When it was new it had minor charm-- the idea it was cheap and there were trillions of coins in circulation made it so penny-ante that people could have fun with it, and experiment with the tech on a tiny budget.

I played a little with it back in 2014 or so. You could buy some by interacting with a Reddit bot, and I mined a few coins on a GTX 660 (midrange gaming card for the day.

I recall sending 5000 coins to a local dogs-rescue that tried to join on the novelty, and paying for some used RAM in part with it.

By then BTC was basically unplayable without a rack of ASICs and it was already moving past the “currency” phase straight to “speculative asset”.

Y’know what? I don’t care. Maybe it’s happening, even in the dramatic worst-case way it’s portrayed here, but is that the biggest/only story in China? It feels sort of credibility-stretching that a country of 1.4 billion people and a top-two global economy is entirely cantilevered around the idea of oppressing a tiny minority in the rural corner of the country. I’m fairly certain there are at least nine people in China who can go an entire workday without contemplating how to wipe the Uighyurs off the map. Maybe as many as twelve!

The US is no longer in any sort of moral leadership position to point fingers on human rights, if not for the last few decades, then certainly in its El Salvador phase. The only reason Western media remotely give a damn here is because they’re desperate to slap an asterisk next to the growth and real economic advancement of a country that promises to outpace them imminently.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

Then you have the NexGen Nx586, which is arguably 386-like in having no FPU, but ended up being the ancestor of most modern x86 CPUs by decomposing complex operations into RISC-esque micro-ops.

Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.

I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that’s college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.

Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.

It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.

The equivalent of “Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes”

In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.

In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.

Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.

Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.

Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.

Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.

The Atari XL seriea computers cut a nice space between retro and futuristic.

They’re much sleeker looking than their 400/800 predecessors, as well as the Apple II and the breadbin VIC 20/64/C16. Only the 64C and Plus/4 really look similarly minaturized and not-in-need-of-a-big-wristrest-for-comfortable-typing.

The use of metal and smoked plastic trim gives it a premium appearance. The 1200XL even hides the cartridge slot on the side to avoid anyone nistaking it for a mere console…

Not to mention I bent all the pins on my Cyrix MII ttying to get it in that stupid socket.

The TV is blocking the amplifier from venting. Does no good to either.

Come on, Betelgeuse…

I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.

ATSC 3.0 is usable. I have a HDHomerun sitting on my LAN with a couple 3.0 tuners.

The big problem is:

• the 3.0 broadcasts are still mostly tests, so you get mostly a respin of a 1.0 channel

• the audio is AC-4 and a lot of software doesn’t support it. There was stuff for Windows but when I looked, the usual suspects (VLC, mpv) on Linux didn’t support it

Why not an aerial for Jeopardy? It’s usually on local broadcast, so you could plumb together a DVR setup if you want it within a unified experience.

Where? That sounds like a good price as internal SATA BD-RE drives tend to be $60+