Ironically, Elvis Costello second album is as praised as his first, if not more.

It is expected that fans gives more positive reviews than critics since they are fans. In fact, we could also say that fans review are actually the result of their own social norms. Moreover the influence of poptimism has tainted critics reviews since it is very rare that albums have a score under 50 on Metacritic. Critics reviews are not very reliable - mostly due to advertisers implicit pressure - but fan reviews may fare even worse in that field.

The submission is about Chinese scientists complaining about being "driven away from the US by discrimination from the government" and this comment makes ignorant discriminatory generalizations regarding scientists based on their nationality. The jokes write themselves.

Even though it is obviously biased - it is owned by Alibaba after all - it is one of the most tolerable news outlets from China. It is informative if you "read between the lines" and "bypass" their slant, while the CCP press outlets like the China Daily or the Global Times (the Chinese Fox News) are unbearable with their jingoist and anti-US tone. Ironically, Wikipedia says that SCMP website is blocked in mainland China so I guess that's why they are more subtle with their news. You could also say the same about the former "free press" in Hong Kong which was overtly anti-CCP - they had their reasons of course but it still means there is a bias.

I also read pro-EU/Atlantist news - which is the main orientation of the press in France, except from a few populist outlets - and I also "read between the lines" with them as they tend to support western-friendly opposition movements in unfriendly countries. Whether they are government-linked or owned by a company, press outlets always tend to support one of the factions of the ruling class (the one it supports depends on the press title). Granted, in China the press is almost totally centralized so you only have one side so more critical analysis is required. But SCMP is not worse than Channel News Asia (from Singapore, a country with supposedly "high economic freedom") in terms of news in Asia.

After all these years, Slashdot still show the old dinosaur logos on submissions related to Mozilla. I am not complaining though.

To be honest a lot of these games on the list are released in "special" circumstances. It's either DosBox or ScummVM wrappers, indie titles or games also released on GOG. A lot of them need workarounds like creating a "steam_appid.txt" file in the same directory as the executable - funnily enough this is how Steamworks API is tested during development : https://partner.steamgames.com... - or passing command line options.

It seems mostly dependent on the publisher policies. Europa Universalis IV and Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 to 3 can be launched directly from their respective executables without any changes. As a side note, Epic Games Store, despite its awful interface, does not seem to enforce any DRM at all and I could start almost all of their temporary free games through Wine without starting the client.

I'm not sure about this. Some executables never check if Steam is running or not and can be freely moved outside of their install directory. Of course you need the client to download it - this is a technically a restriction but it's understandable - but apart from that there are virtually unrestricted. They are rare but they exist: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w...

Or you maybe actually meant what I just said and I misunderstood.

I am not sure that $450 million/year is a reasonable figure so I won't defend that. However, Firefox is supposed to be a "professional" software. Whether it is or not is debatable, but that's how they want to present themselves. They must follow the endless evolution of the Web "standards" - aka what Google Chrome dictates. The number of websites broken with the message "Use a browser based on Blink, too lazy to write portable HTML/CSS/JS" is really telling.

This means that any browser not based on Blink must do compliance tests and at least a minimal form of quality assurance for testing breaking changes. This can already amounts to a few million dollars since this is a large codebase. I am not sure that Palemoon or Waterfox support as much features. I also know that they were regularly criticized for not being up-to-date with security issues. This is one of the problem with projects with unpaid/volunteers developers.
This is hard to economically justify for most companies hence why Opera and Edge switched to Blink. Also that $450 million figure also cover the infrastructure maintenance and organization handling. As unfair as the CEO pay is, it is really a drop in the bucket for the whole budget.

I do not want to defend Mozilla Firefox. It's not a good piece of software. It's bloated, it has questionable (re)design choices. One of its main source of income is the owner of a concurrent browser. It's unfortunately the least worst of the choices on Slackware and most UNIX-like systems. The World Wide Web has become so messy with constant features being added with no standardization that there is no other option. At least, Slashdot may be one of the more reasonable websites. I should test it with Lynx/Links or any other text-mode browser one day...

