Clamchop

I've never thought of (re)writable optical media for backups as having a particularly good user experience. I'm not saying tape is good or better but blu-ray is a lot of faffing about. In theory, the much larger capacity that tape can provide should reduce the faff factor, but the devil is in the details.

Encyclopedias are for summaries, not maximal detail. For that, you look at the source material.

The software analogies to books (documents of various types like PDF, HTML) don't have pathological obsolescence problems, either. Binary executable code is such a different animal that the comparison isn't instructive at all, or else I suppose you would also complain that you can't fit modern Ford parts onto a Model T because you can still read old books?

When running a card as credit, I can't remember ever having to type a pin in the US, although it's possible I've forgotten. As debit, yes, pin, although that may have changed; I run everything as or through a credit card these days so I haven't made a POS debit transaction in a good while.

They will of course but I don't think kids talking to each other was ever the objection to social media. Very arguably, kids coming together in these ad-hoc online spaces may very well be safer than mainstream social media, whether your complaint with it is advertising or the algorithm or adult content or child predators.

I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.

This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.

Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.

We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.

It's a fun myth but Parton and Curry already come fast on the heels of a few recent celebrity deaths: Sam Neill, Bonnie Tyler, Daveigh Chase, Hayden Panettiere, and Lindsay Graham.

Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.

> It asked for zero permissions.

Not quite. It requested to play DRM protected content.

This isn't anything to do with digital time, it's just a convenience of recent microwaves. The digital microwaves of the 1990s did not have this feature, but they were still digital. If you input 1, you just got 1 second.

On microwaves that do have this feature, set the power first to bypass it.

They're within an order of magnitude of each other but they're not _in_ the same order of magnitude. 2 would be in the 0th order and 6 would be in the 1st.

But even if it weren't so, I'm not sure what your point is. Do you have a reason for thinking that orders of magnitude is a good way to compare alcohol consumption?

A major contributor to this statistic is fire sprinklers. New apartment complex construction for decades has required them but they're virtually nonexistent in single-family homes, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

These don't seem strange to me at all.

Lifestyle marketing, romance, appeals to independence, metaphor, and humor. All timeless advertising tropes. It's cigarettes themselves that are passé.

I remember most installers bundling such bullshit. It may have been so normalized that no one was sincerely asking if participating would harm their reputation.

I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.

It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.

I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.

It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.

Redundancy in natural language isn't a big deal, and it isn't entirely useless, either.

I think the underlying needle this is trying to thread is teaching kids to know their audience and adjust their register for it (which is a much broader skill than just whether or not to curse), but I agree that the fucking president ;) doing it gives kids ammo to argue against the rule. Idk if that's a good or a bad thing, maybe just neutral.

The rest of that same sentence, " – and that if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased," seems to mitigate that concern, no? I suppose it hinges on what the test for a "specialized tool" is.

La Brea tarpits

No more pedantic than the comment I was replying to. My advice would be not to use "eatable" at all because others will just think you're saying edible incorrectly.

That's backwards, eatable is the stronger claim that means fit as food while edible just means safe to eat.

In the US, photos of food must depict the actual product being advertised. So all the photos of burgers on the McD's menu are what is being sold, albeit with carefully selected "hero" ingredients skillfully assembled for the best presentation.

For a product that is only advertising one thing in a photo, e.g. an ice cream cone with ice cream on a package of just cones, I don't think there are any restrictions on what the "ice cream" can be made of. (It's probably mashed potatoes, though.)

I agree in fractions.

I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.

I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.

I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.

Demonetized videos show fewer or no ads. It's something they implemented because advertisers don't want to be associated with some kinds of content.

And Apple famously struggled for a long time to compete with PCs on price, beyond what their positioning as a premium brand would justify, compounding the problem. And their hardware wasn't exactly setting the world on fire on performance metrics, either.

I'd long thought it'd gone underappreciated how much slow but steady progress Apple has made in the past couple of decades at improving the value of their computers, but everyone has been talking about that since the Neo dropped. Well deserved and overdue, in my opinion.

The way I see it, self-driving cars have the potential to deliver us from the burden of ownership altogether--maintenance, insurance, liability, parking, and all the rest. This hinges on availability, quality of service, pricing, and a rather large shift in the culture around cars and driving but I have hope that we can get there with time.

Cars are very expensive things to buy and own.

I mean, yes, it is easy. No adhesive and just a couple of clips on the case. You could replace the battery in 20 minutes with little anxiety that you're going to cause damage getting to it.

Running uBO here and I see a chart.

And later pyramids. As a matter of economy, many were constructed from mudbrick and only encased in true stone. Over time, particularly after the casing stones were removed for other projects, they collapsed into the rubble piles referred to as ruined pyramids.

Cost cutting is ancient.