“Major fracture detected, automatic medical systems engaged” - gets injected with magic bone glue

Well technically yes, CSD was a thing and allowed mobile phones to connect to the internet. However it wasn’t like these days, where you could actually use the internet on the phone. It was a technology that allowed mobile phones to work as a modem. So you’d connect the phone to the serial port of your 90s laptop and could “dial in”. The data rate was terrible as well as the latency, but it could allow salespeople on the road to digitally submit orders to the head office for example. This was technically internet, but usually people dialed in to a specific number which only connected to the one server/service. It was also super expensive to do so, so adoption was low.

Internet on mobile phones first started with WAP and I-mode, which are close to internet and technically use the internet, but still isn’t the same as what we have these days.

The first mobile pocket devices which could actually browse the internet in a modern way were probably pocket pc’s. Especially the Windows Mobile ones that came with a (for the time) very capable browser. They exploded in popularity and soon became available for phones as well. Yes there was a time Microsoft dominated the mobile phone market and caused the juggernaut Nokia to fall. They then completely dropped the ball when they didn’t realize they were actually marketing to consumers instead of business and failed to innovate in ways that were more user friendly. Instead focusing on productivity and technical capabilities. Blackberry and Apple swooped in and the rest is history.

That’s mostly because digital cameras were known at the time to be extremely shit. I remember having a webcam in the 90s. It kinda sorta worked, but even in high res picture mode it was 640x480 and the images looked like shit. So it would be more a case of convincing people a digital camera can be as good as an old school one. The concept itself would be familiar. In fact, calling it a webcam instead of a digital camera would be a lot easier for a 90s person to understand.

Well WAP and I-mode were both introduced in 1999 and didn’t go mainstream till 2000. So I don’t think any phone had internet access in the 90s. Even in 2000 most people had a Nokia 3210 or similar, a lot of people still had screens that could only display 2 lines of text at most.

I have issues with calling it the war on science. It’s way too close to the war on xmas, which only exists in the minds of delusional right wingers.

Not even true, where I live the moon was visible for half of the day and set just after sunset. So no moon tonight.

How does this work, if one person is sharing their screen, does the client get to see? Because it seems more like remote gaming kind of thing? Where the client controls the game/app running on the server?

They seem very close to the desk? Are they still working, seems like it would choke them?

Wolf Garten FTW!

Lmao, you crying now, wait till you find out about climate change, get wrecked little man

This is me and my girlfriend, it’s terrible. She is always cold and I’m always hot. She uses me to heat up, which sounds cute but involves ice cold hand and feet touching my bare skin. She has like 3 layers of thick blankets, if I crawl under those within five minutes I’m overheating, sweating and feel like I’m going to pass out. She turns up the heat all the time and I wanted to turn it down to begin with.

I feel like being aligned on heat is much better than being very unaligned.

One little snag: You need to be signed into Windows with a Microsoft account. Using local accounts won’t allow for the updates.

Sailors?

Second floor basement?!?

For people who don’t know, software used to come in those kinds of boxes you can see in the background. These were often high quality thick cardboard, which opened up in unique and different ways. Most had a sleeve around the box with the logo and marketing blurbs, some had those printed directly onto the box. Inside were floppies (size depending on the era) or later CDs. Something like Windows 3.11 with Office was over 50 1.44MB floppies (3½-inch), so the box was big and heavy.

Also most contained a literal book, often hundreds of pages. Paperback with thin pages, double sided to cram as much info in there as possible. Since there was no internet, only sneakernet, the books were all we had to get stuff working and troubleshoot it. Most software back then was also complicated to setup and use, so the books were required. We went to physical stores to buy the software, which was expensive as well. So for the price you wanted the box and books to be good.

I remember many times you couldn’t buy the software in the shop, you would fill in a form and they would order it for you. Then later you could pick it up or sometimes they would send it over to your office or home. This was usually very expensive, so picking it up was the better option. Sometimes this was because we would like to pre-order the latest release, often weeks or even months in advance. Or because the store simply wouldn’t have as many in stock, or not the specific version you needed. Windows 95 was something else, which they announced people could just buy in the store. Pre-order not required, the stores would have plenty of stock. And to their credit, they did.

Games came in neat boxes as well, but to my recollection they were often lesser quality and didn’t have much in the way of documentation. But the art on the boxes was often a lot nicer to look at. And some games came in really neat boxes, making it a feature.

Yeah EU VAT opened up a whole can of issues. It’s super complicated and annoying, with all sorts of weird exceptions. The exact opposite of what VAT was supposed to be. EU countries should have just gotten their shit together instead of this patch work.

I’ve actually seen that fraud in action. People used to ship around huge amounts of phones and CPUs, because they were high value, but took up very little room. A truck full of pallets of tray CPUs could be worth a huge amount.

I think now most of the holes are patched. But for a while there were special rules surrounding phones and CPUs just because they were often used in the fraud scheme.

The real genius behind VAT is that it isn’t just applied to transactions between business and consumer, but to all transactions. The rule is normally very simple, it’s applied to all transactions, with few exceptions. The rate can vary, but those rules are also usually very simple. The trick is: When a business has a transaction with another business, VAT is still applied, but the selling party has to levy the tax and forward it to the government and the purchasing party can ask the government to give back the tax they paid on the transaction.

This may seem a bit convoluted, where the tax goes through the government only to end up back in the business. But this ensures the tax is applied always. Normally a profitable company would sell their products for more than the components they purchased. The difference between these two is the value added. And by getting back less from the purchases as what they have to pay for sales, the tax is only applied to the value added. And for consumers it functions as a sales tax, being applied to all transactions and no way around it.

This system is way harder to mess with than any other form of sales tax. The rules are simple with few exceptions and thus very easy to reinforce. It’s also a more fair system, where each party in the chain pays a part instead of the consumer paying for all of it.

In the end the consumer pays most, but as the taxes are supposed to be used to make their lives better, it seems like a fair deal? Now if you have a government that’s more about filling their own pockets than actually doing what they need to do to improve the lives of the people living there, well then you are going to have a bad day. But that doesn’t happen in civilized countries right?

It would depend on how fast it runs. The faster it runs the more times it’s right. So if we extrapolate, once you get a clock running backwards fast enough, it will be right all of the time.

🤖 Reality Check #1 18/20 🔥 Perfect Streak: 7

I can spot AI images 90% of the time. 🧠 Can you beat me? realitycheckk.com

The two I got wrong were both very artsy and abstract. Anytime there is anything with detail in the image either check it’s super fuzzy and dreamlike or it’s way too sharp. I looked at each image for no more than a few secs, I feel with say a minute per image you could easily get close to 100%.

Outer Wilds has taught me these dudes are larger than my space ship.