Ah, yes. The old "there's totally evidence to back up my statements, I just can't be bothered to give you enough details to find the evidence" routine.

The only instance that some googling shows up is the same one linked to in the summary of this story -- namely, that 404 Media worked with a "rare bookseller" (who they won't name) to put an airtag inside one of the books (which they won't name) in a shipment of 1000 books.

There's rare and then there's "rare." From what I've seen, the people involved have declined to say what the books involved were. About the only reason I can think of to hide that is because they know that people won't be as outraged when they find out what the "rare" books actually are. However, it was a bulk lot of something like 1,000 books, so it's a pretty safe bet that they weren't exactly valuable.

The 1973 manual for a toaster that I found in my grandfather's attic is certainly rare, but we're not losing anything if Amazon feeds it to their AI machine.

If I got one for free, I'd probably plug it in and mess with it a bit, establish that it doesn't really add anything useful, and shove it in a drawer.

If it was $25, I could see a few niche users buying it.

But $230 is insanity.

The historically-bad results of the final at least suggest that doing out-of-class work themselves actually helps students.

Starts? This has been ongoing for a long time.

...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.

Just last week, we received notification that IBM is rolling out a "program" to upper-level employees with decades of experience. The idea is that we would work reduced hours for the next year at full pay, and then leave IBM after a year (next March, I believe.)

Of course, this is for US employees only. I think we can be sure that the replacements for these employees (if there are any) won't be in the US.

You didn't "cut cable" if you didn't have it in the first place; the number they're citing is a percentage of total households without cable, not the number of total households that had cable and got rid of it.

It was "proven false" by mathematicians who considered the number 200,000 to be the same as "infinite."

A quick Google shows that our resident village idiot's claim is nonsense; tuition was charged in the 1950s, although it was (even adjusting for inflation) much cheaper than it is today.

Sure there is; the search engines can ignore robots.txt for reddit.

It's one thing to use robots.txt to say that you don't want the content on your website indexed by search engines, but if reddit is pulling this kind of stunt (giving that access only to Google,) then there's no ethical problem with other web search engines bypassing whatever anti-scraping techniques that reddit uses.

Whenever I've had to return something that was obviously a prior return, I always take a sharpie and write "BROKEN" or something similar, in big letters, on the packaging. I figure that should keep them from trying to just send it out again.

I can just imagine a system where you get a "one minute charging speed boost!" when you choose to watch a video ad...

The increase in applications for remote jobs that I've observed is much more dramatic than indicated by this article. I'm seeing jobs with 200 applications per day. It's crazy. And these aren't high profile FAANG jobs. I'm talking regular companies with normal salaries.

I don't think this reflects a sudden glut of IT talent in the market. It's just that people apply for more jobs because, when you're not restricted by geography, why not? Ultimately, there aren't really 2000 people for every job, so it shouldn't have a huge effect on employees, but I have to wonder what this is doing to HR departments. There's no possible way to give each applicant a reasonable evaluation, and there's a high chance that any application you do try to move forward with will end up abandoning their application in the middle of the process.

That's not what the person you replied to was talking about.

Apple will not allow an app to be hosted in their store if the service charges a higher price using payments through the app than it does using other methods.