Agreed. ISPs did not want to feed Goggle any content. Perhaps also why they dropped their personal website hosting. An oligopolist cannot help their competitors lest they bash them with it. (Chuck Prince gotta dance.)

Big Brother FCC is likely too stupid, but both of these moves corral the net somewhat (pops elsewhere).

USENET aka NetNews was the immediate discussion predecessor of social media (amongst which I count /. as one of the first and lasting). If you want to know whether and how social media is fading, look at it.

AFAICS, USENET has distributed costs and no revenue model. Social Media has serious centralized server costs by like print, but can charge for [much] advertising and some subscription. USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it, so little customer value. Significant costs, running a newsspool is as hard as running a mailserver.

Social media will not die until the traffic [revenue] does, albeit there may be some rotation like MySpace giving way to FaceBook.

I'm much older and use links (similar to lynx but with tables) in text-mode as my main browser. Occasionally I'll have to load something graphic for java[script]/... which is otherwise detestable and to be avoided.

So I have a simple script that dumps a list of URLs into a text file (~100kB). Then `diff` on an earlier version give a few pages of interesting changes. Done and not dependant only YAP (yet another protocol, RSS).

I can understand some frustration with customers mistaking Voice-Recognation (Artificial Stupidity) for AI. But put yourself in their shoes, have you ever listened to the back-tape (if available) or tried calling-in yourself and wading past the gauntlet of questions? Most appear carefully designed to frustrate the caller. Calls cost the company money.

Why stay with MS-Windows? It is known-bad. I had lotsa trouble finding a driver for my aging Samsung ML-1740 laser. Thought the printer might be brokken.

Nope. Plugged it into my Ubuntu main terminal and it was automagically detected, loaded and the Test came out fine. Truly Plug-n-Play (TM)

'scuse me, but prove said computer was not TOAST whenever MS-win10 was least-bad? It will only get slightly worst after alleged-support ends in October.

Linux has been running main my machines since 2000 with a few island MS machines that occasionally get booted to run specific software (never more than one per). The idea of any MS-OS being suitable for general-purpose, 24/7 is beyond risible--all require too much maintenence.

BINGO! If you want to see what the US fiscal balance would look like without Triffin, look north at the loonie and adjust X/M down. Not pretty and yet even it leans on the USD (as a proxy).

What if some troll (M$) buys the original artwork -- do they then have rights to all the derivative works, including Trademarks?

If the mix is bad, maybe C is the problem? =ducks=

Agreed. Didn't I pretty much say that? AFAICS, most LEO have a large polar component. Equitorials have limited coverage.

If lucky, a sensor net might pickup strikes on soil above decent bedrock. But at least 70% of earth's surface is covered by water with will dissipate much and transmit little to the underlying bedrock. Falls are pseudorandom, perhaps more or less since most of the falling satellites (geosync don't fall) are on polar orbits.

If I were them, I'd be looking for ocean anomalies. Ripples in a pond.

Of course there will be ensh^C -- look around you, what product/service has not degraded over time (after invention)? Part of this is the difficulty measuring quality compared to volumes or profits. And the strong incentives for the latter. But part is also the democratization and optimization of quality.

Remember MySpace? Competition still works. AFAICS, fazebuch is stagnating.

/. is supposed to be programmer-adjacent folk. Does no-one realize a well-optimized page that displays well [tested] on many different devices & screen widths cannot simply have a line deleted without scr3wing up the display? Especially with required input! Worse with HTML"composters".

Much easier and safer to change text to something [slightly] less noxious. That's the PC reason.

Agreed. My observations were you aussies are a warm and friendly lot, but your government workers are far otherwise. Pardon the insult, but they seem bent on delivering "The Full Convict Experience".

Will this lead to a renaissance of USENET to continue the flamewars? No central authority to bully.