I think the discussion about "common carrier" elsewhere in the comments misses the point. Social media platforms do not wish to be merely common carriers because a common carrier only transports messages by others and what they want to do is both monitor and control which messages reach specific users because they make money selling information about their users and delivering targeted advertising.

It is the secret, proprietary algorithms of Google, Twitter, facebook, et al. which are the problem here. The social media platforms are not merely common carrier if they are actively pushing certain messages whether for financial gain or ideological purposes. At a certain point we might consider them the author of the content they decide (or calculate) to push. We cannot know if the murderers in this case were fed hateful "instructions" by a YouTube algorithm or not but if they were then that is a problem that should be addressed, certainly.

I resemble that remark.

I'll try to pay more attention when I'm back on my desktop, but i run Linux and haven't seen *any* problems like you describe with memory on my box. The windows machines at work are using a version of FF 7 packaged by Frontmotion (so I can push it out on AD) and haven't had any problems with those boxes either.

Firefox is slower than chrome, but generally uses less memory. There were a couple versions of FF that had a memory leak problm if I recall.
See http://www.dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory too

HP has always managed to make pretty decent hardware - its their software thats always sucked. Oh, the irony.

I have sshd set up on all my machines at home (really handy for admin purposes or just to shut down the kids computer when they're not listening ;) but have never bothered to set up the port forwarding on the router to get to them from outside. There have been a bunch of times I wish I could access my home machines from outside, but they're all laptops! They're powered off and disconnected from the network - maybe even put away in a case. One day I'll get that Synology NAS device I've been lusting after and maybe I'll set it up then.

Having a picture of your car in an intersection when the light turns red seems to be enough evidence to get the owner of the car to fork up $50 according to the courts. But in that case, its the *car* that is incurring the fine - not the driver - because they can't prove *you* were the driver at the time (thats why there are no points on your license for these red light camera tickets). However, they can prove that you *own* the car through the registration and its certainly pretty strong circumstantial evidence that you were the one driving it if you don't have a solid alibi otherwise. IANAL.

When MS Office 2007 came out everybody started receiving xlsx and docx files and the old versions of MS Office most folks had installed couldn't open them. For the die hards (there were a few) I installed the compatibility pack (buried in the bowels of Microsoft's site since I guess they figure most places are willing to just throw money out the Windows(tm) and will buy a new version but I see no reason to re-buy something as trivial as a word processing program which works perfectly well already), but lots of folks got Oo instead. I even changed the icons for some of them to "ease the transition" and to tell you the truth, a lot of them didn't notice the difference. Some that did liked the presentation program better than Powerpoint and swung the whole sales staff over just on that reason. When users ran into something that worked differently (like how to edit headers/footers or tracking changes) they just chalked it up to the "new version". Since we already use Firefox and Thunderbird some folks have migrated over to Ubuntu from Windows (I always used a LTS version but then found they had decided to upgrade to the bleeding edge on their own later and seemed to have no issues most of the time so I let them play). We're not a big company (maybe 100 PCs), and we do engineering and development work so most people are pretty tech savvy, but of course the big issue was our ERP system which is designed for Windows, but its turned out easier to maintain that through terminal services anyway.