Phone numbers are the equivalent of IP addresses. It’s just that the accompanying DNS solutions are pretty badly broken and the firewall options are all iffy.

what’s the point of taking art classes?

The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they’re motivated enough, by studying other people’s art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it’s more difficult and time-consuming without an instructor’s feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.

So it’s optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.

I’m pretty sure that you can find one researcher, somewhere, who will agree with anything you say, including that the weather is being affected by a war between Martians and the people living inside the hollow earth. Especially if you’re offering a large bribe to said researcher to make a statement about something outside their field while they’re somewhat drunk, and then mutilating their remark out of context via the process fondly known as journalism.

In other words, “one researcher” predicting something is pretty much worthless.

I think they’ve funded a couple of series, although not nearly as many as Netflix has.

If you’re talking about the issue I’m thinking of, it wasn’t really specific to ASUS, but could be triggered by overvolting an X3D CPU on any board. Most of the big manufacturers (ASUS included) have revised their mobo firmware to make that impossible now.

Nice to see I’m not the only person whose brain immediately tried to come up with titles and genres where that subtitle could be legit.

People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.

Question is, how long is the expected lifetime of a consumer-grade FFM printer in one of these settings anyway? My bet is that it’s only a couple of years—certainly no more than five. Short enough that many businesses would be able to afford to wait for the expected end-of-life before replacing their old printers, even if there’s new tech out that might make some difference to their bottom line. At worst, the older printers will still be perfectly good and competitive at producing single-material prints, since I don’t think an MMU you don’t use incurs much of a penalty.

I would not want to be involved in working the bugs out of that. Even after they get it to the point where it almost never produces two-headed mice in testing.

So the difference between the current ownership, who may be handing data over to the Chinese government and are using an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes, and the new ownership, who I’m sure will happily sell data to anyone who pays up including thinly disguised fronts for the Chinese government, and will also use an algorithm that promotes undesirable content for “engagement” and propaganda purposes is . . . what, really, at the end of the day?

Well, there’s plenty of standards-noncompliance out there, but breaking the firmware of a peripheral you manufacture so that it can’t be properly supported by the OS driver you wrote and needs a workaround requires a special type of corporate boneheadedness.

Well, at least this way they know for certain that something is listening to what they say. Most deities are awful when it comes to offering feedback.

The dot-com bubble? A whole bunch of investment money was poured into businesses operating over the Internet from around the time dial-up became widely available. A few years later, investors realized that “on the Internet” wasn’t necessarily the key to making a crapton of money and the stock market crashed. A bunch of companies (many of which never made it to profitability) went under, and a fair number of people lost their jobs. Pets.com was one of the more notable victims.

This doesn’t, however, mean that no business is done over the Internet today.

Speaking as someone who never has carried a smartphone, there are a bunch of tradeoffs. I do my banking in person, for instance, and that can be mildly inconvenient. I don’t take a lot of photographs (when I do, I use an old-style single-purpose camera). “Portable media” is a CD player, and I carry a paperback book if I think I might have to wait somewhere for more than ten minutes or so. And so on. Just continuing to live the same way as I did a quarter-century ago.

I expect, however, that it’s a lot easier not to miss what you never had in the first place.

Was it plain PLA? Some of the fancier types cause increased wear. I’ve seen photos of glow-in-the-dark filament having worn through someone’s heat block (not just the nozzle). Wood- or metal-filled PLA can also be somewhat abrasive.

Vacuum-sealed PLA can still be soaked with moisture—it depends entirely on how it was handled at the factory. To be absolutely certain, you have to dry it yourself.

The nozzle dragging, though . . . if the print isn’t visibly warped, that sounds more like faulty hardware or incorrect software settings—the printer no longer accurately knows where the nozzle is in space. Maybe your printer had a marginal part installed at the factory, and it’s now failed. If so, that’s no fault of yours and you should contact the manufacturer.

Um, the transmission path for email isn’t sender client -> destination server -> destination client. Mail doesn’t go over HTTP, it has its own protocols, and takes the route sender client -> sender server -> some number of intermediate servers -> destination server -> destination client. You don’t know for certain what intermediate servers will be involved, who they belong to (often they go up through parent companies or backbone providers, then come back down again), or how they’re secured (if they’re secured). All the servers along the chain, some of which may be in a different country, have to be secure in order for the transmission method to be compliant, and that ain’t usually gonna happen.

Hmm. Get the major parts made by one of those places that does on-demand laser sintering 3D prints in metal, then wire them together yourself? I doubt the parts in isolation look anything like the end product, so the laser sintering firm would most likely have no idea what you wanted them for. No idea how much it would cost, though, and you’d have to do some 3D modeling.

I suspect most people had rather not engage with anything when shopping for products they’re embarrassed to be seen buying. If they’re in a position where they have no choice but to have interactive contact (can’t imagine why, unless dealing with some unusual allergies and needing to confirm what’s in the product), they probably think the chatbot is less likely to judge them, which is . . . not entirely untrue. It just leaves out the issue of a human possibly reading the chat transcript afterwards.

There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.

No effort could have evacuated the entire population of Gaza without free movement across land borders. It was never a practical option.

Even if it had been, parents making a dumbass decision doesn’t justify killing their kids.