I'm Australian, so not tied to either of the USA's major political parties, but it doesn't take more than a brief skim of the main page to know that gab.ai is heavily republican leaning; the articles there currently are overtly focused on discrediting democrats. It's often quite complicated to dissect censorship or coverage and determine whether it's biased or not; our local public broadcaster was audited recently(ish) and turned out to be neutral, even though one side was utterly convinced it was extremely biased towards the other. If I were worried about a platform being biased I'd take a long hard look at my own views, and the views of those around me, to make sure I wasn't falling victim to something like the False Consensus Effect.

It's probably fairly neutral, overall.

Nearly any decision made by a sane person can be justified reasonably, from their point of view, with enough context, but very few of those decisions and very little of that context makes it to the consumer (for various reasons). I tend to take the stance that any sufficiently large organisation cannot communicate internally effectively enough to create a unified understanding of the challenges their customers face and how to solve them; this lack of unified understanding seems to lead to bold moves aimed at decreasing the difficulty of the business problems whilst increasing inconvenience for customers (DRM is a decent example).

Understanding that, it's reasonable to assume that a large corporation won't have the customer-first focus that a small business might. Businesses with natural monopolies are less likely to make concessions for a customer, as their business performance requirements and lack of growth path (since they already have it all) lead to only two ways to increase profits: simplify interactions with customers and products or increase prices. Those in higher-level decision-making positions seem unlikely to have much insight into the lives of significantly less wealthy people, and so don't have enough context to fully understand the impacts their decisions may have.

I guess my point is that you don't have to be a capitalist conspiracy theorist to have a default lack of trust in the generosity of large corporations, just scepticism for their internal communication abilities.

If you could disable it people would, and then they would complain that their phone kept turning off. I suspect if I still had an iPhone I'd turn it off immediately when I heard about it and forget about it if I started having issues later.

They really should tell you that there's a battery issue and that batteries can be replaced, though. Most people would just tap the "okay" button without reading it (my parents do that all the time), but for those who do read dialogue boxes it could help.

Nobody is entitled to an opinion they cannot defend, and anyone who respects someone else's indefensible opinion is an idiot for doing so. If they cannot – or will not – defend an opinion, they are not entitled to spout it into public discourse.

Random story which may elucidate why this is wrong:

I played World of Warcraft back in the classic days, and used to get pretty miffed when I saw +Spell Damage on a piece of armour instead of +Frost Damage; after all, why waste precious stat points on all those elements my frost mage wasn't going to use? Bollocks to that +33 Spell Damage item, it should ditch the other elements and become a +40 Frost Damage one.

My view was a bit naive, I'll admit. The game was balanced around the amount of bonus damage the existing armour provided; if it were altered to give me an advantage, which seemed possible (+single element damage seemed to use fewer item stat points than +all element damage), then they'd have to rebalance everything around that; probably by lowering the base damage of my character, which would suck.

So while you see this bundle which has Awesome Channel + 30 other channels you don't give a hoot about, the cable company is aware. It's bundling those for convenience on their behalf. If they removed the 29 channels you don't watch they wouldn't reduce the price, because it still costs them the same to deliver those channels that you do watch as it did previously. The others are sort of a bonus.

It's a bit weird, and easy to feel like you should be able to optimise and pick just the bit you want to get ahead, but it seems likely that the removal of channels from a pack wouldn't affect the price at all, because you're only paying for what you use - you're just lumped into a group with others who pay for the [different] parts that they use.

As an outside observer, I can confidently proclaim that this statement would be true of the vast majority of vocal political commentators here no matter which name was inserted into the sentence. It is frankly bizarre that such a large group of relatively learned individuals lack the capacity to introspect their own opinions and instead merely vomit forth whatever emotional response they hold as the one truth.

No person placed under intense and biased scrutiny is going to walk away looking like anything other than the most extreme piece of trash ever to walk the Earth, whether it's a politician or your ex-partner. The caricature of a human that evolves in your mind as a response to an emotional analysis is an enormous straw-man and you should be able to recognise and deconstruct that.

I don't have an intimate knowledge of U.S. politics, but I've yet to see anyone attempt to provide an analysis that wasn't trying to push an emotional opinion on the audience. No matter how elegant and subtle you think you're being, it's woefully transparent and repugnant to witness.

Daniel Dennet's rules for composing a successful critical commentary are as follows; if you wish to criticise someone you need to analyse the parts of their opinions that you agree with first, to ensure you fully understand the whole:

1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

No politician is universally bad or has universally bad ideas, and making it out like they are is just going to trigger our internal filters. I find myself skimming over or skipping large posts online most of the time these days; not because I lack attention span, but because the author isn't providing a thoughtful analysis.

