bsimpson

For a long while, my home laptop was a Chromebook Pixel. It had touch and a retina-quality screen when both those things were novel.

I found the touch useful for momentary interactions, like buttons. It's quicker and easier to reach up and hit NEXT than it is to find the cursor, move it to the button, and click.

Definitely don't use it nearly as much as on a phone, but it is useful for surfing.

I know one of the people involved. It wasn't MIT's call.

FWIW, the Aaron Swartz thing happened because an egomaniacal politician thought it would bolster her career. It was a fluke (her office was only involved by coincidence) with disastrous consequences.

We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.

I wonder how they picked the setlist.

Feels retro, but still a ~decade newer than when this was state of the art. Some reasonably obscure artists. Thrice and Thursday released a split EP recorded in the Apple stores: I see Thursday but not Thrice here.

Thrice still makes music. Thursday has been quiet for more than a decade.

People take the iOS version of Fortnite and repackage it to run on Mac.

US v. Paramount separated movie studios from movie theaters.

Sumner Redstone came from a movie theater family and formed modern Paramount by buying Viacom (which was spun out of CBS due to antitrust), Paramount, and then later CBS itself. He was able to buy Paramount as a cinema owner because the government abandoned the rule that you couldn't own both the studio and the theater in the 80s.

The corporate history of Hollywood is long and complicated. Skydance is obviously a big topic this month, but Paramount was owned by the Redstone family's National Amusements theater for as long as many of the adults on this site have been alive.

Even if I cosign the spirit of the letter, this has big 90s viral email energy to the benefit of… another company/service/etc that I have no connection to.

Sounds like his vision is to be a better version of Reddit. Could be good if done well. Not sure how doing his viral marketing for him plays into that. If I'm gonna send a friend a thing, I want it to be a thing I endorse.

I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.

"Safety third" is a mantra out there.

It's a reaction from people who feel overly cottled by the world of building permits and safety regulations - who want to be able to just make stuff and let people be responsible for their own choices.

Back to the Future creator Bob Gale also created Interstate 60. I remember it being one of the best movies you wouldn't have otherwise heard of; no idea if it holds up 20y later. One of the themes was that of the frontier - an escape valve for people who don't feel comfortable conforming to regular society. There's a big element of that at Burning Man.

Festival tells you how far off you are in milliseconds, and gives you extra points for perfect timing.

Can you still access Sony's servers (e.g. to buy games, collect achievements, etc) on crackable versions of the system software?

I'd expect you'd have to play offline, which might be a nonstarter when the disc drive costs extra, and live service games are popular.

Stadia played Cyberpunk at max settings when none of the home systems could do it. I played it on a Retina iPad, and thought it looked fantastic.

I've heard people play Fortnite Festival (basically Rock Band, and very latency sensitive) over Microsoft/Amazon cloud streaming.

"low bitrate and high input latency" is what you'd expect rendering offsite, but in practice, it seems to work surprisingly well.

They all do this. Sony charges for PlayStation online too.

It's not good, but it's not just Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo is the most reasonably priced.