First, It's about time Microsoft starts doing something about these open source scam forks in their store. I've talked about this for years in my journals on Slashdot and it's a practice that's got to be stopped.

On the other hand, there needs to be a sanctioned system in place that allows OSS to take in some form of a donation. The main reason that paint.net has a cost on the store was because Microsoft wouldn't allow the donation button in the app unless it pointed to their store and Microsoft took a large cut. I get why Microsoft wants to have that since it pays them (and the credit card processing fees) as well as makes it easier to actually donate since the store handles the transaction rather than a third party like Paypal, but if they really want to make the store the de facto place to get apps, they need to allow concessions such as reduced fees for non profit app developers.

At this point, he has two options.

1) Pay the Billion and move on

2) Hope that a judge believes that Twitter screwed up numbers. Considering that Twitter admitted to overstating users for years and announced it right after they took the offer, he has a leg to stand on.

After that, he can simply make another offer for less. Sure it (might) cost him 1 Billion Dollars, but if it saves him 10 billion cause they accept a lesser offer...

A battery for a Nissan leaf ranges from $5500-9500 depending on size https://www.recurrentauto.com/... [recurrentauto.com] (not sure of source, but prices sounds about right.)
Many Nissan outlets say they last from 8-12 years depending on mileage (100k to 150k on average) and abuse. Here's a dealer blog. https://www.downtownnashvillen...
And I know that Nissan is saying they last much longer, but only if you recycle them for solar chargers and things other than powering your car. https://insideevs.com/news/351...

An engine for a Nissan versa (close to the leaf's size) costs $3010 remanufactured. https://shop.advanceautoparts....
It gets even cheaper from a Junkyard.anywhere from $500 to $2000, although you don't know what you're getting. https://www.google.com/search?...
Nissan Versa's tend to last 150-200k miles according to reports. https://motorandwheels.com/how...
On Average, most drivers drive roughly 12k-15k miles per year. https://www.kbb.com/car-advice...

Long story short, you could buy at least 2 Nissan Versa engines for the price of one Leaf battery. And the Versa's engine will most likely last longer than 10 years anyway as long as it's properly maintained.

I didn't say that car buyers don't buy electric cars, I said you don't want to.

Totally different time and era. The EV-1 was not only one of the first commercial EVs, it was the first you would want to drive. People loved them. The problem was that GM was doing it just to flex off their techno-muscle and get some sweet Government Cred and Green (as in money) and had no idea what they had, how good it was, and refused to experiment with longevity studies of the vehicle to see if customers were loyal to it past the lease. The second the government money dried up they killed it faster than you can say concept car, and they specifically designed the leases so that they wouldn't have to deal with them after they killed them.

And frankly, if you could buy one, where are you going to get the special lead acid batteries to replace the dead ones in the EV-1? Then who's going to put them in?

An 8 year old Nissan leaf retails for $8137 as of today. https://www.kbb.com/nissan/lea...
A battery for a Nissan leaf ranges from $5500-9500 depending on size https://www.recurrentauto.com/... (not sure of source, but prices sounds about right.)

If you're a gambling man, sure buy an older Leaf, just keep in mind you're practically buying another Leaf if the battery goes flat, which at that point, you might as well lease a new one, trade it for another one when the lease expires, and never have to worry about a surprise battery bill.

Frankly, it's an electric vehicle. If you're leasing it, you'll want to trade it in anyway.

In fact, you never want to buy an electric car unless you're a rich car collector that likes lighting money on fire, and this will never change unless a industry wide universal "drop-in" battery solution is developed. And that will never happen.

Electric cars are not ICE cars. The battery has a finite life span and the expense of replacing it is typically 1/3 to 1/2 the price of the car when you bought it new.

Once you hit 8 years or 100000 Miles on your Mach-E, Car resellers will avoid buying that car like the plague for fear of getting burned like they did with bad battery Tesla's and Nissan Leafs. The only way you'll be able to sell it is on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace in the hopes that someone who doesn't know better takes the car off of your hands.

This is one of the reasons why so many car manufactures are building electric cars now. The only green they care about is money. They know that these cars have a guaranteed extreme back end high cost, and they can use that as leverage to keep you on the lease bandwagon.

No. This is one Democrat Legislation I can get behind.

On the other hand, It's Democrat Legislation, so it will probably standardize mini USB.

Back when I was in high school in the early 90s, I had to write a research paper for a science class. Mine was entitled "Why we should be burning Paper and Plastic instead of recycling it".

It pretty much stated that plastic recycling was an end sum game, since most plastics (and paper at the time) could not be recycled past 25-50% in the 90s and eventually all of the plastic made today (IE: the 90s) would eventually end up in a landfill (IE: Now), it would just take longer to get there. The solution given in the paper was to burn the paper and plastic in a incinerator while turning the heat into electricity, and then use the electricity to clean the exhaust of any particle or greenhouse gases and sell the excess power if any to cover maintenance and waste handling costs. It also discussed replacements to wood paper such as faster growing bamboo or grass based paper, using the paper replacements to reduce plastic usage in many household containers to minimize the need for plastic in the first place since paper burns cleaner than plastic and is biodegradable, and encouraged the use and recycling of materials that have a 100% recycling rate, such as glass and metals.

