It's in the name.

Summary of the entire silly discussion:

a) If one favors cats over birds, cats are pets, birds are food.

b) If one favors birds over cats, birds are pets, cats are pests.

Options not included in the discussion, but welcome to make things even livelier:

d) If one favors both birds and cats, both are pets and cats walk with bright red collars and bells so the cats can roam freely and the birds can survive.

e) If one favor neither, all are hunting targets.

f) If one favors dogs, they need come and say something offtopic.

g) If one's a fundamentalist Christian nutcase, all animals are automatons whose existence serves the sole purpose of pleasuring humans, and they won't be in Heaven because they lack souls.

h) If one's a Muslim, cats are clean and you're a sinner.

i) If one's...

Etc. etc. etc.

The man bought a vacuum cleaner that required an internet connection, and that didn't make him suspicious?

Not so clever I reckon...

The pigs using ubiquitous street camera surveillance to accuse the woman, or the woman using ubiquitous in-vehicle camera surveillance to prove her innocence.

No part of this story makes me warm or fuzzy.

and the ubiquitous surveillance of large swathes of the internet as well. Woohoo!

Note to self: stick to Debian and don't touch Ubuntu or Mint for a few versions until the kinks have been worked out.

Shut down all sensors that have nothing to do with navigation, that Google uses to put people under surveillance, stop the data collection and stop sending data to the mothership all the damn time. I guarantee you power usage will go down significantly.

How do I know that? because my Fairphone 4 running CalyxOS gets a few more hours of battery life than the same Fairphone 4 running vanilla Android, and my Fairphone 5 running Ubuntu Touch also does better battery-wise than the same phone running Google's surveillance platform.

Poetic justice.

the first hit is free.

Kinda. The US had no officially designed language from July 4th, 1776, to February 28, 2025. English was the most used language, but not a legal requirement.

Since March 1st, 2025, there's an Executive Order signed by Trump determining that English is the official language of the United States. Executive Orders are valid until a President cancels them, so we can presume that at least in the period from March 1st, 2025, to January 20th, 2029, the US will indeed have an official language. Coming January 21st, 2029, depending on who was elected for President, it may cease having one, thus going back to its traditional approach.

To make this truly a new default would require a more permanent law than an Executive Order, preferably a Constitutional Amendment. That's unlikely though. So we may well see a situation in which the US alternates having and not having an official language in timespans of 4 to 8 years each.

Let me get this straight: you're actually, for real, in favor of hidden fees, so a business can tell you that you owe them $x more than you agreed to pay for, and now you're obliged to pay?

The right-wing ones too.

My statement doesn't address the gravity of the two things I mentioned. Just like the statement "Foot fetishism and pedophilia are both paraphiliae" is factually true and says nothing about which one is worse.

All I said was, if there's a new technology, the first people to use it for their particular interest are always people peddling smut and magical thinking.

You can be certain two things always corrupt any new technology: porn and religion.

https://youtu.be/U0YkPnwoYyE