, and Computer Attacks and Countermeasures.