The paper got a C from the teacher (and was not well received by students because it was "anti-recycling"). He said that although the works cited and math used was correct, the premise was wrong, since plastic and paper recycling is still reducing the size of the landfill needed, and is justifiable vs no recycling. (Even though the incinerator idea would produce 0 landfill waste, and could be used to theoretically reduce existing landfill sizes) He also believed the Incinerator would replace one pollution (Landfills) with another (Air Pollution) since he didn't believe that incinerator exhaust could be completely scrubbed of smog, ozone depleting and greenhouse gases.

I find it funny that my high school science project from the 90s is being justified almost 30 years later.

So pretty much the corporate equivalent of "SO LONG SUCKER!!"

I'm curious to know if this goes to the level of possible fraud charges by the SEC. Twitter didn't seem to falsify account statements, but their stock trading price is influenced by subscriber growth or decline, and it's definitely worth less if there's less users on the platform than before the buyout announcement.

The thing is their user share is close to, or has peaked. It will only decline from there regardless of if Musk buys it or not.

I'm assuming if Musk buys it there will be a similar exodus to what happened to MySpace once News Corp bought it but that depends on how both political sides perceive how the company is run. Twitter needs to be perceived at neutral to survive, but I don't think Musk, or anyone for that matter, can accomplish this when the right thinks it's a left echo chamber and the left thinks its not doing enough to stop the right. The worst thing a corporation can do is take a political side. It all but guarantees that half of your customer base has a negative opinion of the company just on politics alone. See Disney for the latest example.

Their biggest competitor right now is TikTok. They really should have stuck with Vine but by killing it, they allowed a competitor like TikTok take over that space and slowly encroach into theirs. Because Teens see Facebook and Twitter as old hat, they're both in or approaching decline, but at least Facebook hedged their bet with Instagram and Twitch. Twitter has done nothing in that regard and has killed potential apps if anything.

How about a New Phantasy Star Online that doesn't take a degree in mechanics and resource management to understand.

Currently, I would say Twitter is at the Plateau stage of their popularity unlike Yahoo which was in full freefall with no viable plan to right themself at the time MS made the offer. That's not necessarily bad for twitter at this point in time if they can maintain it.

The keyword here however is maintain. At this point, either Musk or Twitter execs could initiate the freefall regardless of who wins just on political climate alone, which will devalue to company.

At least shareholders will get paid guaranteed if Musk wins. If Musk loses there's nothing stopping Musk from triggering the poison pill for shits and giggles just to watch the share price tumble to penny stock prices in a few months and see if he can buy it for a song post offer from investors bailing out.

Remember when Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, and Yahoo Shareholders listened to their board and said no instead of taking a no-brainer overinflated cash offer given to them by a probably drunk Steve Ballmer?

Remember how they all got screwed with shares not even worth 10% of the value MS put on the company when Verizon bought Yahoo's corpse 9 years later?

Do you honestly see your share worth more 9 years from now than what is being offered today?

While you're thinking about that, Remember that Vine idea that Twitter bought and killed some years ago that some Chinese company cloned and is now dominating social media with?

I don't disagree there. MS definitely wants to go down the 5 years and done hardware model like Apple and Google. The OEM's especially want them to go that way too. It wouldn't surprise me that they start pushing rolling system requirements soon. They're already testing it in the insider builds with the watermark and all.

And MS definitely wishes they had a walled garden store like Google and Apple, but for some reason they seemingly don't want to go down that route at least in the short term.

Windows 11 SE is the most prominent example right now. All cloud, Education focused. externally cloud managed. It's pretty much a clone of Chrome OS, Yet they refuse to sell this to consumers, and focus on the education market, which is mostly switching their iPad's with cheaper Chromebooks since they're easier to manage and repair, and they're not looking at Win 11 SE cause it has all the problems of Windows now with a more restricted, must reset to fix interface.

Windows 11 S is the consumer oriented cloud version, but again, it doesn't compete with Chromebooks due to it's hardware overhead and price. especially with Chrome OS flex coming soon out of beta for free.

If Microsoft was serious, they would be giving away WIndows 11 S for free (or give it away with ARM Processors) without the option to upgrade to pro unless you pay for a key. This would be cheap and plenty enough for Grandma to read Facebook and gives them the walled garden experience that MS can make money on when Grandma wants her slot machine and bingo games.

Windows 11 isn't being adopted for two reasons.

1) Compatibility. They put the system requirements so high almost no computer short of a machine newer than 2016 is guaranteed to run it, and if you didn't setup your BIOS correctly when you built your PC, even a new machine will fail the check. that coupled with the fact that many of the requirements are unnecessary, useless, or dubious for 99% of PC usage and it gets more infuriating why MS went down this path short of they want to be like Apple and not have to support anything over 5 years of age.

2) Idiocracy. They're Stupidifying 20 years of interface design for your protection to chase the Chromebook paper tiger. They've basically replaced a high end Sony Hi-Fi system with a "My First Sony" and wonder why no one is buying it. They already dumbed down the context menus and start menu, and they're still slowly replacing more of the smart control panel settings with the dumbed down settings screen.

The difference is the lameness filter filters out more annoying obvious things like first posts and ASCII art, and gives you the reason why its not posting as soon as you hit post so you can correct it or get the hint.

The Flag is used for more egregious things like doxxing or porn, and wasn't even in the original Slashdot until they got sued to remove posts.

The rest of the moderation is handled by users, and is viewable by anyone.