Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB.

Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.

Dude, I wish. I run a large homelab filled with consumer and small business grade intel hardware, and would love to have vpro on all my mid-high end consumer intel platforms. I have the experience and network environment to lock it all down securely, and it's very reliable high performance low level access from before boot.

It's true that some number of relatively expensive consumer-grade CPUs support vPro, but the catch is it also requires the motherboard's chipset to support it, and it has to be both implemented and enabled in the BIOS.

You rarely if ever see consumer hardware with a chipset that supports it. On all the systems I have that fully support vpro from soup to nuts, you have to intentionally turn it on because it's quite dangerous in the wrong circumstances.

I'm not sure I've ever heard this before. IIRC the term originates from liberians and can refer to papers of official record and reputational record.

The Wall Street Journal is highly profitable, and also definitely a paper of record.

https://libguides.mcmaster.ca/news/record

Before even finishing this sentence, I can think of five or six examples of awful internet ads that completely ruined the experience I was having (spank this monkey NOW!).

Something like 40% of users employ an ad blocker, and the other 60% likely don't know ad blockers exist. I think that's a pretty strong signal that something is wrong with internet ads specifically - people are willing to accept ads in other aspects of their life when it's not so invasive.

Struggling to see anything but more risk with no benefit with this security posture.

I guess it's valid to take everything you legally can, but personally, I'm saying it's fucked up move not to pay even a token amount. That's their only consequence, (some) people thinking it's a fucked up move.

The ones that a barely-informed stranger could easily identify as having made you 7+ figures.

In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.

In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.

Synthetic fibres such as polyester and acrylic absorb little water, as such they are good insulators but poor at thermal buffering. They have minimal heat of sorption (about 5–7 J/g) [7], and are limited to moisture wicking. There are also more likely to develop odors and are much more flammable.

They can look at Ukraine who bitterly regrets giving up their nuclear weapons, or North Korea, seemingly invulnerable despite being the most pariah of pariah states.

From the perspective of the Iranian state, it would be idiotic and irresponsible not to try to make a nuclear weapon in these conditions.

poking around with MTR (traceroute and ping combined) using various exit nodes and destinations would give you some more information if you're interested.

I was a huge Windows fanboy, now completely Apple but this was single most annoying regression of functionality when switching and one of the only things I miss.

The single biggest complaint I had when I switched it to Mac was lack of this feature. Still miss it. .