Someology

This is why they will not release the 90s shows on 4k BluRay. They don’t want anyone to actually own copies.

Nowhere did OP say anything about a desktop. I thought they meant “what’s the current laptop equivalent to a Thinkpad back in the day?” If they meant a desktop, they should have used the word desktop. “PC” is not exactly specific.

Convenience.

I have a loved one with permanent nerve damage from chemo. We’re very happy the chemo was successful, but imagine a combo of numbness and constant pain for the rest of your life in all your fingers, which becomes dramatically more severe with exposure to cold. It makes make simple daily life tasks from driving, to cooking, etc. far more difficult. They do not tell patients in advance they are going to continue the treatments until the point where permanent damage happens. You only realize after going through it that this was the plan all along. It makes medical talk about informed consent feel ridiculous. The severity fluctuates, but it has already been like 7 years, and this is never going away. It is not for “a while”.

It makes no sense to say a government censored it. It makes the Historical British Empire look evil. The UK is certainly not controlling the Hugos. It criticizes the Chinese CCP zero, because they are not mentioned. It shows great evils that were done TO China in the past by colonial powers, which should be a positive from the CCP perspective. The Hugos certainly have not been snubbing Chinese authors (see award winner Liu Cixin), and therefore the USA has not stopped them. I mean, Liu Cixin shows us that the revolution in China could have traumatized some people, yet it won.

EDIT to add: Now, I’ve just seen a post over on Reddit that actually explains what people think are going on with the Hugos this year. This post didn’t explain that at all. I still can’t see any logic behind this supposed censorship, but it’s nice to have context. For anyone else who doesn’t follow World Con Politics: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/19ctcmn/im_a_bit_surprised_by_the_relatively_subdued/

Gotta say that it boosts my confidence in the Hugo Awards to see Babel NOT get nominated. This has zero to do with the author’s nationality and ethnicity and everything to do with Babel being a poorly written novel (with the ending obvious a long way off) and horrific character development. It would be shameful to award a novel where all characters are stand in caricatures of their cultures of origin instead of actual individuals. It just comes across as racist in itself, promoting stereotypes, instead of merely showing the reader that racism existed.

Yes, but in the lingo of the 2020s, that is not a gender difference. It is a sex difference. Yes, I know this was not always the case. I’ve read old dictionaries, but at the moment, that’s the usage.

That’s just about when it got a bit more watchable.

I keep hearing George Carlin’s old comedy routine about how we evolved because Mother Earth needed plastic for reasons, and now that we’ve made enough to last a very long time, she can get rid of us…

One of the first things I do on a new Samsung phone is disable Chrome and install Firefox. You’ve just saved me from ever buying a Redmi.

Check the first one out of a library, perhaps, to see if you like it.

Some jerk company (like Google) cannot suddenly discontinue my entire reader with all my feeds, because its mine, on my server. But because it’s a web app, I can use it from any device, unlike a local app. After Google killed reader, That was just too annoying. Self hosted since.

I really enjoyed Star Trek: Klingon, on PC back in the day. It was officer cultural sensitivity holodeck training for the officer exchange program. You had to make decisions appropriate to Klingon social customs. It was bundled with a Klingon language learning program with speech recognition tech. Very cool stuff for 1996 CD-ROM games.

I promise, you’re unlikely to see an “everyday American” driving an F650. There might be a literal handful of exceptions out there somewhere, but most people will only ever see this in industrial applications. Most often you’ll see a 650 outfitted with a cargo bed or a (extra large, for towing big rigs) wrecker setup, or something large, robust, and industrial like that. This is just a publicity/marketing stunt. 99% of Ford F350 and larger trucks you will ever see will be industrial/cargo/heavy equipment moving/etc. industrial job vehicles. It’s even relatively common to buy the truck, and buy the bed you need for your industrial application, custom. This is not something you’ll see set up like a pickup truck in very many American driveways. The handful of those exceptions are the same sort of enthusiast niche that will hot rod customize to a ridiculous impractical degree a regular car, just to say they can. Very small group.

Reacting as if this is real is just as insane as thinking it’s really common for somebody to trick out their excavator and drive it to McDonald’s.

Freshrss is pretty great.

It is much more like an old school daytime TV Soap Opera in acting style and overall production style than like other SF shows. This is really jarring. Acting very inconsistent. Crappy production values. Like, huge CRT screens being used everywhere? Really? At this same time, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine knew that hundreds of years in the future, nobody would use huge boxy CRT screens. They depicted thin tablets and terminals even though 1990s tech wasn’t able to do that yet. There are so many things like this that jarred me out of the story.

The development of a few characters was cool, but it was like suffering through a mountain of junk to get the good crumbs. The plot had a lot of “I can see it coming a mile away”.

Not worth it IMHO, if you already tried it and didn’t like it.

The best lines are mostly Carl Sagan quotes, which I appreciated, but that isn’t enough.

Thank you for sharing the information!

Thanks for the info!

If you connect your phone to the car, can it spy on your Signal messages? I mean, they have to decrypt on your end for you to see them, right? Or has Signal taken specific steps to stop this?

What model did you buy? It is rare to see one these days that doesn’t have all this nonsense.