Similarly, if you go to buy a new Pixel and choose to trade in your old phone, the contract states that if they determine your phone is intelligible for trade in, you won't get your phone back.

Don't be an ass. It's not about "too cheap". If some random wacko kills you on the street, are you "too cheap" for not having hired a personal bodyguard? Or are we all just inundated with a million potential monthly-fee subscription services and we have to make a value judgement about which ones we can afford and are likely to be beneficial to us?

Does Breyers still make "Ice Cream"? The ones that Kroger sells aren't labelled as "Ice Cream". They are "Frozen Dairy Desert"

And yes, I too once thought of Breyers as one of the higher quality ice creams. Another fond childhood memory shattered.

Yep, that was my exact impression of the email...the charity wasn't visible enough for them benefit from any publicity. By amazon's way of thinking, I probably shouldn't volunteer in scouts anymore because I'm only helping a few dozen kids in my community, which isn't enough impact.

I had my donations going to my elementary school PTA. Looks like they've received about $750 from amazon. That doesn't sound like much, but they get a bit from amazon, and a bit from kroger, and a bit from busch's, a bit from box-tops-for-educations, and it all adds up. Sometimes it only takes $100 for a teacher to acquire the materials for a really great project idea for the kids to learn from.

During the great northeast blackout from about 20 years ago, I had natural gas working the entire time. It seems at least some utility companies planned ahead.

Lets just repeat his question for a different detector...how many people own a radon detector? I'd say it's pretty rare.

Mine doesn't vent outside (I wanted to change it to make it do so, but it would be quite a pain in the ass). My smoke detector (which is less than 10 feet from the stove) goes off less than once a year. Maybe just try not burning your food when you cook? Get a infrared thermometer, and watch your temperature when heating up. Learn the smoke point of the oils you use to cook and keep under it. It's really not that difficult to not trip a smoke detector when cooking.

Right. But then the downside (if you see it that way) is that there is no way to use the assistant that I can figure out. I've toggled that setting, because I do use the shutdown/reboot options more than I use the assistant, but every now and then I would like to actually make use of the assistant, but I can't. Why can't there be an assistant button on the power screen? Maybe if I turned on "Hey google" it might, but I've disable that because I don't like accidental triggers when it mishears me.

Lol. How are you going to provide "garantees" against this: I create a codebase, I open source it, I privately fork the codebase and install backdoors on my fork, I continue to apply any patches to the public codebase against my private fork (ensuring none of them break the backdoors), and run the forked code on my server.

Any level of protection that open source might provide only exists if you compile the code yourself and run it on hardware you can trust.

The poster also said "the power you need at night comes from your partner on the other side of the planet". Regardless of what else they might have said, THIS was the point being discussed in the reply.

In most cases I'd agree with you. However, in this case, the OP ( Iamthecheese ) got really snippy about people being wrong. "I'm kind of tired of seeing...Please do a little research". When in fact the OP was the one who was flat out wrong. When you start chastising people for being wrong when it is you yourself who don't know what you are talking about, you lose the benefit of a cordial discussion, IMHO.

What I find most amazing about this story is just how rare her specific cancer is.

Normally if your illness is that rare, you are pretty much screwed unless something is discovered by accident while working on something else. But with techniques like this they can develop customized cures for people that otherwise would be out of luck.

Nobody is forced to accept currency for most everyday stuff. The only force is for debt. Currency is legal tender for all debts. That's a good thing. It keeps people from being indebted to some arbitrary form of payment which may make it difficult to pay off (ie: debt slavery/servitude)

Aside from that, there's no forced obligation to accept fiat currency. If you go to the grocery store and buy a box of cereal, there is no debt. They're perfectly free to deny you the sale if you don't pay in the arbitrary payment method of their choice. It's only if they say "take the cereal today and you can pay me next week" that they are obligated to accept fiat currency.

Today I learned that 60+ million year old dinosaur bones fall under intellectual property rights. Mickey Mouse copyright suddenly doesn't seem so crazy.

So at this point, I was thinking they were just talking about using bones from a dinosaur that wasn't a T-Rex. But then...

Would it really be that difficult to distinguish a real bone from a cast? How did this even make it to that stage of nearly getting auctioned? You couldn't possibly expect to fool the actual purchaser passing off a cast bone for a real one.