“Elites” is about as useless a word as “woke” or “terrorist”; depending on who you ask, you will get wildly different (and often mutually exclusive) answers on what it means.

To most people, it also implies wireless backhaul.

I think it’s more accurate to say that things become fire.

Businesses generating their own power is not anything new. The big auto manufacturers used to do it back in the day, and if you scale down the concept, every windmill (the grain grinding kind) and waterwheel built and operated for profit is the same thing. I’m just happy that Google is seemingly having their own built, instead of getting taxpayers to build it for them.

Depends on the device and the usage. “Smart devices” can encompass a lot of things.

I thought dodging state imposed transaction restrictions was kinda the whole point of cryptocurrencies (other than the pyramid scheme part).

Most of the “what if” scenarios that I’ve come across focus on what if the Nazis hadn’t attacked the USSR when they did. If Germany was fighting on one front at a time, the question becomes does Germany take the UK, and if so, does the US directly enter the war at all?

Worse. Terminally online edgelord.

“Yay! We’ve created artificial general intelligence!”

“…Fuck, it’s an asshole.”

Nothing says “small government” and “freedom” quite like mass surveillance.

Wait, is that a random number, or the actual scale of the power draw we’re talking about?

'Cause that’s fuck-all when we’re talking about industrial level power draw.

Not important enough to me at this point to spend the time changing over. Windows 10 does what I need it to and still gets security updates. When one of those two factors changed, then it will be worth my time to change over.

Microsoft has made the choice very easy for me. I still have an i7-7700k that works just fine. But that’s “too old”, so when Windows 10 hits end of life, I’ll be switching over to Linux.

the ads are minimally intrusive — that is, highly relevant and engaging — they should not detract from the overall user experience

In what universe do ads, no matter how “relevant and engaging”, ever not detract from the overall experience?

In this case, none of that applies. I do industrial programming. 99% of the ethernet networks I have to connect to don’t have a router, and nothing is running DHCP. They locked out my ability to manually change my IP address.

I encountered “lawful evil” once. My answer of “I know what the problem is. I know how to fix it. But because you have no clue about what this company actually does to make money, you took away my ability to do it. So now I’m here, wasting both our time” didn’t seem to go over very well.

Yes and no. The reason companies are hiring them is for the image of impartiality they bring. If your firm gets a reputation for just always siding with the company, regardless of what actually happened, that image gets destroyed.

Plus, I’m willing to bet that there’s not a whole lot of recurring business from individual companies for this type of service. That would kind of defeat the purpose of being the “neutral third party”.

The fuck is BIFL?

Not sure if Fusion360 supports Linux. Only other choice I can think of is FreeCAD.

Manufacturers of what? Selling and replacing car parts is a much different proposition than trying to replace semiconductors inside an earbud.