manxu

It seems like a simple concept that everyone should be able to agree to: if I buy a product from you that does x, y, and z, you don’t get to remove x, y, or z remotely after I’ve made that purchase. How we’ve gotten to a place where companies can simply remove, or paywall, product features without recourse for the customer they essentially bait and switched is beyond me.

We have all the legal and governmental tools required to enable that recourse. We just chose not to any longer at the turn of the century.

The other day, I spent - no exaggeration - 3.5 hours trying to cancel my waste collection service. Calls would go to phone numbers that automatically disconnected after a 20 minute hold, humans would transfer/drop calls after a 40 minute wait.

The previous administration instituted a very basic “one click cancel” rule, but we voted for people that killed that. Last century, companies as powerful as AT&T and Oracle lost bruising fights with government agencies. The same are now toothless.

That sounds extremely well reasoned. It makes no sense for a deputy to decide on their own how they should spend the state’s resources, including their own paid time. It would be like a supermarket cashier deciding their time is better spent washing the windshields of cars in the parking lot.

Add the 600 billions in promised investments, that the EU cannot influence (since they are private) and you get the impression that this deal is just a temporary stop-gap from the perspective of the EU. Make outlandish promises that you can’t possibly keep, because that makes the USA feel good about herself, but you already know the deal is not going to last long enough for anyone to remember the promises made at the beginning.

The parents had brought their kid to that school. The school was aware the parents were gay. The child chose that school. The school allowed the child to enroll.

I would say, yeah, this was a curve ball coming from an ultra-conservative parish priest, not anything inevitable.

Jinx!

Where I live, US 285 North goes East and crosses CO 470 East, that goes South.

he had a grievance against the NFL over an unsubstantiated claim that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Well, I suppose the behavior supports the claim, as tragic a proof as this is.

That was definitely a red line for me, too. I gave him credit for being incredibly vocal about equal marriage in 2004, way ahead of other politicians, but something seems to have drastically changed and moved him to the right.

In the process of degoogling my life. Email and files are gone, but I use GMaps, still.

Google (still) offers a regular backup of your data to download. You can set it up to run at intervals and just download the entire thing. Includes file (and photos), email, messages, etc. It’s great for products you forget you were using, and great for an offline backup.

I am taking this as the official admission by Donald Trump that his name is in fact in the Epstein files, planted or not.

I remember seeing Ansel Adam’s pictures of Yosemite and thinking they were absolutely magical and he had to have spent months for each shot, they were so perfect and unique and marvelous.

Then I went to Yosemite and realized that no, that place is perfect and unique and marvelous, and even I can take perfect and unique and marvelous pictures with my Xiaomi phone in Yosemite.

It really is indescribable. Just to give you an idea, even five seconds before totality is boring. It’s day, a little darker than usual. Then, five seconds later, it’s totality, and it’s like the entire universe had been replaced by a magical fairy tale land.

I fully agree, although I do have to wonder how frequently these gratuitous attacks are astroturfed and paid for.

If you can get rid of a pesky open source competitor by paying off some troll to make unsubstantiated accusations and personal attacks, it’s a great investment. Especially if the rest of the open source world doesn’t come to the rescue and supports the open source developer vocally.

I think the problem is that the Roman empire was on the brink of collapse so many times, it would have been weird for someone to think one particular time was special. The troubles of the Third Century, for instance, looked a lot worse at the time than anything after that, but the empire recovered just fine.

The first (of several) sack of Rome in 410 AD was probably a huge red flag. But by then, Rome was not even the capital of the Western Empire any longer. The sack was mostly a symbolic loss, Rome having been able to defend herself for a thousand years.

In hindsight, permanently moving the capital from Rome to Constantinople was what might have turned the page for the empire. It was a complex series of changes, placing a new religion without strong ties to Rome on top, moving the political center of the empire to the East, and freeing the emperors for a while from the pressure of the senate and the people.

I note that the Eastern provinces were economically outperforming the Western ones by large margins even before Barbarian incursions. That the East would run the empire was probably inevitable at some point.

Yes, and nobody disputes that some bicyclists put everyone at risk. The point of the article, though, is that drivers are handed a fine, while bicyclists are handed criminal charges. Pointing out that bicyclists are given harsher treatment for a less dangerous offense is, I think, fair in this case.

Yes, that is correct. Thanks for pointing out, I’ll edit to avoid confusion.

Alright, I hear you, but I think the point is that a cyclist running a red light mostly endangers themselves, while a car running a red light endangers others. Here in Colorado, we changed the laws such that a red light is a stop sign for bicycles, and a stop sign a yield, in recognition of the differences in risk. (Edit: cars -> bicycles)

It’s great business, offering electricity at above market rates. Like many things Green New Deal, it has Capitalists salivating at the business opportunities.

Perils: blacklists and spam filters.