This, plus the scarily efficient people at Columbia House (who could track you down better than the CIA, I am convinced) loading you up with 12 albums for a penny. When I bought an album, it was because I heard a song on the radio and I listened to the whole thing over and over and had plenty of time to discover the b-sides, the deep cuts, and the obscure tracks that end up becoming my favorites over time. But if I want to discover a new artist today, I have to discover not only them, but the 800 zillion little new music sites that are all over the place, or the 3 conglomerates all running the single algorithm that will just give me a combination of stuff I already know about and stuff they're aggressively pushing to everyone. We're not in a monoculture anymore. It's good because the industry gatekeepers don't have control of the entire flow of exposure, but it's also got a downside in that we must drink from many small streams instead of one big river.

If you're over a certain age, you're looking for the song or the band that makes you feel like you did when you heard music twenty years ago, regardless of genre. It's why bands get accused of either being sell-outs or changing too much by their fans who were around when they were a grubby local act, or the bands not changing enough and still trying to ride nostalgia and fit their middle-aged butts into the same leather pants they did twenty years ago. Music is just as much about emotion and sense-memory as it is about hooks and lyrics and melodies.

Bingo. This is the real reason the big, somewhat-reputable sellers are gone while the fly-by-night counterfeiters are still there. The Zon doesn't care about what's in the store so much as it cares about what's outside the store and they'd rather snuff a (potential) competitor (even if it's not as huge) than a supplier that's wholly dependent on them. They care about keeping shoppers in the ecosystem more than keeping shoppers happy with products.

The click farms that do this are in this whole business. They create accounts by the metric ton, using scripts and spreadsheets or banks of cheap phones and sim cards for verification purposes. Then they use batches of the accounts to review free items to boost each account's reviewer rating (I can always tell when someone is bringing a new batch of fakers online because I'll get a flurry of downloads on a free short story I have up, and really random nonsense reviews like, "product received on time" (it's a digital download) and "10/10 would purchase again" (it's an ebook) or "super-fast shipping, great customer service!" The star ratings don't always match up with the nonsensical word salad, because accounts with a range of star ratings look more legit than ones that one-star or five-star everything. An account that does this to a handful of free items earns legitimacy through "verified reviews" quickly and cheaply.

Dunno if I'd call it "innovative" to build your reputation under the "everything made in USA" banner and then bring it all in from China, or how "innovative" it is to bully local gubmints into giving you tax abatements for decades, build your utility infrastructure out for you at cost, and undercut every local business in a 25-mile radius based on the promise of "jerbz" that don't even pay enough to keep your employees off the dole.

Also, Walmart keeps "reconfiguring the sales floor" to include less and less actual stuff. and more empty shelving, because who cares--you're too poor to shop somewhere else and there's nowhere else to go anyway. At least out here in the sticks.

Well, that's the thing. You're free to change it...if you know how. If you don't know how (the difference between "user" and "developer"), you move on to something else. I keep thinking the FOSS community forgets that only a small percentage of users are ever going to be programmers or developers. The appeal of FOSS is "tools anyone can use or modify" but there are far more anyones in the "use" group than the "can modify" group. FOSS has always struggled with maintaining a user-focus (without the benefit of profit in a non-judgmental sense) versus developer-focus (hey, I'm working on this because it interests me and I'm not getting paid, anyway).

For my part, of the programs I use in my daily life (Scrivener, PC games, Chrome, and Firefox), the games and Scrivener work in Windows. There's an "unofficial" Linux version of Scrivener, but with the development lag, it's hard enough getting the official Windows versions of Scriv to come up alongside their native Mac version. Many of my PC games *might* work in VMware...but they might not, depending on if it's Tuesday and it's raining. And maybe my mouse is jumpy and the extra seconds between the input and the game lag turns me into Leeroy Jenkins at the worst possible time.

I just need them to work. I want to click the button, run the program, and do my *real* work (or play my *real* game) instead of "hunt down the obscure bug/setting/command-line fix of the day. I don't need to be told "you should use the command line for that" when I want to use the button.

And it absolutely drives me up a wall to go into a user forum or IRC and say, "I need to do the thing. How do I use X to do the thing?" and be told the equivalent of, "Why would you want to do the thing at all? You should do the other thing. And don't use X. Use Y, Z, and Q, to do the other thing, and you should use the command-line because reasons."

I loved KDE. I loved KDE4.2 even harder. Yes, with all the bells and whistles and plasma. KDE was what Windows wanted to be when it grew up. I'm currently using Mate on my linux laptop because it's the only default that will work on my chokey little graphics card and Mint. I would love to "install it for grandma" but "Grandma" (my mom) needs Windows to do all her specific stuff.

What happened is that people stopped having time to understand "how computers work" as a hobby or a monolithic enterprise. Just like people stopped having to understand how cars work, unless it's their profession. Most of us just get in the things and point them towards work or the store. Operating Systems are becoming invisible. That's what happened. Ubiquitousness is invisibility.

You can't shoot cancer and heart disease.

Not just contractor grade stuff, but most home designs are not customized to the region or, more granularly, to the lot itself. Rather, they're customized to a footprint on a lot, and designed to keep the materials cost per square foot low. You won't see long breezeways with southern exposures or barrel-vaulted ceilings because the materials costs for living space will go through the (barrel-vaulted) roof, and the footprint won't fit the average square or rectangular lot as well.

Well, no, not really. An armed population can *attempt to* restore the rights that the portion of the population with the most arms wants restored. Which was the point the original upthread was making about the 2A and slaveowners.

Thinking and writing and planning aside, the point at which this all falls apart is the simple fact that an armed population is simply a population that possesses arms. Possession does not imply skill, or even the knowledge of which end goes towards the other guy.

You mean like the "mental health issues" that every white perpetrator of a mass shooting is explained away with? The CDC has every right to study the effect that plentiful and free movement of firearms in America have on our culture's overall health the same way they study the effect of other types of lead poisoning.

I believe that's called the US Army, and they also give you clothes, too.

Of course it's an uncomfortable topic for the NRA. They're not about *giving* people guns, they're about people *buying* guns. If you *give* them guns, you can't get at their money now, can you? And if you can't get at their money, you don't have the money to buy the congresscritters to suppress the information about how many gunfails there are in the US each day. And you don't have the money to send out those glossy mailers ginning up the fear that someone is coming to Take Yer Gunz Awayz so you rush right out and buy more, giving them more money so they can tell you how much more you should be afraid, so you buy more guns and they get more money so they can tell you why else you should be afraid and you buy more...

With even more obvious irony that the UK, after exporting its empire to the world, decides that when the world "returns export" that it doesn't want to play anymore...

Pfft. So you had grass, huh? Lucky.