Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did. Yeah, but he was working to achieve something for himself and not to make some parasite richer.

They could have identified me, that's the point. We couldn't identify the criminals because that example was before facial recognition. You read the article but you still don't get it.

паляниця Transliterated as palianytsia, Ukraine uses this word because it is difficult for native russian-speakers to pronounce. And now they have a drone named after it, so that is a thing. https://kyivindependent.com/everything-we-know-about-ukraines-new-palianytsia-missile-drone/

Yep. Pretty sure that was deliberate on Musk's (or his cronies) part. Imagine working at X and being told by your boss "I'd like you to make the bot more racist please." "Can you convince it that conspiracy theories are real?"

the US the 50 states basically act like they are different countries instead of different states. There's a lot of back and forth on that - through the last 50+ years the US federal government has done a lot to unify and centralize control. Visible things like the highway and air traffic systems, civil rights, federal funding of education and other programs which means the states either comply with federal "guidance" or they lose that (significant) money while still paying the same taxes... making more informed decisions and realise that often the mom and pop store option is cheaper in the long run. Informed, long run decisions don't seem to be a common practice in the US, especially in rural areas. we had a store (the Jumbo) which used to not have discounts, but saw less people buying from them that they changed it so now they are offering discounts again. In order for that to happen the Jumbo needs competition. In rural US areas that doesn't usually exist. There are examples of rural Florida WalMarts charging over double for products in their rural stores as compared to their stores in the cities 50 miles away - where they have competition. So, rural people have a choice: drive 100 miles for 50% off their purchases, or save the travel expense and get it at the local store. Transparently showing their strategy: the bigger ticket items that would be worth the trip into the city to save the margin are much closer in pricing. retro gaming community GameStop died here not long ago. I never saw the appeal in the first place: high prices to buy, insultingly low prices to sell, and they didn't really support older consoles/platforms - focusing always on the newer ones.

I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one. Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.

You seem to think we disagree on creation of a police state or massive surveillance system being a bad thing for some reason. None of which are stopped with regulations by the states that are funding and building said things ...

Why? Because you can’t sell them?