I think that is indeed the best you can hope for with new labour in control over the tories. Slightly less backhanders and tax breaks for the already stupidly rich.

I don’t expect anything far left of centre. I say this as someone that is somewhat centre left (UK centre left to be clear, USAans don’t judge me on your political compass), I don’t really think I resonate too much with the current labour party.

I think the thing that terrifies me, is that the tory party we had, that pushed through a no-deal brexit (when there were many other less disruptive ways to leave the union available), that has wet dreams about planes flying immigrants to Rwanda weren’t right wing enough for our population.

What is the tory party’s solution to this going to be? I doubt it will be returning to the centre right position they occupied in the Cameron era. They either accept their death, or move further right. I suspect we’ll see the latter. When we find out their new leader, I suspect it will cement their direction for us all to see.

Too late, I voted against him. If only I saw this before I left!

I think people’s experience with PLE will always be subjective. In the old flat we were in, where I needed it. It would drop connection all the time, it was unusable.

But I’ve had them run totally fine in other places. Noisy power supplies that aren’t even in your place can cause problems. Any kind of impulse noise (bad contacts on an old style thermostat for example) and all kinds of other things can and will interfere with it.

Wifi is always a compromise too. But, I guess if wiring direct is not an option, the OP needs to choose their compromise.

Most smaller instances will let you make a new community.

Getting people to subscribe, that’s your problem.

I think we should qualify the question. I think I’d like to hear a reason for society as a whole to exist that is reasoned and has a firm basis in logic and has no emotive or circular reference.

Because I cannot see the point of it (and I’ve been accused of being a pessimist, depressed and worse for expressing this opinion). So, I would really like to hear an actual reason for us all to be here.

I’d go further than that and say that deciding to leave the house or not, are both gambles.

But in the context of spending money with the only net result being you lose money, make money or retain the same money with no other goods or services provided in return. Then gambling is the primary attribute of that spend.

Bookmakers and investments meet that criteria, your other purchases are not.

I’d say that it is always gambling because there is risk involved.

But I would say that both traditional gambling and investments have the same threshold for problematic behaviour, and that is when you spend more money than you can afford to lose. That is regardless whether you win or not.

Both, each have their place. I have a desktop in my office. Decent recent spec and kept fairly up to date.

Laptop I have a reasonable “gaming” spec in the lounge we both use it.

The laptop will always be a compromise. You cannot shift the dissipated heat from a full power gpu at all in that form factor, and most cpus are going to also be lower power editions because they need to work on batteries as well as connected to power. But they’re still for sure usable.

Desktop will always outperform. Even the stock cpu and gpu options will perform at a higher tdp, and you can usually improve cooling in a big case to either improve stock boost frequencies, or over clock.

Physics is the limiting factor for laptops, both in terms of power delivery, and heat dissipation.

I ensure my instance stays up, by running my own :)

Yep. I was around in the mid 90’s. Which was around when it became generally affordable to get internet at home.

I’d say most stuff was running from university computers though. Normal people couldn’t afford to have a permanent connection (even 64k) at home and in the few places co-location existed it was priced out of reach of normal people (and so were the servers you could install).

But it was still not even slightly commercialised.

Well, it’s generated in the same way as modern tones are in a telephone exchange, not a played sample. You can usually configure the tone frequencies (never tried on cisco ip phone, but asterisk allows it for its own generated tones and I had a cisco ATA that let you configure them).

So, unless we’re limiting ourselves to the original mechanically generated dial-tones. I’ll consider them for all intents and purposes to be one and the same.

E.g. for the UK on cisco/sipura ATAs you would use the configuration found here https://teamhelp.sipgate.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/208200875-UK-Regional-Settings-Cisco-Linksys-Sipura-Adaptors and as an example (dial tone)

Dial Tone: 350@-19,440@-22;10(*/0/1+2)

The comfort noise is also generally only added when there’s no other noise on the call. This is to prevent you thinking you were disconnected when no-one is talking.

I think a federation of smaller hobby run sites is going to be the only way to avoid the commercialised Internet, and all the negatives it involves.

Last time I heard a dial tone was just a second ago when I pushed the speakerphone button on my Cisco ip phone.

GPS Navigation didn’t become widely available at a decent size until the mid 2000s I would say. I remember for sure I had GPS navigation on a laptop which was just as ridiculous as it sounds in around 2002-2003.

The GPS was a PCMCIA card with an aerial you put near the windscreen. The software would just stop showing a map when you went faster than 50mph or so, and only provide basic instructions and your speed. Buying a laptop charger that plugged into the cigarette lighter socket wasn’t as cheap as it is now either.

Needless to say, it was a novelty thing. The main problem with paper map navigation when driving is, you really need to compress the instructions down to something you can remember if driving on your own. Since you need to stop if you lose track of your route. I don’t miss that to be honest.

I’m in the ntppool.org pool for the UK. It randomly assigns servers which could be any stratum really (but there is quality control on the time provided). I also have stratum 2 servers in .fi, and .fr (which are dedicated servers I also use for other things, rather than a raspberry pi).

No. A GPS (with PPS) hat. That counts as a stratum 0 time source, making the NTP server stratum 1.

Well I run an ntp stratum 1 server handling 2800 requests a second on average (3.6mbit/s total average traffic), and a flight radar24 reporting station, plus some other rarely used services.

The fan only comes on during boot, I’ve never heard it used in normal operation. Load averages 0.3-0.5. Most of that is Fr24. Chrony takes <5% of a single core usually.

It’s pretty capable.

If no-one pirated any Sony game do you think they would.

A) Lower the price of the game to maintain their existing profit margin.
B) Set a lower price that increases their margin.
C) Keep the higher price and just make a fuck ton more money.

Phone: it looked like https://www.sparkshire.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/CREAM8746TELEPHONE_1512x.png?v=1627985748

Computer: ZX spectrum

I don’t know. I’m suspecting the question was asked in some very weird way. I refuse to believe this is true. Maybe I’m out of touch, not being from America. But this just seems so unlikely to me.

Even people that like the guy, must have heard his opinion on women many times before now.