The worst part isn't even whether or not Eats / Doordash suck (and make no mistake, they do) at their core purpose - It's that virtually every restaurant traditionally known for delivering has realized they can cut that nonsense right out of the budget and just push everyone to use a third-party delivery service at the customer's expense.

I know I'm going to sound like a cranky old man here, but once upon a time, food delivery was a sweet job for a late teen / early 20-something - Drive around town rather than being stuck in a kitchen, busting their butts to get the food to you while it was still warm, and were thrilled to get tipped a five. Now, if you only tip these professional "food ransom services" a twenty, you can expect to scrape your food off the garage roof and be named-and-shamed on IG for being such an insufferable asshole as to not pay more for the delivery than the food. And even if you tip "enough" to avoid the wrath of your driver, it's guaranteed to be late, cold, and in way too many cases to be coincidental, missing a few fries / nuggets / whatever. Go ahead and complain, and they'll just ban both the driver and the customer, and good luck getting a refund.

But hey, I have nothing to complain about since I live more than 10 minutes outside a city core, nobody will accept the delivery anyway.

Like many other people, I dumped the Sonos ecosystem when they started killing support for their hardware I owned and still actively used. Even with their "trade in offers" to upgrade? It made no sense, when the new speaker or interface wasn't going to sound any better than the one I already owned.

I felt like the brand was nearly irrelevant in today's world where practically every audio device supports Bluetooth connections and everything has mobile apps.

But Sonos is right about this idea/realization: They're really not a "speaker company" (at least, not one of any consequence). What they really have to offer really is an "audio operating system". How well that works out for them depends on how well they design it. But at least there's some potential buy-in for me here.

If you can make it co-exist on top of everything else i use, like streaming audio from a Mac's Music library via AirPlay or my wife wanting to send music from her phone or tablet to either the soundbar on our living room TV or alternately to her little Sony bluetooth speaker? It starts to make some sense. It's great if it makes any and all Sonos branded hardware super easy to configure and use, but should also allow managing everything else under the same roof.

Oh, goody, the website selling our licenses is down. Whelp, toothpaste back in the tube, we can all rest easy knowing that the day is saved!

Of course, the next obvious step if they can't sell them is to simply release the entire batch into the wild. And how dare any of you think this might somehow be the fault of sweet innocent idscan.net for inadequately protecting the highly sensitive data they were grudgingly entrusted with in the first place.

We need a hell of a lot more CEOs in prison, and we need any politicians that requires / supports / allows this bullshit to join them. Of course, absolutely none of that is going to happen because Joe Sixpack has zero clue any of this is going on; and even if he somehow catches wind of it from a Facebook meme, oh well, it's just one more breach, who cares, he gets notices of those on a monthly basis and has been intentionally trained to treat them as junk mail.

Private industry doing it better than the government.

Fine, we'll do this the tedious way, since you Meta/etc shills are happy to prove they're incapable of inductive reasoning.

Foreign scammers do not care about the law. Social media CEOs play fast-and-loose with the law and consider fines just a cost of doing business. Governments consider themselves above the law. The "good guys" didn't need this law in the first place.

"You may not use this service unless you're 13 or over" - Poof, every 12YO is suddenly 35. See the problem with your hypothesis?

I know this will come as a shock to many, but porn sites aren't the problem here, merely the lowest hanging "for duh kidz!!1!" excuse available to push these adult-privacy atrocities through - If anything, they tend to be some of the best actors in this situation, if only because they're the most closely watched by puritanical assholes. I trust PornHub far more than I trust Twitter, and I trust Twitter far more than anything ending in .ru, .il, or .in.

Sounds an awfully lot like you're agreeing with me here. Are you referring to a specific situation you'd like to cite?

To the best of my knowledge, gambling requires having some way to pay. Kids aren't laundering birthday cash from grandma so they can place a trifecta on the ponies, dude. Meanwhile, this will have zero effect on gambler-in-training gatchas that let kids bet on loot boxes via Play / iTunes gift cards.

Pbpbpbttttt! I know you are but what am I?
Christ you trolls are tiresome.

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

Lots of posts here bashing this product while I bet exactly none of them have tried using one yet.

No argument Dyson makes a lot of high-dollar products that just attempt to be a little better/different than the norm -- and won't impress people who are always looking only for the lowest cost solution.

But I have yet to really use anything Dyson branded I thought was a bad/dysfunctional product. I owned the orange Dyson ball vacuum cleaner, many years ago, when it had only existed for a short time. It was 4x-5x more expensive than a typical Hoover or Eureka upright vacuum from a discount or department store. But I got a good 12-13 years or so of use out of it, before selling it to someone else. I remember when I first got it, thinking it felt "too plastic-y" with plastic hoses and attachments and levers. Wasn't confident it wouldn't just crack/break on me. But it never did, and my only real complaint with it was the ball design prevented getting the vacuum under the coffee table. (Obviously, switching to one of the suction attachments let you get around that.)

I feel like at $500, I don't want to be the first guy trying one of these out. But if early adopters decide it really works, and isn't too slow at sensing where gaps are between your teeth while brushing with it - I would consider buying one on sale and giving it a shot.

You're funny. Tell me, how many under-13s do you think are on FB, despite not being allowed? Hint: All of them.

And I'll be sure to let the offshore scammers know it's illegal, I'm sure they'll be quaking in their boots.

a doozie to debug

You are entirely correct. I took another look at what the law actually required and I am definitely crying wolf (at this point). Thanks for taking the time to point this out to me.

There is definitely a slippery slope there, but I agree with you, California is far enough away from the event horizon of that slope that my histrionics are not warranted. Not only that, but the carve out for Linux actually is helpful. Thanks once again.

Then my wife mentioned that perhaps he's concerned about his own comings and goings being tracked...

He's more concerned with trying to explain away his diverting of $10 million obligated to pay for health insurance for poor kids that inexplicably went to two PACs then the Republican Party of Florida, all without anyone knowing who diverted the funds, including the people who were charged with managing the funds.

I don't think it's been ignored, but it might have been siloed. I was aware of it, and I'm not even close to an expert in that field. (OTOH, that bit about Teflon was surprising. I'd have expected Teflon to be totally inert.)

That's probably a underestimate. But, yes.
The real problem, though, is that many of them intensely support him. I think many of his supporters tend to be more firmly committed than were Nixon's.

Calling him a loser is incorrect. That he has occasionally lost is correct, but find someone who hasn't. Sometimes it seems he's playing a different game than the one we expect him to play.

But I rather agree with the rest of your characterization. And think it leaves out quite a few correct pejoratives.