For it’s time, possibly… but I’ve played through it. There are others from slightly later that have so many possible endings and characters that I never felt like I fully completed them.

I knew about the plastic… I’m a bit worried about what Judith is doing in there.

My kids have phones with no SIM card; they can call 911 and they can use WiFi when in range; I have them set up with a VPN to home, so that’s the only connection any hotspot sees.

Apple said “no” and they reversed course.

I buy a maxed out laptop every 8 years. My 2008 laptop just lost its battery this year, but still works when plugged in.

Plus or minus?

Why not?

Because what happens when your referent changes? Which direction is Mars from Earth? We obviously need a single navigational system that works anywhere in the universe.

Why? If they were already using Signal, they weren’t about to stop using it when it dropped SMS. If they weren’t using it… any encryption was window dressing anyway.

What they found though was that people were just using it for SMS, not realizing that this meant it was insecure. People kept choosing convenience over security. Removing that support was well messaged almost a year before it was done; that’s the slowest rug pull I’ve ever seen.

Locking it to phone numbers? THAT was an untrustworthy move. But removing SMS meant that people could no longer pretend to be secure when they really weren’t.

RCS requires server-side processing, so it requires the org providing it to be large enough to be able to peer with the other orgs providing it and the telcos routing it.

And the encryption isn’t part of the core RCS soec that’s compatible between providers.

Why would Signal removing support for an insecure messaging platform make you trust them a lot less? They were pretty clear about why it was done and gave plenty of warning.

It’s currently PA; the abbreviation will be one of the first changes.

90 cents per charge? And no cable that you discover after you’ve pulled up to the charger is broken?

Seems like this will pay for itself in short order at fast charging stations.

Here’s a question: how many people making more than $200,000/year or who are independently wealthy actually serve on a jury?

I ask this because every jury pool I’ve been in was made up of working class people. Those too poor don’t vote and so aren’t on their lists, and those too rich always seem to have acceptable reasons to be excused, if they’re ever pooled in the first place.

And, of course, there’s inflation. The value of something is a perceived thing, but the actual dollar value attached to that perceived value always tends to increase, except when an economy collapses. Inflation is caused by a government pretending things have more value than they actually do and pocketing the difference.

Superfluous “a”

Abrahamic people generally did name tracking based on heritage; Hebrew used “bar” and Arabic uses “ibn” or “bin”. So the apostle Peter was called Peter by his friends, but was Shimon bar Jonah legally… unless there was another Shimon whose father’s name was Jonah, at which point they’d tag on another “bar” up the patriarchal lineage until their names differed.

So if you wanted to know which Jesus/Jeshu/Joshua was Jesus the Christ, you go to the gospel of Matthew, where the first 16 verses are actually Jesus’ complete “last name”.

And Abrahamic cultures aren’t the only ones who do this. Celtic cultures do it too; MacDonald means “son of Donald” and Scottish clans can “mac” their way back quite a ways.

And in Ireland, you have Mc and O — Mc means “son of” and “O” essentially means you are a landholder on that person’s land, with O’ being short for “of”.

Then you’ve got Norse names which are a bit looser; we have Eric the Red (he had red hair), but then we have Lief, Eric’s son who was identified by the fame of his father.

Then you’ve have English last names that describe the person’s occupation, like baker, chandler (makes candles), smith, etc. This was taken from German, which used a similar descriptor.

In the bible, only key people have their “last name” listed; in most situations it didn’t matter, and you’ll see people referred to by either their given name or their nickname interchangeably.

And Greek and Roman people tended to be named after the town they were born in — and since Paul was a Roman citizen, his official name was “Saul of Tarsus”. Of course, there were likely many Sauls in Tarsus, so he would have also gone by his occupation (tentmaker) and only reverted to “son of” to differentiate him from other Sauls of Tarsus who were tentmakers.

Where does this leave women?

In all those cultures, they were property of their father or husband, so didn’t have their own last name — for the exceptions (widows etc), they’d use the existing naming strategy the men used.

That’s the question, isn’t it?

Can you actually buy a (new) car in 2025?

One way to tell: disable the cellular modem in your car and see if it still operates.

This is the answer.

The more insidious bit?

Most manufacturers don’t actually know what’s in the masking fragrance, because they buy it from a third party who has no legal requirement to list the ingredients.

So even “unscented” products have this stuff in them that’s a mixture of perfume and preservative, the contents of which are a trade secret. There’s very few soap, deodorant and aftershave suppliers who actually know all the chemical contents of their products, and even fewer who are willing to share that information with the customer.