Okay, Iâ(TM)m thinking of the strippers.

Did the article have the wrong planet name when OP copied the text?

And now I’m putting junk characters in my editorial metacomments. Look, gimme a break. I just finished my taxes.

âoePatterâ? I left off the âoenâ? Huh. Well, in my defense, the legalese does qualify as dark patter.

I used TaxAct for the last two years and ran into this, and the way they implemented it, it’s absolutely a dark pattern. The page where they harvest your consent to share information with third parties has extremely roundabout, legalistic wording that overall looks like they’re asking for your consent to simply process your taxes. The true details are in there if you read very carefully, but good luck if you don’t have training in logic or law. The form includes inputs for “Signature” (your name) and the date. The big, obvious “I Agree” button accepts their terms; a smaller “I Don’t Agree” text link skips forward and lets you finish your tax filing without approving third-party info sharing.

Text from a screenshot of last year’s consent form:

-----

Consent to use your tax information.

Plain Talk: In order for TaxAct to personalize your refund options, we need your permission to use some of the tax information you entered.

Federal law requires this consent form be provided to you. Unless authorized by law, we cannot use your tax return information for purposes other than the preparation and filing of your tax return without your consent.

You are not required to complete this form to engage our tax return preparation services. If we obtain your signature on this form by conditioning our tax return preparation services on your consent, your consent will not be valid. Your consent is valid for the amount of time that you specify. If you do not specify the duration of your consent, your consent is valid for one year from the date of signature.

By clicking “I Agree", I, [your name], authorize TaxAct to use the information I provide during the preparation of my 2021 tax return along with my prior year refund funding rate and similar information from prior years as needed to communicate with me and to evaluate and present refund and payment options available to me. By completing this form my consent will be effective until December 31, 2025.

[pre-filled input: "Signature"] [pre-filled input: "Today’s Date"]

If you believe your tax return information has been disclosed or used improperly in a manner unauthorized by law or without your permission, you may contact the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) by telephone at 1-800-366-4484, or by email at complaints@tigta.treas.gov.

[button: “< Back"] [text link: "I Don’t Agree"] [highlighted button: "I Agree"]

...a Radio Shack 16B+ with a 15MB HD, 8 inch, 1.26MB floppy drive, 768K of RAM, and two Hayes modems on two landlines.

It was on-line 1983-1991 as an email and USENET server (tijil) and connected with other machines worldwide via UUCP.

It was still working just fine in 2005 when it and several boxes of floppies were shipped of to a small computer museum outside of Chicago.

Here's Boris on his way to the shipping company:
http://tijil.org/boris_in_box....

An example: I was a front-end developer for the Wall Street Journal five years ago. The home page was a shifting multi-column stack of dozens of internal content modules (developed by different programmers) that had no awareness of each other (also often the case with the programmers), along with dynamic ads and an astounding amount of additional crud that included externally-sourced content like spammy Taboola and Outbrain links. To conserve bandwidth, the module containers triggered just-in-time content loading when the user scrolled down to within a certain number of pixels. There was effectively no way for any part of the page to know the position of any other part. Sure, I declared the sizes for images within my module, but it had no effect on the rest of the page.

One huge advantage to wired headphones is that none of mine require batteries.

I do not need yet another accessory that requires batteries or charging.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

... I put the number on "block" so they never get through again.

Sometimes I do answer, for example if I am expecting a call but do not know the number that will be calling, but in any case, answered or not, unwanted calling numbers go on the block list.

If there are specific groups that need to vary their times for doing things depending on season, it should be up to them to simply change the time *they* do them, not force the rest of the country to screw with wasteful time changes twice a year.

Pick a time zone and just stick with standard time.

What it says to me is that you addressed one quarter of my complaints about this poster by saying things that I'll have to do a reasonable amount of research about to see if it's even true. Having seen no evidence or studies as to whether ADD "should statistically affect boys and girls equally", I can't even answer to it before I do some digging, but I notice you didn't bother to back that "fact" up with any citations, leaving it to me to do the legwork. On top of that, even if it turns out that false diagnoses are up, that doesn't give anyone dispensation to label all or even most of them as such without some sort of supporting proof.

So even assuming that I drop the entire line about the poster's comments about ADD diagnoses, you didn't say a word about all the rest of it. Considering that your argument fails to address much less rebut any of the other things I brought up, like claiming a majority of kids "do whatever they want" or "stuck to the fucking XBox for 12 hours a day" or that any reasonable percentage of parents "decided real parenting was too hard", and considering that these things (and the out-of-scope comments about ADD diagnoses) were to discuss why tenure shouldn't be used to protect someone like this from dismissal, I'd say you need to be a lot more thorough if you're going to join the argument.

Virg