Apple's only advantage is that they are seen as a status symbol by certain people. Apple has gone out of its way to make sure that you can tell if someone you are talking to is using an iPhone. If they aren't using an iPhone then the experience is degraded significantly. There are a million video chat programs, and they all work great, but the cool kids all want to Facetime. In group chats they care what colors bubbles they have.

That works great in places where there are a lot of Apple users, but it works against Apple in places where there is not. In China there are replacements for all of Apple's software that everyone uses, even if you have a fancy phone you aren't really in Apple's ecosystem. In essence you are buying an iPhone to become a second class citizen in all of the software you actually want to use. Everyone else is running Android.

Throw in major financial issues in China and all of a sudden Apple's phones look like a very poor choice, even without throwing politics in the mix.

I was extremely disappointed by Three Body problem. I thought some of the concepts were pretty cool (I actually thought the part where the Trisolarians build the Sophons was great) and the the story through the lens of the Cultural Revolution was an interesting viewpoint. But damn, the writing sucked. Like you, I plodded on hoping it would get better and like you, I wondered if it was just the translation, or because I didn't have the right cultural background to get the cues, but ultimately... it's some good ideas that are just awfully executed.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But they can't subvert/create a cloud of several hundred accounts easily.

And you also put some kind of metrics in place for upvotes that compares their voting habits to known human users. If the thing is upvoting 30 times a day and most humans only upvote 12 times a day (or none), then flag the account for closer observation.

And most of all, you need a really good moderation advisor for this kind of thing. I recommend Lance Modoman. He's the real deal. He saved my forum.

heheheheh.

Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?

It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.

These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?

Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.

Weird market!

PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.

If you "sneak" amendments into an agreement, arguably said agreement would be invalid because you were duplicitous which prevented a meeting of the minds.

Yeah, but oh man you have to be pretty daft to not have seen this coming. No serious group of people thought there was a reasonable chance that hydrogen was the immediate future. They were gambling and they lost. If they didn't understand they were gambling? Just absolutely daft. A fool and their money. And yeah, I'd apply this to the first BEV users too. It wasn't certain they would be successful, and would have a lot of pain points.

I read an interview with one of the main protestors that got fired in the first wave. Their plan is to become a professional protestor. I suspect that pays better than being an average Googler.

Or more recently, a mimic of Android which this OS is a fork of. They're trying to be the Google of VR.

Let's say I write you a letter (on paper) and I encrypt this letter using a cypher that only you and I know. The government intercepts this letter and asserts it contains evidence of a crime. Are you or I compelled to assist in the decryption of that letter? No? Then why should electronic communications be any different?

Beyond that, how does preemptive invasion of the privacy of all persons (which is exactly what backdoors in encryption amount to) so that, at some future time, the government can sift the communications of those who may have broken the law not equate to a general warrant?

Worse than that was the federal government asserting that you could not grow wheat on your own land for your own use because such constituted "interstate commerce." Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) upheld that ridiculous notion.

Good flick if you want to get a feel for how Pharma sales work.

I'm surprised it hasn't be Pfbanned yet based on who it highlights.

They always rant about Wayland, systemd, Pulse/Pipewire, devops, dkms, quic, zfs, etc.

I used to wonder why they don't just not upgrade their os, but then I realized they are lazy and want somebody else to maintain their old system for them.

I mean, even compiling gentoo with the right use set is too hard for these bellyachers.

Yet the humility never occurs to them that the non-lazy people who actually build distros are embracing the newer technology.

Instead the Old Farts case aspersions and ad-hominems at these hard workers. It's pathetic.

I'm done with their BS and won't help them understand anymore - the arguments are almost universally in bad faith.

Because otherwise they would just not upgrade. I have some Infomagic Slackware CD's from 1993 they might be interested in. Yeah, my first Linux box was over 30 years ago and I competently run all those technologies now. I don't fear change even though understanding new tech takes work and I can't just rest on my laurels.