Dumb terminals don’t need much RAM. Unfortunately, the minimal RAM would come with maximum rentiership and exploitation.

You mean those workflows that could’ve been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?

Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.

Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.

Luckily, that would never happen…

Even not underestimating the scale, I’m not sure it would work because all the debris would need to be ejected from the thousands-of-kilometers-deep hole. And then you’d also have to have a solution to stop the walls from caving in before the next bomb had a chance to arrive. It’s almost as if you not only need thousands of extremely powerful (even for nukes) bombs, but also need to deliver them in a continuous stream to keep the blast pressure up and the hole open.

I feel like, at that point, the easier strategy to accomplish your goal would be redirecting a large asteroid to impact the planet, or something like that.

I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.

Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.

Contracts require four elements in order to be valid: offer, acceptance, consideration, and intention to create legal relations. EULAs fail at multiple of these:

1. As I already said, they offer no “consideration” because you already have the right to do the thing they purport to give you permission to do (i.e., make the incidental copy necessary to run the game).
2. They lack “acceptance” and “intent” because they are contracts of adhesion (sprung on you after the sale transaction is complete and you already own the copy of the software), and clicking through them is nothing but a mechanical act necessary to use your property (which, again, you already have the right to do, by definition of “property!”) with no legal intent behind it. And if you have no intent, how the fuck can merely doing a thing you’re being forced to do constitute “acceptance?” It is, simply, complete bullshit.

If it were presented at the time of sale and you had to agree before the money was exchanged maybe it’d be different, but that’s not how they do things. And even then, it would still fail at “consideration” unless they offer you something above and beyond the right to use your property, which I cannot emphasize enough, you already have.

(By the way, since it sometimes comes up as a “gotcha” rebuttal attempt: no, Free Software licenses are not EULAs, and that’s why they are valid while EULAs are not. You are not required to “agree” to the GPL etc. merely to use the software; it only kicks in when you want to do something, like modification or redistribution, that would otherwise be copyright infringement. It grants you those new privileges in exchange for accepting its terms, and that consideration is what makes it valid.)

It doesn’t matter what the EULA says when you never agreed to it in the first place because it failed to meet the basic requirements of a contract.

This is the “theory” by which publishers try to justify the validity of EULAs (they argue: “buying the thing isn’t enough; you need to agree to this to be able to actually use it”).

But, fun fact: copyright law has a specific carve-out for that incidental copy, 17 USC §117 (a) (1), which means EULAs offer no ‘consideration’ and are therefore bunk.

I wouldn’t argue just that it should be; I would argue that it is and we have a massive problem with the FTC failing to enforce existing law.

Conveying something to someone in perpetuity (i.e. “selling” it to them) when you don’t have the right to do so is fraud. Just because Amazon or whoever’s right to continue offering the thing ended doesn’t mean their customers’ property rights somehow end with it.

It’s exactly as absurd as a car dealer stealing back all the cars they previously sold just because they ended their agreement with the manufacturer.

There is absolutely no sane world in which stealing your customers’ property could ever be the “only legal resolution!”

That, by itself, is absolutely outrageous and absurd. The game developer’s failure to license the music appropriately is between them and the music copyright holder; nothing gives them the right to steal the content back from the third parties they conveyed it to in perpetuity.

When you buy something, you absolutely do own it.

Call this phenomenon where corporations try to pretend that it’s only “licensed” or that they somehow have the right to revoke it after the fact what it is: FRAUD and THEFT!

Micropurples

I think stuff continued to get better for a long time after 1991, but upvote for Tandy.

(I wish I still had my Tandy 1000 RLX/HD.)

Free Software is better than it’s ever been, but that doesn’t outweigh the enshittification going on in the rest of the world. Way too much of my effort using Free Software is spent actively defending myself from surveillance, propaganda, and other threats.

Excluding free/infinite, I’d have to say my best is Morrowind, probably, but it could also be Sim City (Classic or 2000), Starcraft, Half-Life/TFC, Team Fortress 2, Super Mario World, or Mario Kart.

Worst is even trickier, as I’m very careful about my game purchases (excluding Humble Bundles that are technically infinitely bad because hours played is zero, but don’t count because I paid to get some other game and/or donate to charity). It’d probably have to be some old early '90s game my parents bought for me, not anything I’ve bought for myself. I remember a couple of DOS games with horrible magenta and cyan CGA graphics (even though my computer could do VGA, BTW): one was some kind of helicopter game that I couldn’t figure out how to play, and the other was some kind of side-scrolling platformer or beat-em-up (maybe Ninja Gaiden, or a rip-off of it?) that I also couldn’t figure out how to play.

This is merely a convenient approximation for properly-inflated tires carrying a load, not a hard rule rooted borne out during empirical examination. After all, removing a wheel from an automobile and rolling it along clean concrete leaves tire tracks that are full width, yet the tire will not substantially deform at the contact point because 20-30 pounds is not much of a burden. If there’s no deformation, then the contact patch is a line with a tiny area, which would wrongly suggest a ludicrously high tire pressure.

Sure, the tire itself has a certain amount of strength, but (unless it’s a run-flat tire, I suppose) it’s negligible compared to the load carrying provided by the tire pressure.

While bike wheels do act as gyroscopes – as do all rotating masses without a contra-rotating mass – this is not substantial to bicycle stability. If it were, kick scooters or e-scooters which have substantially smaller wheels but with the same physics as bicycles would be unrideable.

No, you’re overstating your case. First of all, I didn’t say that gyroscope forces were the only factor. Second, they are a “substantial” contributing factor. Your own wiki link agrees with me:

Several factors, including geometry, mass distribution, and gyroscopic effect all contribute in varying degrees to this self-stability, but long-standing hypotheses and claims that any single effect, such as gyroscopic or trail (the distance between steering axis and ground contact of the front tire), is solely responsible for the stabilizing force have been discredited.

The important part is the “gyroscopic effect… contribute” part, not the “solely responsible… discredited” part.

Remember, OP’s question was “why are the wheels big,” not “why do bicycles stay upright,” so the effect that’s relevant to discuss is the one that’s different between wheels of different diameter. And that’s the gyroscopic effect, not any of the other things that contribute to bicycle stability but don’t depend on wheel size. There’s a reason people generally don’t prefer things like Bromptons unless they really need the packaging advantages, and it’s because bikes with small wheels are (relatively) weird and twitchy to ride.

The pressure the tire exerts on the road is always equal to the pressure it’s inflated to. When the vehicle weight increases while tire PSI stays the same, the contact patch (area squished flat against the pavement) increases in size.

Bike tires are narrower than car tires because bikes are much lighter (so the contact patch doesn’t need to be as wide), and also because they lean into turns (so the contact patch can’t be wide). Bike tires are often larger diameter than car tires because they have more gyroscopic effect and thus make the bike easier to balance. They also make it easier to ride over bumps, but on a road bike (as opposed to a mountain bike) that’s probably a relatively minor reason.

I think motorcycle and ebike tires are a little wider (but still round in cross-section, so not like a car tire) for durability reasons because all the forces they’re subjected to are larger.

They “understand” just fine. They’re trying to normalize the destruction of property rights on purpose because they absolutely loathe the idea of anyone not continuously paying them rentier fees for absolutely nothing in return.

They are evil and must be destroyed.

I remember that one.