The US seems to follow "buyer beware", whereas Australia (and NZ) follow "buyer be protected". If you buy a device with a 12 month warranty and a reasonable consumer would expect it to last in excess of five years flawlessly, you can likely get it repaired/replaced for free if it dies within that time period (though it'll probably take some arguing). Likewise if the device doesn't do what it purported to do, or what the sales person said it could do, you can have it refunded. Reduces risk on the buyer's behalf and encourages better quality goods. In theory.

Language is usually fairly irrelevant. It's like if I wanted to write an essay on the nature of monkeys (which I don't know much about) in Esperanto (which I don't know at all). I could learn the characters and grammar of Esperanto, which is apparently not super difficult, but that wouldn't teach me anything about monkeys or how to structure essays about them.

However most vegetable oils are high in omega-6, which is correlated with arthritis amongst the usual crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-6_fatty_acid#Suggested_negative_health_effects. It's used in pro-inflammatory immune responses, which are useful, but when consumed in excess (relative to omega-3, which is pretty hard to get given the 30:1 ratio most people apparently eat) it seems like it might not be so useful. Humans certainly didn't evolve with the ability to digest massive quantities of seed oil unimpeded by the fibrous seed itself. It looks like saturated fats and olive oil are still better for you, just for different reasons.

Microservices have some legitimate criticisms; it seems like you should only embark on that quest if you really know what you're doing and it's the best solution to your specific problem. It might be useful for expanding a monolith which is out of control, or for performance/language reasons in some cases, but building a whole system from microservices looks like it would be needlessly complicated once you delved in.

Perhaps, but imagine for a moment that you're an LGBT (or otherwise marginalised) teen living in a fairly hostile community. You'd want to reach out and communicate with people who could empathise, but wouldn't want to reveal your identity lest it lead to retribution. Not requiring a real name would allow them to reach out in a safer manner on that particular platform.

That isn't just restricted to LGBT people, either. Anyone with a condition or history who wanted to communicate about it without linking it to them in a way family/friends/employers might find out about could benefit from a lack of real name requirements. Bullies would benefit too, however, so it's a double edged sword.

It probably depends. If you're wheelchair bound and are unable to move into a vehicle unassisted you're already utilising wheelchair taxis, not normal taxis, so it probably wouldn't apply in those situations. Refusing to have a guide dog in the car is problematic though, as they're permitted pretty much everywhere and are quite well trained. It's not unreasonable to require drivers to take a guide dog if a blind person hails a taxi, unless they're allergic, so why should ridesharing services be permitted to do so?

In cases where it doesn't require much, if anything other than an attitude change, to support disabled people, it's more or less a no brainer. In other cases, if it should depend on the circumstances. If a person can't change the thing about them that's causing the issue (e.g. in this case, their disability) then requiring businesses to make reasonable changes to accommodate them is perfectly ethical. They're still human, and should be given the best chance to lead a normal life if they desire it.

Sony probably backed it to give them another edge over the Xbox One. It's an odd decision, however, given RPG remakes don't tend to happen.

I'll be interested to see if they can live up to the expectations we've developed over time. Upon replaying them I discovered that a large part of the depth of PSX and earlier Final Fantasy games was filling in the blanks – particularly when it came to personalities. Without voice acting you can come up with a completely different person depending on how you read them, which leads to different people having dissimilar experiences. With latter FF games they've been inserting a lot of voice acting, which I found very off-putting (it's not exactly A-list stuff, and I find that the personalities they project are strained).

I found Leigh and Kirk's FF7 Letters to be an interesting nostalgia trip. Kirk had been in the industry for a while before playing FF7, having been exposed to its legend on many an occasion, and exchanged letters with Leigh whilst he experienced it for the first time. There's a lot of things my mind skipped over as a kid; always ignored Tifa, for example, when I could have interpreted her in an entirely different and more mature way. It's interesting.

It'll be cool to see, regardless; re-imaginings are often fun ways of looking deeper into a story.

I'd be more concerned about the cigarette companies using countries to lodge World Trade Organisation complaints or suing you under old treaties than about people growing their own tobacco (not that doing so would be easy with current war-on-drugs surveillance technology); they're still trying to get Australia to reverse its widely-praised plain packaging laws.

It'd be interesting to find out how good lard is, but when it's coming from bacon you'd still have the same problems associated with other processed red meats. Coming from unprocessed red meat (i.e. pre-bacon curing), however, looks like it might be fine.