How nice for you and the other guy.

We were both fans. But allegedly it had a low number of tens of millions of users, but then firefox has a decent number of tens, so the percentages weren't terrible.

It's a collecting information about your activity service. It's not for you, it's for them.

yeah yeah if you're not paying you're the product yada yada.

Cool. But it was also useful to me. The bookmarking and tagging was very useful. The recommended articles were really good. And I shouldn't use it because?

And? All Americans are murderers because: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ? Where are the demonstrations? Where are the protests?

Mind you, in Russia an anti-war protest right now leads to 15 years behind bars.

I agree, but I feel like I have to speak up here to defend Governor Cox a bit (I live in Utah). He's actually an intelligent and very reasonable guy, and as close to a thoughtful centrist as has any hope of getting elected to a statewide office in Utah. His position on trans rights just about cost him re-election, even though he really wasn't saying anything other than "Hey, we have to be careful here, these kids are suffering and doing the wrong thing could cause a lot more suicides" (Utah already has among the highest teen suicide rates in the nation, and the US has pretty high rates relative to the world). His "disagree better" campaign, while exactly what we need in this country, IMO, also raised a lot of GOP eyebrows in the state. Which is just stupid, but it is what it is.

Anyway, the point is that he has to pick his battles. He often signs legislation he disagrees with because he knows the GOP-dominated state legislature can and will override him if he vetos, and being overridden is politically costly. And if you think that's a cop-out, you should look at the field of competitors he had in the GOP primary, none of whom could be called thoughtful, reasonable or anything close to centrist.

I'd prefer someone the left of how Cox acts, but he's not only the best we've got, he's the best we're likely to get. And I strongly suspect that Cox would prefer to move significantly leftward (which would still leave him right of center, nationally), but he's an astute politician and politics is the art of the possible.

A few comments, in reverse order.

First, code violations are civil, not criminal, in every jurisdiction I've ever heard of. What state are you in? The only way they become criminal is if you refuse to comply for long enough that a judge finds you in criminal contempt. In this case, I'd be shocked (even assuming shutting off the emergency disconnect would get you a citation, which seems unlikely, see below) that the first ticket would simply be an order to turn it back on. From there if you refused to comply it would escalate to fines, then increasing fines, then a court order to turn it on and pay the fines.

Second, the purpose of codes like this is to make sure that the house is livable. I expect the code (if it actually says a grid connection is required) was written before self-generation was realistically feasible and just wasn't considered. Odds are a house that has plenty of electricity but is technically in violation wouldn't be cited, unless you sold the place and the new owner complained, and even then they'd probably just require you to pay for reconnecting it. Further, I expect that as long as your house is still physically connected, it would be in compliance so if you were cited a judge would throw it out.

Of course, you shouldn't take my word for it, but it's pretty easy to find the laws and codes online. I'm curious enough that if you tell me where you are, I might even look them up for you :-)

That said, there very well might be something the power company can complain about if you try to get service disconnected so you don't have to pay the monthly connection fees. There might be some law giving them the authority to issue citations, essentially for non-compliance with their contracts. In practice, what would probably happen if they have that power and you called to disconnect is that they'd just tell you "no". But I'd really be surprised if they complained as long as you kept the service and paid the basic monthly fees; from their perspective it just looks like you're paying them money for nothing.

Finally, not having an exterior emergency disconnect is a serious code violation from what I can find (NEC 230.85 (that link is from NY, but the code is national)), so you might already have a code violation. I guess it depends when that requirement was added to the code vs when your system was installed, but you said your system was just redone recently?

The king is still head of state, so I'm okay with that.

Too late. That was already a thing in 1970.

It's good to have a second engine but it sure sounds like Gecko isn't long for this world.

You're right we should allow business to abuse monopoly positions, infringe on privacy and not give a damn about the negative social impacts. Oh and funnel money into tax havens. /s

I mean yeah, but everyone knows which are the good universities and which aren't.

I don't think the EU is claiming Apple has a monopoly in the smartphone market, I think the EU is claiming Apple has a monopoly in the market for apps, etc., for iPhones, where its market share is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.

The Mozilla foundation has pissed away tens of millions of dollars on "features" nobody asked for

I liked and used pocket.

I can't believe how angry people are about an online bookmarking and tagging service integrated into a browser.

You merely reiterate my point. The left don't care about reining in the financial markets, they care about castrating kids.

Sure, it may provide some small value somewhere. But just as you don't have go to to the Moon to develop velcro, you don't have to create a giant financial casino to develop low-latency communications... you just invest the money on developing low-latency communications instead.

There is simply no world where it makes sense for the best and brightest kids to be spending their time figuring out how to take a tiny cut of transactions rather than building new things that will be useful to everyone.

In my experience it seems that consultants are often only hired to justify things that managers can't justify. Once they hire a consultant and the consultant tells them they should do the thing they want to do, they can do it with no further justification and blame the consultants when it all goes wrong.

AI should be pretty good at that.

I know of several companies who are avoiding hiring anyone with a degree for that reason; it's much cheaper to hire competent people without degrees than to hire people with degrees who expect much higher pay so they can pay off their loans.

But they're small to medium sized companies who aren't being strangled by HR.