yeah, I agree. For a company that first peaked by being a mail-order catalog based system, they could have taken Amazon's model, paid up on the stupid patent rights (even though most of the details about online shopping are bleeping obvious, but never mind, /. had that discussion 25 years ago...I was there.), and dominated that model all over again... ...but they knew if they did, they'd hurt their retail...so they died (multiple times).

This aspect has been true in other parts of tech history; a company won't embrace the future because it hurts their current. IBM crippling the PS2 because a properly configured 386 would have competed with their workstation line. The supposedly paperless office of the Xerox PARC system was lost to Xerox because the copierheads feared it would hurt their copier and ink sales (mind you, in spite of 50 years of the PARC lifestyle on our computers, we're still shelling out tons for HP ink every year, so much for paperless...).

Yeah - the McDonnell Douglas attitude. Such mergers, where the better company (who was the larger) gives way to the management of the smaller one happened with the SiriusXM merger. XM had the better tech, the wider variety of stations, the wider variety of playlists within those stations, the more loyal customers, and generally the higher individual stock value at the time (XM holders got 4.6 post-merger shares for each 1 XM).

Yet Sirius's management won out on every level except the tech, where they were the weakest of a bunch of weak stats. XM drove the tech, but Sirius drove the content...into the ground. Most of the XM stations with Sirius matches were shut down, along with many of the content-specialized stations that distinguished sat radio from the crap we already got over the air, and the Sirius stations with their much smaller clear-channel quality playlists dominated. The product saved money...and lost value.

I had a less historical, more geeky, version of the same. No matter how much I tried to emphasize 1977 *original* price, I could not get Google to give me a site that described the original retail prices of Star Wars figures at the time (I was looking for it as a matter of measuring inflation, to the price of Prisoner figures today on a kickstarter).

Everything just kept being page after page of either modern price guides, or actual figures for sale. Google just wouldn't give up on the commercial side of it and give me some page (somebody SOMEWHERE has to have written it) that had the original retail prices, and maybe even a discussion about the increase of the prices between rise in demand for popularity and the general inflation of the late 70s early 80s. Nothing at all.

Jacobsen's Algorithm wasn't widely implemented until the 90's and you know it.

While Grady is not a grid engineer, I am pretty sure he is not misinformed. Are you a power grid engineer? Do you work at a power station or large solar installation?

Isn't that illegal in Texas and Florida?

I didn't, but now I'm thinking of something like "Pack 'em, see ya!" which should go fine with these new-fangled portable computers.

Well, Linux isn't Mac or Windows, and generally doesn't want to be. There are lots of very good desktops for Linux distributions and Fedora supports most of them which is a tremendously good thing. You don't need a spin of Fedora to get KDE or XFCE or Mate, but it's faster to set up one of these desktop environments with a Fedora spin.

Like I said, probably not for you, but for others these are good things to have. It's nothing at all like having different versions of Windows (Home, Pro, Enterprise), thankfully.

I agree with you but don't underestimate DeBeers.

They have enough diamond reserves that they can steeply discount natural ones for long enough to put synthetic diamond makers out of business.

LK

I appreciate your comments as my original comment was not particularly good.

I suspect, at this point, that Hasan is already making a living running No Tech For Apartheid, and protesting for Palestine. It is even possible that it is a better living than they made working for Google, but probably not. I am not saying that sacrifices have not been made. However, when I say that this person is a professional protester I understood what that meant. My wife is a professional organizer. You can pay her, by the hour, to organize your closet, or your warehouse. Ibraheem is a professional protestor.

Citation?

If I lived in an apartment with no charging infrastructure and the need to recharge every 50k then that may be the case.

But if I use at home for commuting? I suspect I wouldn't have an issue plugging it in every couple of days and never worrying about the gas station.

TikTok itself is banned inside China. Many western social media and news organizations are also banned there. The precedence is already there.

The difference between trolls and bot farms and manipulation directly from the social media platform is gas lighting is significantly easier. The platform has all of a user's graph data and can directly measure engagement with manipulative content. If they detect any engagement they can push less subtle manipulative content and accelerate as they measure increased engagement.

Trolls and bot farms don't have the same level of feedback. They're certainly not ineffective but their targeting is not nearly as precise. TikTok in particular is problematic in that Chinese intelligence services have direct access to and influence on the platform.

This is concerning not just with telemetry and graph data but also influence campaigns. Because the weighs in "the algorithm" of any social media feed are completely opaque to the end user there's no way to know the difference between organic content, stuff the user engaged with knowingly, and content inserted to wag the dog. This is used by platforms for advertising but works the exact same way for manipulating for any reason.

Well damn, I was totally going to buy one before you said that!

Yep. Thus helping the blue states to maintain their dominance in technology work.

Acela has been around since 2000. Acela trains are the fastest in the Americas, reaching 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) (qualifying as high-speed rail), but only over 49.9 miles (80.3 km) of the 457-mile (735 km) route. (source: wikipedia)