There is a lesson here. Have these conversations today with your loved ones about final arrangements. I promise you that many of them would rather be buried in a casket from Costco and have the money spent on literally anything else.

This is especially true if they’re going to be cremated.

They used to. Or rather, the industry used to. Most of those players have since folded, largely because of them becoming known for crap quality.

Roberto?

Mail in voting is an equalizer. Nearly everyone lives very close to a place that accepts outgoing mail, with most at their own homes. Once you require people to physically go somewhere special to vote, then you can put the squeeze on everyone there, in an extremely unequal way. You remember the stories of people waiting 8 hours to vote in Atlanta? Coming soon to everywhere statistically identified as “blue”.

Good news on the EV charging part, at least in North America. Most (if not all) manufacturers have agreed to switch to NACS, and most have adapters to work with either connector. There will be a long tail as the old connectors fade away, but the future is looking standardized.

I seem to recall this not being very effective, but I can’t find any studies right now either way. Lots of marketing, and a little bit of anecdotes, but no studies.

The idea being that they get used to it and just ignore it, because they want to bite their nails. At best it serves as a reminder when they do.

Level 1 charging can work for a lot of people, but it ends up needing a lot more mental energy. You have to more carefully calculate capacity/range, daily needs, charging speeds, variances, and unexpected needs. The end result being that it’s not a great experience.

Level 2, even at the slowest speeds, are enough that you can fully recharge most vehicles overnight. And you have enough capacity to last through the day unless you are a super commuter or drive professionally.

Used EVs are remarkably cheap. The problem is that it still effectively requires you to be able to charge at home, which is not common on cheaper housing.

Cartman was the first person I ever heard use it, by at least a decade. These days I hear a relatively small number of people use it regularly.

Wanda Sykes did a PSA about this. It was put on YouTube 17 years ago. I don’t know when it first aired.

https://youtu.be/sWS0GVOQPs0

Now I feel old…

It was used in an old Gatorade ad. Is this what you’re thinking of?

https://youtu.be/liKnJ-ejztw

I presume you are referring to the SuperFish scandal in 2015.

First, you have to define “comparable”. These are Enterprise-grade laptops. Their class includes the Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook. It doesn’t include anything you will ever find at Best Buy. It might be tempting to do so, since your visible specs like CPU and RAM are the same. But they really aren’t the same.

Within their class, Lenovo has (for over a decade) been noticeably more expensive than their counterparts. Roughly $100-150 more per unit for the T4x0/T14 vs a Latitude 74x0 (now Dell Pro) or an Elitebook 840.

Current prices are: HP Elitebook 8 G1i 14 - Core Ultra 5 236v, 16GB/512GB, $1249

Dell Pro 14 - Core Ultra 5 236v, 16GB/512GB, $1659

Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 6 - Core Ultra 235u, 16GB/512GB, $1809.

All have integrated graphics.

I don’t think the detailed specs/pricing for Gen7 (what the article is about) has been announced yet. I would expect it to be in line with previous generations, since their 9/10 repairability score was.

Now is probably a good time to remember what a VPN can and cannot do. It can block your ISP from knowing which sites you’re going to. It can bypass ISP-level blocks, including geo-blocks.

It cannot stop the endpoints (WhatsApp, both the client and server) from harvesting whatever data they want from there.

Meta is clearly concerned about bans on WhatsApp. This is nothing more than their own self-interests.

This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.

However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.

I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.

It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.

The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.

There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.

If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.

You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.

I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.

If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.

I couldn’t tell from the article. Does the Brazilian justice system work differently than I expect? It just says he was initially convicted, but then exonerated. Does that mean the charges were thrown out for lack of evidence, procedural missteps, or something of that nature? Or was it dismissed because the judges disagreed with the law? Or am I completely misreading/misunderstanding the whole thing?

That model was a flop, but people love the feature. Just not enough to buy the rest of the car that goes with it.

It’s also not the only model with that feature.