No. By legal definition, you can't sell something you don't own. If a company collects your data or metrics, they don't own your data, they merely have copies of it.

This is why many EULAs confidently state the company will never "sell" your data, to make you feel more comfortable. Then, they immediately turn around and "share" your data with their business partners in exchange for money. Totally different. Since they're not technically lying, it's totally legit.

Okay... but wouldn't it just make more sense to read a good Chinese book than a crap Chinese book?

I disagree. I was just having a discussion with my dad about this yesterday. As much as the marketeers keep telling us they make SUVs because that's what people want to buy, every time I go to the grocery store, half the vehicles in the parking lot are cars. At least in the New England area, there are still tons of cars everywhere -- but they are all foreign brands.

He's a Ford guy and owns a Fusion, and he's really pissed that Ford discontinued all their cars and he can't buy a newer Fusion. We both agree that American manufacturers are trying to ram SUVs and crossovers down our throats, when it's obvious there's still a healthy market for cars.

This same mentality is now infesting EVs. The current EV selection makes no sense at all, costs way too damn much, and the situation with charging networks is infuriating. I'm pretty sure this is not what the market wants.

...and their PR departments. It didn't take long for AI systems to start offering people some good old-fashioned politically correct ethnic diversity!

I tried updating Mint to the latest version. I found out quickly that they distinguish between an update and an upgrade. The update procedure can be done in the GUI utility, but it doesn't work right especially if your root certificates are out of date or can't update. If updates can't be installed, the GUI installer just fails silently, and you need to use the command prompt to do it. If you want to upgrade, that is done exclusively from the command prompt, and after installing the upgrader and running it, they require you to stop and install a "backup" utility before you can continue with the upgrader.

I spent many hours screwing around that that to get it working, gave up, and just did a wipe and reinstall.

Truly a +5 informative statement. It's so depressing how the Linux community insists on living in denial and blaming all problems on user error.

Well, that's the point. He can use it because if his system breaks, he has you around to fix it.

I still remember my experience trying to upgrade a Mint desktop to the latest version. I'm still banging my head against the table, because in the end, it was way easier to just wipe and reinstall.

Windows 7 does. I think it gives me one blue screen of death every... five years or so. I've had FAR less grief with Win2000, XP, and Win7 than any Linux distro or desktop environment I've tried in the same time frame.

With that said, I gave Windows 10 a test run on one of my spare systems, and I refuse to use that piece of shit. I don't like Linux, but I'll soon have little choice but make the migration.

That's the coolest bathroom mirror I've ever seen!

Good. I'm sick of robots with fake human faces to try to make them look "relatable". A robot is a tool and should look like one.

If you rent or lease something, they're supposed to tell you how long the usage period is.

The software industry is too comfortable with the notion that, "It works until it doesn't". It's been that way for decades and we're well overdue for making this practice illegal.

Every year for the last 30 years PC people have said consoles are dead.

With that said, the PS5 is the first Playstation I have no interest in buying. To each their own.

I can't believe they managed to break each(). Every time a new version of PHP is released, everything breaks. It's not just my own project that has to be rewritten on each new release, I have to wait for updates to all of my other 3rd-party scripts, too.

Disclaimer: I stopped using PHP about 10 years ago. My single PHP project is just in maintenance mode, so I'm not even adding new features -- all of my rewrites are just to make up for the PHP team's stupidity.

It had been a long time since I went to a theater, but when Dune 2 came out, I decided to take my family.

Fucking 45 minutes of ads. Literally. I had no idea it had gotten that bad.

No wonder my family were the the only ones in the theater and the rest of the seats were empty. Granted, we went out on a Thursday night, but still...

That's exactly why we distinguish between belief systems and religions. A belief system is what you believe, a religion is a set of traditions and practices you follow. Religious practices don't have to make sense or be even remotely consistent with the core values of the belief system.

Religions are definitely the problem.

The problem is that it claims to improve quality by applying new noise reduction techniques to the image as a pre-processing stage. This is supposedly a better version of what older paint programs did by blurring the image before saving as a JPEG. In practice, I've found that this does not work very well if you want a good compromise between quality and compression.

Before adding a feature "ASAP", it might be best to consider whether it's a good idea or just marketing bullshit. I call the second point.