“Can I have that once you’re finished with it?” Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can’t afford to pay for them. It’s a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.

You’re the one who brought up the Boomers, not me. And I don’t believe the behaviour of the Catholic Church is justified or should be permitted in a modern society—their priests committed secular crimes and should be doing time in prison for it like the rest of the non-clergy. The Vatican’s shielding them is reprehensible and the people in their hierarchy who did so should be charged with aiding-and-abetting. My point was that you can’t blame their centuries-old misbehaviour on a group of people that haven’t even been around for a single century.

(And you say you can’t hold the dead accountable—the Catholics have actually done that before, too. Look up the Cadaver Synod some day when you’re really bored.)

I think you’ll find that this kind of thing had been going on for thousands of years before the Boomer generation came around.

Mental inertia. It’s the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They’ve convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.

Attacks only machines running specific Ubuntu kernels and using specific boot methods. Plus no actual payload. This doesn’t yet represent a real risk.

Where we’ll be in ten years’ time is unknowable, however. I think the Ars commentors who suggested going back to forcing jumper cap swaps or other hardware-mediated access requirements before overwriting the mobo’s boot firmware might be on the right track, even if it’s inconvenient for large corporate deployments. It’s normal for security and convenience to pull in opposite directions, and sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.

Depends on how low your standards are. I mean, there were [a small number of] people who convinced themselves that the 1960s chatbot ELIZA was a person with feelings, and the bots have only become more convincing since then. I can certainly see the modern ones fulfilling the emotional needs of someone who really, really wants to believe they’re speaking to a sapient being who cares about them, and as for the other, well, some people have pretty low sex drives or find phone sex fulfilling enough (at least for a time).

Because you’re using an external device to extend the capabilities of the port. It can’t do that without the dock, so now you have two things to carry around.

If you look at the comments on this, there are two distinct camps of people who will never agree: those who expect their laptop to be a self-contained unit that doesn’t require anything that wasn’t packaged with it to meet common use cases (which requires more ports), and those who are okay with docks and dongles and adaptors.

By the time the ecosystem has “caught up”, we’ll have USB-D ports to contend with. Possibly even USB-E.

Exactly. The combination of “bank” and “startup” is innately terrifying. Don’t put more money than you can afford to lose in a place like that.

(Aren’t there any laws in the US regarding who can call themselves a bank? Or is this another case of Americans being unwilling to do something sane and obvious because some politician has convinced them it will infringe on their “freedom”?)

I’d rather have nice sharp jaggies. Antialiasing tends to give me the impression that someone’s smeared my screen with Vaseline.

I acknowledge that this is a minority preference, and the algorithms involved in antialiasing are interesting even if I don’t like the product.

And whoever buys it won’t also have some kind of ulterior motive? Chrome isn’t likely to be a money-maker on its own. If it were, Firefox would have less trouble staying afloat. Anyone who buys Chrome most likely will have plans for it that are no more in the end-user’s best interest than Google’s.

All browsers using Google’s Blink engine are distasteful. Vivaldi is less bad than most, despite being closed-source, but to echo many here, you’re better off with almost any Firefox derivative. Libre Wolf has a good rep. I use Pale Moon, but its old-fashioned interface isn’t for everyone.

Depends on how much effort the average scammer puts into remembering the prospective victims that don’t bite. My guess is that they don’t waste too many brain cells on that.

The problem isn’t that it didn’t. The problem is that anyone thought that it should have.

It depends on the VM, but some of them have working graphics hardware acceleration. Virtualbox should be relatively easy to set up with modern Windows guests, but isn’t free for commercial use. qemu/kvm is free for all uses, but may require some tinkering to get everything to work. qemu also supports video passthrough—using the VM to drive a second video card installed in your machine—which some gamer types prefer.

Moose are technically deer (taxonomic family Cervidae, which also contains reindeer, red deer, roe deer, etc). And a big bull can weigh almost a (US conventional) ton. I don’t know whether that’s enough to trash a modern semi (based on an old memory of an apparently undamaged semi and a dead moose on the shoulder of an Ontario highway in the 1990s, I’d guess probably not, or at least not always), but I wouldn’t want to be the driver of the semi, either. Hitting them in an ordinary passenger vehicle—like any Tesla product—is something you really don’t want to do.

It’s one of those things that needs careful handling and is unlikely to get it. I can see it having some value in therapy, but only if there is, y’know, an actual therapist involved who can make an informed call as to whether their patient will be helped or harmed by talking to a digital fake of a loved one. Instead, we’re likely to see a ham-fisted “allow all” or “forbid all” call by regulators.

Non-geeky people will generally run things until they actually stop working completely.

Geeky people, on the other hand, may either adopt a new OS while it’s still half-baked, or jump through hoops to keep an old one running long past the point where a non-geeky person would have given up. Some of us do both, just for the lulz. Windows 11 on unsupported systems offers a new and exciting(?) way to scratch the same “can I make this work, just for the hell of it?” itch.

I didn’t mean disable it in software, I meant physically disable it by stuffing the phone in a Faraday cage (you can buy them for phones in the form of pouches with metal worked into them), which blocks electromagnetic radiation and therefore prevents the phone from contacting towers or satellites.

Or you can disable it from time to time at random when you’re doing something innocuous, and obscure the pattern that way. Which is probably easier for the average person than figuring out a second method of tampering with their phone.