the consumer always loses when industries consolidate into relatively few players.

or onlyoffice

it’s a ‘refurb’, listings for those by third-party sellers are usually lacking in details, just saying ‘ssd’–not what type or brand. technically, op got what he ordered.

it really depends on where and from whom you get it. i’ve seen laptops sold as ‘brand new’ that have been cracked-open by sellers and ‘upgraded’ to sata ssd from nvme (worked on one a few months ago a guy just bought as new off amazon, with no indication in the listing that it isn’t as-built by hp originally); and i’ve seen more than a few ‘refurbished’ units (desktops and laptops) with cheap sata ssd used where nvme was available.

“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.

the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.

Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away

the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’

if you have to work all three shifts every three weeks, you can’t realistically hold-down a second job or attend regular classes, you’re exclusively at the disposal of your masters.

you should be able to ‘rufus’ an installer for that. the instruction in the ‘new’ minimum requirement dates back to 1st gen.

i just directed someone to a 12th gen laptop (i5-1235u) with 16gb ram and 512gb nvme at dell for $430 in a ready-to-ship configuration, search their site for nn3520gsbbs to find it.

you’d be surprised at how many people look for lowest price and fail to read even part of the rest of the item’s page below the item title at the top.

kindle. check.

lowest price. check.

buy now.

click-click-done.

(oops. they just got a ‘trial’ to prime, too. that takes actual reading of pages to find and click-through the cancel process before the payments start)

amazon still sells the ad-supported versions of kindles. and not just the fire tablets, but the readers, too.

i use private windows mainly so i don’t clutter up browser histories with useless stuff i won’t go back to (if i do run across something to save, it gets bookmarked or printed to pdf).

i had just looked that up on verizon here. you can configure it to be whatever you want (with some limits), and it’s what gets sent with your phone number for caller id to compatible mobile devices/plans and to landlines with name & number caller id capability.

when i lived down in texas (and a couple other places), the stores had can-sized paper bags for the big cans and for regular 12oz ones. and i’d see guys having clerks at the store ‘bag’ their beer (even each can of an intact six-pack)…

then see them a few lights down the road chugging one at a red.

of course i learn of this today, a day after i just spent $10 each to ‘recycle’ a bunch of dead monitors.

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

half of that time is sitting in san antonio traffic.

french guiana is part of france, and the eu.

if they put all their tv/cable channels online and had a comparable ease-of-use of turning on a tv and flipping channels (without jacking d+ rates up–except espn; sports channels should be separate), they’d see a huge influx of subs and higher long-term retention of them.

but, they won’t do that. they have the cable and satellite companies by the balls, and they squeeze regularly. gotta extort higher overall profits from that dwindling customer base–and they do.

so, only those who made more than $10m get to keep some of it? sounds about right.