Companies even do this if you have a 5g modem.

There is a 2 hour window at the end of the month in which I am miserable.

I’m at the tip of the US’s Wang and have zero access to wired internet, so I am stuck. 😞

I can just about hear someone saying, “Do you know who I am?” or “Do you know who my father is?”

This situation just screams of the diabeetus-loving tomato sauce company bribing the local police.

We may not have seen his encounter with the “future Federation” reminding him of the “temporal prime directive”

That said, can you remember your work mates from half of a life ago?

Human memory is good, but a life of adventure and an over abundance of scotch can give one “Swiss cheese memory” ala quantum leap

Coincidentally, I just got a knock-off Soda Stream from Phillips. It’s over $150 cheaper and works 2x-3x times better. I wanted to build something similar for a homemade soda bar concept, and discovered how truly cheap it can be to make soda and carbonated water at home. I was shocked at what a simple concept it is, and how much of a profit these sodas water companies make. Phillips even charging $50 for their system is a total rip-off.

Truthfully, I think the increase in quality in the Phillips machine is due to fewer parts is an “exception that proves the rule” as these in-bottle carbonators seem to work better with fewer parts. It’s just a pressure hose connected to a co2 tank. Literally, all of $6 if you were to build one yourself from parts on Amazon (or $3 if you got he Alibaba route)

I truly believe that the fewer parts the better in any DIY or commercial product due to the less chance of a failure in a part if there are fewer parts. This works fantastically for the “lower quality” producing companies, like Phillips.

My inventive and engineering entrepreneur friends and I call this “fewer parts the better” concept, a “Murphy’s law compensator” as the fewer parts there are, the fewer parts that can statistically “go wrong”

Gotta love the marriage between tramatic brain injuries and an under funded education system.

I believe that a lot of issues lile this would be solved with legalized sex work and the destigmaization of mental health treatments.

I’d rather remain comfortable not buying games from Ubisoft and EA.

I refuse to waste a single dollar on every game from both companies, since we were all bent over and continue to get bent over because they just don’t care about anything but making more money.

A good example from Ubisoft is the handling of the Driver series. They kept on releasing the games in the series in a near unplayable state before when most people had dial up.

A good example with EA was the failed DRM with Spore. They only let you install the game 3 times, which glitched out to the point where people had to turn to piracy (warez and crackz) to play a game they paid for.

We vote with every dollar spent, which gives me hope when people rally around good companies that do the right thing.

No way in hell I’d trust just one backup method for my data.

A 6 TB drive is less than $100 on Amazon and two cloud backups is like $30 extra a year.

This is exactly why I look at companies and corporations with a side-eye of doubt when they claim to have some sort of “do not be evil” motto baked into thier company culture.

It doesn’t matter if a gigantic company has a hundred philanthropy focused CEOs, all ot takes is one greedy or evil one to destroy a company’s dogma

After the investors, managers, and profiteers taste easy money, they will continue to demand to be fed that blood flavored stew.

Once that happens, they either need to be lobotomized or put down for the good of all lest those who are not in the know continue to put money into the frothing imitation it has become.

That is like saying that the screwdriver is the most over-rated tool in the tool box.

Each tool has a place and a usage. AI is just another tool in toolbox that is used to get things done.

I’m using my steam deck right now as a gaming PC while moving across America.

It works really well. I got a dock from Amazon that gives me the ports to plug in my gaming mouse and keyboard. I can do HDMI out to the hotel TV or, better yet, lead out one USB-c cord to a fantastic portable monitor.

I only ran into two minor issues. The first is getting enough juice to the steam deck and heat. Both can be easily solved with a good fast charging station and better air flow (I use this tiny hyper fan and have had zero issues in 90 degree Florida winter weather).

Of note, I dual boot with Windows 11. It’s a bloated mess of an operating system, but I want to use certain mods and programs that windows only. Plus, I’m not tied down to only steam games. The addition of being able to run nearly everything that’s Windows compatible takes the deck up a level, I feel.

The best way to get the most out of the Windows environment is to run a debloater admin tool, which removes unnecessary programs on Windows 10+ systems. The difference between the performance is shocking, making it pretty much required for usage. It’s not too hard to use, too.

The best part of it all is that you still have a stream deck at the end of the day. You don’t have to do any hardware mods. You can pick the deck up and walk out of the house and still have the gaming PC with you.

I’d be very interested in your theory.

I thought it had something to do with the distance to the server or ping timeout, but that is more of a guess.

I’ve not experienced that problem again despite working as a network engineer for 20 years

Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.

One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.

It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.

Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.

I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.

It’s too bad it’s not the US mint. It might help inflation.

Where’s Jeeves when we need him? I’d ask him but…

Unless it’s something that you are a super uber fan, avoid buying a game before it comes out.

It saves a lot of heartaches and headaches.

Plus, in today’s world… why pre order? It’s not like a game will run out of copies…

I did telecom work about 5 years ago

It was shocking the amount of area that depends on a low-quality copper wire infrastructure.

I don’t know if that changed in 5 years, but companies are going to have a hard time getting that replaced nationwide

It’s not fair for the rest of the Triple A games this year.

BG3 is a hard act to follow considering it was molded from the wishes of players for several years before release.

Thank you very much. This is something that I really needed to hear.

I feel like I’m walking through a fog, having to do the same things I did dealing with death stuff that I had to do for my grandmother not but 3 months ago.

I will for sure do that sort of meditation and I will see if it works. I’m sure it will as it seems like a good way to hack a memory…

Thank you so much for taking the time that you did to write that out for me.

Thank you very much for the information

The thing that got me so confused over it was that it was stuffed under the bed. When my grandmother passed in Feb, they took all their trash with them.

I’m not going to put significant moral blame on the paramedics, but I wish they would have left the trash out for me at least to see.

Having to reach under the bed to see what was under there and getting my had covered in blood and other fluids seriously about made me vomit in shock alone.

I appreciate that they tried to save my father’s life which is why I’m only mildly upset. I’m not wanting to “karen” them as I’m sure it was a mistake, and a weird one at that.