Portal 3?

It’s also an argument for not having your own domain for emails, because you may one day loose that domain too, and someone could poach the domain to impersonate you.

The Google Nest Mini is a smart speaker, not the smart thermostat with a similar name.

Why did the Thinkpad 701 become a cult legend in computer history?

It was the expanding butterfly keyboard that gave you an 11.5" wide keyboard from a 10" wide laptop. Super cool for its day, but not really a problem that needs solving anymore. Nobody seems to be clamoring for the nipple mouse anymore either.

I see you’ve never played “Dragon’s Lair”, where every scene was cell animated and the player “chose” the path that the animation would take.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

Classic Microsoft Business Strategy

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

Whoa there. Are you seriously gatekeeping sci-fi? Don’t be a jerk.

Just the MCU characters with an obvious sci-fi backstory: Tony Stark, Hulk (an actual scientist), everyone in Guardians of the Galaxy. Even Thor is actually an alien using Sci-Fi tech. Bucky Barnes is a cybernetic super soldier. There’s the Nazi scientist from Hydra that transferred his consciousness into a computer. Fucking Vision and his love story with Wanda. Black Panther may mix in some mystical drug, but his suit and all the other toys are all science fiction.

I’m not arguing that ANY of these are great science fiction stories, but they are still undeniably science fiction. Sci-fi stories are often also something else: horror, action, humanist, dramatic, comedy, or all of the above.

Not every science fiction story needs to use the obvious sci-fi tropes either. Ursula K Le Guin wrote a bunch of very influencial science fiction stories that you could be forgiven for classifying as fantasy and have very little shiny tech in them.

Whataboutism isn’t a very convincing argument.