So only games that are made from scratch can charge full price? What about reusing code? Engine? Animations? Textures? Lighting system? Rendering backend?.. Games are made of everything that came before, being angry about a game using assets that were originally developed for an older game is like being angry about a movie reusing props made for an older movie, should they burn all of the Christmas decorations between one movie and the next? Or can the studio hang the same glass ball on two different movies? Does that detract from the movie? Will you really only consider it’s worth the full price if all props were made exclusively for that movie?..

I always take them to ride the ferry to Staten Island and back if I can.

I know what you meant, but my brain read that and thought “what if he can’t, he just leaves them there?”

I assumed this was for tourists, so you don’t get to visit other countries anymore.

Curiously one of the only times I’ve seen a tourist trying to cut in line they were french, and tried to pretend they didn’t spoke English (at the exit of the Harry Potter studio tour).

Both of us were big guys so we made a wall between them, I’m … 128cm

Hahahaha I know you fixed it, but 128 is 4’2, that’s not even tall for a Hobbit, so I immediately knew you had Missconverted/mistyped the value, but it was hilarious anyways, thanks for leaving it and just adding the correct value after it.

Please tell me that the moment they start complaining about it you switch to Catalán, Gallego or (pretty please) Basco. Some of them do know Spanish, at least enough to get by, but I noticed that even though it’s extremely similar they can’t make the jump to Catalán (I’m new here and haven’t had time to study Catalán just yet, but Spanish being my native tongue I can understand around 80% of what people tell me in Catalan, but I noticed that people who don’t speak fluent Spanish can’t make the jump from one language to the other that easily). I’ve never heard Gallego but I assume it’s somewhat similar as well, but speaking to them in Basco would be just perfect.

But then that would beat the purpose of only paying one bill for both phone and internet at home.

The awe of immersion in the first VR game I played was unforgettable. I knew that theoretically you could fool your brain into seeing depth using two screens, but that didn’t prepare me to put on the glasses and completely be transported to another place. Nothing has ever borne that sensation for me. I’ve seen grown used to it and rarely play VR anymore, but still see it as the most immersive experience I’ve had.

Three is truly unlimited. I used to have them when I lived in Ireland. For a year it was the only internet at my home, so I worked and had meetings daily with it, my wife would watch YouTube and her classes, and we would both watch Netflix and play some online games. All from hotspoting from our phones. Battery on the phones was a problem, but we never hit any sort of data caps with them, and we were using hundreds of GB per month for sure.

I pay €90 a month for a package that includes:

• 1 mobile number with unlimited data, sms and some ridiculous amount of minutes of calls I never use
• 1 mobile number with all of the same except data limited to 30GB
• Home internet with 1GB optic fiber and unlimited data
• TV with hundred channels or so

I think if I wanted to get just the phone line it would be something like €10 a month for the unlimited data one. This is in Spain.

My guess would be that it happened gradually. Someone living in a place where the minimum temperature is 15 might be willing to move north to a place where the minimum temperature is 13 as long as other factors are better for him. Couple of generations later you have someone who’s living in a place where the minimum temperature is 13 willing to go north to a place where the minimum temperature is 10, so on and so forth.

I’m surprised no one mentioned Spec Ops: The Line yet

Realistically the best option here is to not have the data in the laptop. So they would remote into a machine you control to access the data, or something of the sort. Regardless the laptop should have full disk encryption so if it gets stolen no data is accidentally leaked.

Other than that the best way I can think of is giving the user a non-root account and have the laptop connect to tailscale automatically so you can always ssh into it and control it if needed. But this is not ideal, because a malicious person could just not connect to the internet and completely block you from doing anything. This is true for almost any sort of remote management tool you would be able to find.

That’s a bad idea. First you need to understand that for the government to be able to track every citizen first they must be able to track every phone, and then be able to figure out whose phone is who. You’re trying to break their tracking by denying the second step but in doing so you’ve made yourself a priority target.

Imagine you’re a government trying to track all of your citizens, and you’ve got the GPS data for every phone, and now need to assign them to specific persons and/or decide who you track specifically. Random Joe who goes from home to work and work to home will be last on the list, but a person whose itinerary changes every week, and drastically changes after a couple of months is someone that sticks out. And the moment someone notices this, it won’t be difficult to track other users with the same behavior, and realize they’re switching phones by comparing one phone’s behavior during one week to another phone during another week. And now they have the same information they would before, except they have their eyes on you more closely.

Plus you would probably need to login to your email or some account on the phone, and that would be enough to track that you changed your phone.

The best idea to avoid this sort of surveillance is to only carry your phone from home to work and back. No one will bat an eye about someone going for a run or something without his phone, and from someone tracking you’re just a boring person who only works and goes home.

But you probably received the data anonymized, i.e. you had a code that meant a person, and you could track information on that person, but you couldn’t immediately know who that person was.

Otherwise that company, and whoever sold it its data, are in for a BIG lawsuit from any EU citizen you track. And you might say “who cares, my company didn’t act in the EU”, but whoever sold you the data certainly does, and they would get sued and fined very heavily, so it’s unlikely they would not anonymize the data before selling it.

Spanish is my native tongue, so this might not work as well as I expect it to, but Pimsleur courses are GREAT to get quick phrases and learning to think in the language. They try to teach you very close to how native speakers learn it, and because of the repetition you tend to remember most of it.

That being said most of their content is focused on visiting a different country, so you might not need the very basic phrases like “I’m American, I don’t speak <language>”, but they give you an idea on how the language is structured.

Finally, while Pimsleur and many other suggestions here are great, it varies from person to person so you might need to find what works best for you.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m glad you’re happy with your new device, but the fact that you could have gotten almost the same device 6 years ago only serves to prove OP’s point.

The girl stopped going to the school at the same time someone was kidnapped in his neighborhood. The rumor was that it was that same girl, but he doesn’t believe it. It’s not that confusing.

Much more storage space

Much more storage than 512GB?

a higher-rez 120hz screen (beautiful)

Much higher res than 2160x1080? And Is the difference between 90hz and 120hz really that noticeable?

cameras that rival my DSLR but take MUCH better low light pictures (cats)

I’m sure other devices already had cameras just as good, but for the comparison I’m going with I’ll grant that it’s very likely your new phone has a better camera

USB-C

Almost every phone was USB-C 6 years ago

more speed (I didn’t need more speed, but it’s nice that it’s there)

Probably the only number that would be extremely higher on your new phone is a benchmark for speed, which probably won’t mean much unless you’re a heavy gamer on your phone, and even then most games try to hit a wider audience so they have lower specs.

absolutely bonkers battery life

Much more than 4000 mAh?

So, let’s forget the camera and benchmarks for a second, compare your phone with this: https://www.phonearena.com/phones/Asus-ROG-Phone_id10914 which you could have bought 6 years ago for $900 and tell me if your new phone is really that much better or cheaper. Then let’s do the same with an extra 6 years, so find me the best smartphone you can from 2012 and see if it’s even comparable, and if you go back 6 extra years there weren’t even any smartphones. And that’s the whole point OP was making, your new shiny phone is great, but you could have gotten a very similar thing 6 years ago when you bought your previous model, you would still be wanting to change it now because that device would not have received updates and the battery would probably have started to lose it’s charge faster, etc, but technically phones today are not that much better than 6 years ago, especially not considering the amount of advances that happened in the 6 years prior to that, or the 6 before then.

What did you got on that new device that wasn’t available 6 years ago?