Then let's amend it to an algorithm not fully disclosed to its users. This way chronological can stay common-carrier, but the secret sauce of Facebook and X post ranking becomes editorial.

Their goal is to ensure that only crappy corporate music companies can create formulaic music that nobody wants to listen to. I don't see the downside here.

"and finally, finally, Slashdot returns to being a shining example of what discourse can be."

That can't happen while the white supremacists are emboldened by the cryptocucks who put their business name in the spam filter, and formerly put "Nazi" in there too so they could shelter them.

Yeah, but how much of that is the "I might not get it or it might be fake" discount?

I stopped shopping on eBay a long time ago, except in situations where it was the only way to buy a particular product, because the risk is so much higher if the product doesn't work or is damaged. Return policies are inconsistent to nonexistent, you're on the hook for the return cost (if it is even possible to return it), and at least historically, you could generally assume that they would side with power sellers over random individuals almost every time, so the company doesn't have your back.

And most sellers would take several days to ship out products in the first place, and then would ship them by the cheapest, slowest shipping possible, which means it takes a week and a half to get anything. It costs money to ship out goods within 24 hours of when an order is placed, and that's factored into the cost of buying things from major vendors instead of from some random person on eBay who happens to be hoarding toilet paper or whatever.

Buying from eBay has always felt a bit like sending your teenager to buy produce at the farmer's market, knowing that there's a 20% chance that the right farmer will even be there that day to provide what you want, and if the kid picks bad produce, you're stuck with it. And your kid doesn't have a car, and thus will have to walk there and back, so the trip will take six days.

The extra protection offered by going through a reputable vendor is worth it to me more often than not, as is timely shipping. When timeliness doesn't matter, I'll buy it for 60% off from AliExpress and wait the extra two to four weeks.

I heard that Britain and other Western powers are sending weapons to kill Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

Oh wait. They Are.

Did Western leaders not think there would be payback for that? And with British generals telling the public that they should prepare to go to war with Russia, I'd say that aiding hackers is pretty much a low-level response from the Russians, all things considered.

Unlike, say, Javelin missiles killing your tank crews.

My $200 Moto phone offers far better value than any iPhone. Even if it lasts only half as long (past that already) it's still cheaper. And it has features that Apple doesn't offer, not even counting sideloading.

The POTS network is going away. The telcos in the US are trying to get out of their obligation to maintain it right now.

That's literally not what I said, kid. Learn to read before you come at me again.

Reducing CO2 is the goal, and you can't get there by increasing efficiency to the thermodynamic maximum. The only ways to reduce CO2 are to prevent emissions or to suck CO2 out of the air. Mostly this means shutting down coal and gas plants, efficiency might help with that but it mostly means building solar and wind farms, and energy storage.

There's a lot of scams on this topic, in this case it is Microsoft's AI division "buying" green energy from their non-AI division, possibly increasing emissions via transmission losses, and not in the least promoting the construction of new clean power plants since it's just internal accounting. This is worse than the usual scam of buying green energy, which at least has the potential to result in new green power plants by affecting the market price of green energy.

You said "unless the company is ready to spy on them on an ongoing basis to ensure they're not compromised by Chinese security services."

You seem to have forgotten.

You've been doing pretty well lately, don't backslide.

I mean, I used the line input on PowerBook hardware back in the day for that, because I was cheap^H^H^H^H^Ha grad student, and because usable external input hardware was nonexistent. But by the time Apple dropped the line input, I had long ago moved on to external audio input hardware, because the internal input wasn't ever really all that great.

Less laws is fine too. This wouldn't even be a problem without copyright law.

Maybe, maybe not. What I usually find is that for anything that Walmart sells in their brick-and-mortar stores, they are usually cheaper, with only a few exceptions. But otherwise, for high-volume items and expensive items, Amazon is usually about even for the best price, though sometimes other merchants' cards or whatever can provide bigger discounts (e.g. PayBoo from B&H). For things that are only sold by third-party sellers, yeah, the price is marked up by shipping costs.

This is, of course, ignoring the AliExpress "I'm willing to wait a few weeks for it to arrive on the slowest boat from China" discount, which is often a very high double-digit percentage.

You missed the point there. Every single Microsoft employee is spied on through the OS no matter where they are located. That's what telemetry does.

Cheaper before or after you factor in the 5% Prime discount that you lose by not having their credit card?