Readit NewsHow did you learn arithmetic?
I could put a Mac Mini on my desk with half a dozen adapters sticking out of it, but even then I still can't upgrade the RAM. The last Mac Mini with user-upgradeable RAM was 2012.
The 2019 Mac Pro feels to me like an Apple Lisa. Even at 1/4 the price, it would seem steep to me. I want what it has, but there's no way I'll ever be able to justify that.
This is new territory for OSX-era Apple. It didn't used to be so expensive to buy an expandable Mac. You could get a PowerMac G5 for $1800, and a PowerMac G4 from $1500.
The 2018 Mac Mini is user-upgradeable up to 64GB. Storage is soldered on however.
For one, I hope subscriptions die. It's a pernicious trend that is borderline fraud for consumers (like gyms, profiting from users who simply forget to unsubscribe or making it painfully hard to unsubscribe). It's also exclusionary for most of the world for whom the subscription price might be a year's income. With downloadable software it was kind of possible to find a crack online, but web apps and content make it almost impossible.It also makes individual property ownership impossible. we need honest,anonymized payments on the web.
Once you have abstract property as a concept, it's all about tracking the association in and of itself, separated from any physical manifestations of it (possession and use). Your house is yours not because you live in it, but because there's a title on it in your name, and a record in the registry. This makes it possible for one person to have ten houses, live in one, and rent the rest out to those who don't have any. If they accumulate the rent, they can eventually buy more houses, and it becomes a positive feedback loop.
But there's no particular reason why any given society has to adopt such a system of property, and not all societies did or do today - especially with respect to land and other immovables. This can often be seen in the colonial history, where the colonizers expected to be able to buy and sell things that the indigenous population didn't even consider property, or at least the kind of property that could be bought and sold. More often than not, the colonizing power would then declare that in the absence of a "proper" abstract property claim on e.g. the land, it's there for the taking of anybody who is willing to make one. And that is how we ended up in the present situation, where that system of abstract property rights is mostly enforced throughout the globe - but I don't see how it follows that it's a system that is inevitable for any human society.
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When we held public executions, we could at least see who was wielding the power, by whom we were being conditioned, and what there was to fear. Yes, the body was being tortured, but the soul remained intact. In the surveillance age, we are subjugated by forces we cannot untangle, see, or fully understand. We discipline ourselves in fear of these unseen entities who may or may not be constantly watching; what they do with our information remaining a mystery
You're explanation is fairly academic and I think we can be a little more concrete. Focault's point is really that discussions of power in the West tend to revolve around law and right, jurisprudence, when in fact the exercise of power qua something that alters your behavior is in almost every relationship we enter into with other human beings, no matter how anonymous: when we go to school (which is modeled on factories), when we go to work at the factory (where they wanna know how long you take having a piss) or (as many of us here are familiar with) the office, when we pack onto the train for the commute (which to me is a place where our behavior definitely meets up with the practical definition of panopticism, e.g. we act as if everyone is watching everyone else), when we "come out the closet" (despite being a 'practicing homosexual', for lack of a better term, Foucault was not comfortable being labeled gay, and its speculated that the conditions around his death by HIV were exacerbated by this; as well, I find sexuality to be strongly policed on all sides in America).
None of this is new in history, but modernity ramped up the scale and intensity to previously unseen levels (much like everything else)