All it takes is a sudden surge in unallowable posts and overwhelming their limited ability to police them. Why spend millions buying them up when it's a lot cheaper to just make sure their existence is no longer politically acceptable. These days, you don't even need fake accounts to do that, there are plenty of real nitwits available and just looking for a voice.

Politics are a much stronger market force than competition and you don't become Facebook-sized without being keenly aware of this. What I'm more interested to see in the future is when/if these giants run out of smaller competitors to crush start using that tool against each-other.

Thing is... At this point, that doesn't sound entirely like a bad deal.

Somebody pays for it, most likely you. What you mean is that you don't get to see the invoice or the price the bureaucrat who's job is to spend other people's money agreed to. Remember, there's never a whole lot of downward pressure on prices when something is 'free'. The price gets set by a budget that nobody wants to get blamed for lowering and everybody naively believes should be increased.

Big pharma *loves* socialized medicine and they lobby pretty hard to expand it.

There wouldn't be as much of an advantage to stacking this one though. Might as well just use a bigger version when you need more power.

... doing an experiment on publicity stunts.

In my limited experience, it feels like it's having an opposite Streisand-like effect. I imagine it works if they keep doing it but to abuse your analogy, I know of at least a handful of people who had their first sip specifically because they were told not to and found it rather tasty.

BBC: Extinction of the facts.

And I found the misread amusingly appropriate.

Well, the 3d printed piston isn't billet or forged either... It obviously is resistant enough to do the job but I wouldn't compare the resulting material to billet or forged either. In fact, my guess is that it would quite comparable to an alloy casting.

No, it has to be the climate or else you don't get your research grants.

To be clear... Updates are never pushed. You pull them yourselves and never in an automatic/scheduled manner.

This is not a case of "OMG, my device can get remotely Pwned at any time!"

Keep in mind that the update is *accessible* via http so that routers which are typically too space-limited to have openssl/gnutls/etc. by default can download it directly but that is not the typical update route.

Typical update route is that the user will download (via the https default) the firmware using their regular browser and then upload it via either the router's WebUI or ssh/scp.

It *is* an attack vector but you'll probably wait a heck of a long time playing MITM to find an user that is actually performing an install via http. As for individual software packages, those are typically installed once (after a full firmware flash) and never touched until the next time you flash a new version of OpenWRT onto the device.

Well, it's by no means comparable to Visio, but for basic diagrams and getting the point across, draw.io is surprisingly convenient. Wish they had an offline version.

If Inkscape isn't fancy enough for you, I doubt draw.io will fit your bill but it might be useful for others at least.

I certainly wouldn't mind the look never changing if that meant the overall number of bugs actually decreasing and my computer upgrades actually going towards my data/applications rather than being gobbled up the OS' ever-expanding resource requirements.

A clean install of Win10 is about 30 times the size of a clean WinXP install. Are you 30 times more productive with it than you were with XP? Is it 30 times easier for a maintain and manage? If all the applications I use could be magically ported to something XP's exact feature set (but, say 64bit) I can't think of a single Win10 feature that would make me want to switch over.

While I appreciate the indignation, it's more complicated than this.

As a single (of many) example of why: When you make something as complicated and ubiquitous as healthcare 'free', no amount of bureaucracy is going to be able to keep up with what should be a 'fair' cost. This creates a void above those costs and they will inevitably rise for many different reasons greed and profiteering chief among them, but also ass-covering and good, old-fashioned ignorance.

This is true any time you spend someone else's money actually, not just 'free'. Insurance companies have every interest to keep costs down but they typically can't afford to audit or even check invoices below $30k. You can imagine how, eventually, if 'everybody does it', something that should cost 100$ ends up costing 500$.

As I mentioned, this isn't the *only* reason for high healthcare costs but it is one that applies to just about every system, be it Canada's 'free' healthcare or the US' cut-throat system.

I don't think regulation prevents free market. So long as the regulation is frame not to favour any individual player in the market.

Patents would be an example of regulation that hinders free market. The patent holder is treated differently than his would-be competitors.
A law that makes fraud/theft illegal is an example of regulation that favours free market. It's just as illegal for every competing entity.

The surveillance state is always bi-partisan.

All you needed to convince both sides is: "Cars will soon need to be connected and approved in order to work. We can tax every mile, we can record every location. We can 'protect the children' by automatically enforcing every single traffic regulation. And we can finally get a share of the revenue (fines) by adding fees when local authorities access the system."

How much will this cost you ask? Next to nothing, all the hard parts have already been figured out in China.