You can't effectively have free speech if you also have to comply with so-called "hate speech" regulation. That is the main issue.

Yup, google has become kinda useless, but what is the alternative?

As dividends go, oil pipeline companies are best. Enbridge pay about 7% with a stable stock price. Realty trusts are kinda scammy, since their stock prices decline all the time - so they just give your money back, you don’t make anything.

No, no. In the ;

Intel is so far behind the curve, they will never catch up with the Chinese.

>" In this particular instance, hate speech is not what the accused is being charged with"

Oh, *I* know that, but every article that references "hate speech" in an article gives the term/concept a tiny bit more "legitimacy." I want to combat that any time I see it.

>"Yep, snap ends up being more of a problem than a solution."

Not just screw snap, but screw any FORCED use of containerized packages. Users should always have a choice for native packages- you know, the ones that take little disk space and are not complicated to manage.

Having the choice to use a container package is fine/great- they can be useful. But abandoning native packages is bad. And if you are going to support containers, using snap would probably be the worst choice. It is why Linux Mint not only has native packages for the major stuff that Ubuntu doesn't, but they also fully support flatpak and not snap.

>"Every Snap I've seen is alongside the deb package, so the choice is there."

You haven't looked very hard, then. And the number will go up with each release. It is one of several reasons Linux Mint is continuously gaining in popularity.

>"Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 'Noble Numbat' Officially Released"

Kewl, because that means a new Linux Mint will be on the way soon.

https://linuxmint.com/

And I seem to be more fascinated by their LMDE project, although I haven't decided to jump to it from regular Mint quite yet...

https://linuxmint.com/download...

>"No, hate speech is speech that attacks not just an individual, but a whole class of people."

No, "hate speech" is whatever anyone wants to define "hate speech" as. It is a nebulous, ever-changing, non-legal-definable, subjective, emotional, nonsense concept. I have seen countless examples of so-called "hate speech" that, in my opinion (and I doubt I am alone), are not "hateful" at all. It is a dangerous term that is utterly incompatible with any rational form of "free speech" and should have no place in our society.

The issue here shouldn't be what was said, but the fact that someone was IMPERSONATING someone else with mal-intent. I am no lawyer, so I am not sure if that is a crime, but it certainly should be one.

Now, Congress has stepped back and allowed you to get a hearing aid from anyone.

And note how far the prices have dropped. Proof, if any were needed, that the big name hearing aid makers were gouging the public.

If I wrote that Bytedance was losing money, I miswrote. My intended meaning was that TickToc was unprofitable.

In your example you described the phone that needed replacing as "Ancient".

When you get to "Ancient", it doesn't really matter whether its apple or android. It's out of support on either, and yes, app support starts to fall apart at that age too.

My brother in law just updated from a Galaxy S5 this year (10 years old).

Disagree. Perhaps it _should_ be a big factor, but it's really not.

People text, and snapchat, and tiktok, and watch youtube and play spotify, a mobile game, and take pictures, and maybe once in a while even make a phone call.

As long as that all just works, they don't really care, and will use the phone until they break it or it stops holding a charge.

Or if they're on some sort of subsidy-treadmill, they replace it every 2 years regardless.

Very very few people are 'oh noes, Samsung/Apple/HTC is no longer sending me annoying updates that make me reboot my phone... I need a new phone now!'

Tomorrow it will be insulin prices or something.

I'd like to see them go after the prices of the interferon drugs used to control MS. My sister used to need to take one of them once a month, and before she was taken off of it the price had gone up to $1600/dose. The feds had put anybody using it on MedicAid automatically, but that's a huge, unreasonable price for something like that.

And hearing aids. Notice how you can now get them by mail order at about 1/10 the price the big boys charge? Wonder why they've always been so expensive until now? Well, here's the answer: "Everything the traffic will bear!" Congress should have stepped in with an investigation decades ago, but they were too busy pocketing campaign contributions to bother.