"Bell" was actually not the name of a company but was used in the "Bell System" brand of AT&T. Since AT&T was a de facto monopoly in the US until the 80s, I don't think brand recognition was an issue since they had virtually no competition.

I could be facetious by saying that I don't drink Coca Cola but even if it's true that would be besides the point. "Coca Cola" is sufficiently distinct brand name since it is composed of two words. Same thing as "Best Buy", it's actually two words, not a single English word.

This is more of a problem nowadays since there are way more companies than they were before. Once, Facebook was synonymous with social media - now that it has dozens of competitors and few have really worked it out. The technology field is very competitive now so having a recognizable brand name is more important. I am not sure that a supermarket named with something simple like "Target" now would be as recognizable as it was in 1960. Metaphorically speaking, their recognition is "grandfathered".

Enterprise is a terrible name though... First because I am not sure which one you are talking about since Wikipedia lists a lot of companies with that name.

I must admit that this is one of the most nitpicky post I have written, apologies for that.

"If you can't make something clearly defined, use a common term in an unexpected way."

Mastodon is not a common term. It exists but it is far from being used frequently so it is recognizable. However, I must argue that Bluesky is terrible since it is associated with the defunct animation studio who made the Ice Age films IIRC.

That's not the same thing though. Nike, Sony, Adidas and Toyota are not simple English words, - which is the world language for trading, whether it is fair or not - they are either named after their founder(s), by an abbreviation of their original names or in the case of Nike to a mythological greek figure. In all cases, these are distinct, recognizable names. Using a common English word like "Block" - or a single letter in the case of X - is not the best for brand representation. That was the point I was trying to make.

With titles like "Block", "Threads" or simply "X", - whether it is the UNIX display system or the shitshow that was previouly called Twitter that was already bad before its takeover but somehow found a way to be worse - technology companies names have become very confusing.

Funnily enough, Jamie Zawinski was involved in Netscape Navigator but left the Mozilla project after it had been decided that its codebase would be totally rewritten.

That's a funny sentence since some countries in Europe have some former Stalinist parties - I refuse to call them communist, that's misleading - represented in their respective Parliament. In France, there is the PCF (French Communist Party). In Czechia, the KSCM (Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) was often one of the biggest opposition party until recently.

Moreover, a lot of social-democratic parties in Eastern Europe are the legal successors of the ruling party in their former countries - they are often more conservative than the western social-democratic counterparts though. In Germany, Die Linke (The Left) is technically the successor of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) which is itself the successor of the East German ruling party SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). There is also the Italian case where most of the members of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) choose to transform their organization into a social-democratic one after the fall of the Eastern Bloc.

I'm not giving an opinion on whether that's good or not - I chose to not vote anyways. That was just a fun trivia I wanted to write after simply reading "Maybe not in Europe". However, most of these parties are often just relying on nostalgia though and making promises about the welfare state that they know they won't be able to keep but it does not matter since they never have a majority.

I was being facetious, of course it is a bogus argument. But I should have made it clearer that I was playing Devil's Advocate - English is not my native tongue, hence the language barrier with written communication. I think the main issue is that, in practical matters, Reddit is a monopoly on online discussion and thus the impact of being banned from this website is greater than from any other website. I think we're both in agreement with this.
What I meant is that complaining about censorship on one website is not seeing the forest behind the tree: that some companies have more "speech" power than others. I'm just saying that it's not a "Reddit problem", this is how the whole society/economy works as a whole. Is it unfair? Well some will argue "market rules" as I did ironically before. It was actually cynicism from my part.

However, I still think FIDOnet is not a good comparison. FIDOnet is not a single website nor part of the WWW, it is a network. Therefore, being "banned" from FIDOnet is not akin to being banned from Reddit but from the whole WorldWideWeb.