Most modern devices have a sensor for that. They don't even start "recharging" if the battery is above somewhere in the 92-95% range.

Well, this breach - and the negligence therein - will probably be great evidence for the DOJ's case that Ticketmonster is an illegal monopoly causing harm to consumers, and should be dismantled.

You'd be amazed how many companies, publishers, etc... might have a hand in it. Archive.org has all sorts of things that are abandonware or public domain, and they HATE that. Could even be a book publisher trying to fuck over their checkout system for digitized out-of-print volumes.

There's a coinflip chance that it's someone in the music industry, hollyweird or similar that's funding the DDoS hoping to knock the internet library offline and fuck the preservation of our collective history over.

Point of order: it's been Republicans who have been fighting against sane standards since the 1970s. They were the ones who introduced and expanded the "SUV Loophole" in CAFE standards in the 1970s and 80s, and they're the ones currently fighting against updating fleet standards today.

Ok, I'll give it a shot. You didn't say what "the answer we all know" is, instead of relying on some bullshit insinuation tactics, but we'll see if you respond and say what you are insinuating outright in return.

#1 - Spirit and Frontier weren't trying to merge. It's Spirit and JetBlue that were recently blocked from merging in courts, under lawsuit from the USA.

#2 - you should read the judge's ruling. It focuses on key points of concern including:

- Reduced availability of seat count on many travel routes (artificially raising scarcity and thus pushing upward on prices to consumers)

- Reduced competitive routes creating monopolies; he identified many routes currently serviced by Spirit and JetBlue that would leave the combined company as the only company serving those routes, along with other routes or connection legs that would be similarly affected.

"The proposed merger has the potential to increase prices for customers in two ways: 1) with the elimination of Spirit from the market, consumers would no longer have Spirit’s low prices as an option; 2) with the elimination of Spirit from the market, consumers would no longer benefit from Spirit’s downward pressure on other airline’s prices."

"Summing it up, if JetBlue were permitted to gobble up Spirit -– at least as proposed -- it would eliminate one of the airline industry’s few primary competitors that provides unique innovation and price discipline. It would further consolidate an oligopoly by immediately doubling JetBlue’s stakeholder size in the industry. Worse yet, the merger would likely incentivize JetBlue further to abandon its roots as a maverick, low-cost carrier. While it is understandable that JetBlue seeks inorganic growth through acquisition of aircraft that would eliminate one of its primary competitors, the proposed acquisition, in this Court’s attempt to predict the future in murky times, does violence to the core principle of antitrust law: to protect the United States’ markets –- and its market participants -- from anticompetitive harm."

If US Cellular isn't being split between T-Mobile and Verizon then what kind of business will it be in after the sale?

It's a Vulture Capitalism thing. US Cellular will exist "as a company," and will be "leasing" various services from T-Mobile, so that the "US Cellular" company can be loaded down with debt and a bunch of the investors can run a short-sale scam on it (they likely were in the known and shorted the company right before this merger was announced already).

Same thing that just happened to Red Lobster. The company was actually doing fine, a hedge fund bought them out and engaged in what ought to be considered financial fraud.

The technique, colloquially known as asset-stripping, has been a part of retail chain failures such as Sears, Mervyn’s and ShopKo as well as bankruptcies involving hospital and nursing home operations like Steward Healthcare and Manor Care. All had been owned by private equity.

Asset-stripping occurs when an owner or investor in a company sells off some of its assets, taking the benefits for itself and hobbling the company. This practice is favored among some private-equity firms that buy companies, load them with debt to finance the purchases and hope to sell them at a profit in a few years to someone else. A common form of asset-stripping is known as a sale/leaseback and involves selling a company’s real estate; this type of transaction hobbled Red Lobster.

The sale/leaseback that helped sink Red Lobster involved the July 2014 sale of premium real estate underneath 500 of its stores, which generated $1.5 billion. But that money didn’t go back into Red Lobster; it went instead to the private-equity firm to finance its purchase of the chain, Red Lobster's press release said. That firm was San Francisco-based Golden Gate Capital, with $10 billion in assets... The $1.5 billion sale crippled Red Lobster. After the real estate was sold, Red Lobster had to pay rent on stores it had previously owned, significantly increasing its costs. According to the bankruptcy filing, by 2023 its rents totaled $200 million a year or approximately 10% of its revenues.

It's almost like the USA's model for situations where a limited public resource is involved (right-of-way for landlines, spectrum for RF communication, etc) is crap, and the European model where standards are actually standardized, and the supposedly-premium services have to compete with a public utility that the population can directly access is far better. (Looking at Texas, where taxpayers have been soaked for now over $35 billion by "middlemen" companies so that the Corrupt Republican Fucks in the state government can get kickbacks...)

The sad part is that so many in the USA forget that efficiently run public utilities and services are possible, given that conservatives in the USA regularly sabotage our public utilities and other essential public services both nationally (like the post office) and locally (parks, public transit, libraries...).

You could think that, but then reality sets in. Just try to see what happens to many games' onscreen menus or text displays with upscaling. Or try turning on some related functions. Half Rate Shading on a Steam Deck with a game that hasn't been fine-tuned for it, for instance, will royally fuck up the HUD.

Libertarians are just fascists who like weed and want to repeal age-of-consent laws (guess WHY they want that last one).

He's of the same political party that just pardoned convicted white-supremacist Daniel Perry, who shot an Air Force veteran in cold blood. What do we really expect here?

The tech-support scammers usually try to get people to call them these days, instead. Either they have their number in one of the infected/scary ad popups rolling around the internet, or they're using SEO'ed webpages to trick people who are trying to find a phone support number.

The calls seem to come in "bursts", I'll get no scam calls for weeks then day after day of scammers calling me. I'll get a dozen such calls in a day.

This is because the scammers keep logs of who answered numbers, and sell lists of "known good numbers" to other scammers in bulk to feed their autodialer systems.

I tell the scammers the guy they are looking for is dead, which I have good reason to suspect is true, but that message doesn't seem to register with them.

They don't care. They care that someone actually answered the line. Therefore there's a human there, therefore it's sellable to other scammers to try to scam you.

Some will claim to be from a "TV provider" and need me to give some information off a cable or satellite box, I wonder how that scam is supposed to be profitable.

It's probably a variant of the "iPhone upgrade" scam. They're going to try to get you to give them enough information about your account that they can then take it over, order new equipment off of your recorded payment method, and then steal said equipment for resale.

When a hacker screws over a scammer, it's called ethical hacking.

Let's all be honest here. Autocorrect is universally bad at its job, and it's a real ducking problem.