And I always use a link on my menu bar, never a toolbar -- interesting how user method changes perception like that.

[goes to check]

Looks like IXQuick/Startpage has reverted to the old layout (that was quick) which would explain why today it again works fine without javascript. The 'upgraded' page quite definitely did not. Plus it was hard on aging eyes. Fucking pastels everyone has suddenly gotten into...

DDG used to require JS to work, but doesn't now.

...the biggest reason middle-class rentals are disappearing is because there's no money in it. At best, you might cover your costs, but more likely costs will exceed income, by as much as 50%. Who in their right mind would own middle-class rentals when they're so likely to be a financial loss??

It is far, far cheaper to rent. Yeah, you don't build equity, but you also just pay rent. You don't pay tax, insurance, and maintenance that exceeds the value of a middle-class home, and which can bring your total outlay to half again more than the mortgage payment.

Home buying benefits realtors and mortgage lenders a whole lot more than it does home buyers.

That's actually why I decided not to use Dropbox, Backblaze, etc -- because more often than not, the file I want back is on some HD not presently connected, and would therefore look "deleted" to the backup software... so it would be deleted from the remote backup as well. This is probably fine for a business box that doesn't have removeables come and go. Not so fine for my use.

That's a problem, yeah. I think it would depend on whether "intent to defraud" could be demonstrated, and whether it gets prosecuted as "theft of services"... there's a fine can of worms, considering that Facebook users are the product being sold by Facebook. Are they thereby defrauding their advertisers??

(In the U.S., generally you can call yourself whatever you like so long as there's no intent to defraud.)

This was 2001. At the time there weren't all that many options in free FTP hosts, let alone with decent bandwidth. Walnut Creek's FTP.CDROM.COM had been THE main archive host for the whole world for a decade, and a lot of scenes depended on it. Mirrors that could handle its level of traffic were rare to nonexistent, and often limited to university use. Bandwidth/hosting was still expensive and even our puny 4GB archive was still a LOT of data (IIRC total data was about 300GB). So yeah, single point of failure wasn't a good thing, but you can't entirely blame facepalmworthy users here. We used what we had. And it failed us. Mirrors have since proliferated and hosting/bandwidth have become cheap, so today's self-appointed experts think the world was always that way and anyone who did different was too stupid to live.

And they fail to consider that anyone with a good printer and an editing program can whip up a convincing driver's license, certainly good enough to pass muster as a photocopy.

And yet there are over 500 Facebook users right now with the same rather unconvincing 'real name' as my own account.

The only blocker I use is NoScript, with javascript entirely disabled for the whole site, and as a result -- for me, Slashdot's look has changed very little since its earliest days.

Everything needs to be more broadly mirrored, so there's not a single point of failure for the source community. One or two big hubs may be convenient but if that one or two go bad, then what?

And remember when the old Walnut Creek FTP was acquired by Digital River, who shortly thereafter nuked all the non-paying archives with absolutely no notice??

The DOOM archive was saved because I'd found some financial statements that Digital River had accidentally left accessible, and judging by the state of their profits, I smelled trouble and predicted that the free FTP would very soon go away. Fortunately the DOOM archive maintainer believed me, and mirrored our stuff elsewhere.

Other archives were not so lucky; some were lost.

The logic sometimes isn't profit. Sometimes the logic is being able to show a loss for tax purposes. See also "Hollywood accounting".

No, no, no. This is their new program to vet developers so that we users can easily tell which projects will sell us out.

...StartPage/IXQuick just "upgraded" and thereby royally fucked up their interface (now requires javascript AND the search box no longer accepts paste, at least for me). I'd preferred StartPage, but have now switched to DuckDuckGo in sheer desperation for a search engine that doesn't argue with me, never mind tracking me... that's almost a secondary issue in the face of usability, or lack thereof.

...in forums hosted in small island nations and obscure African anarchies.

I agree. It's not about tolerance or civility; it's about pandering to SJW beliefs.

Relevant:

http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

Boogie makes good points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...