The surveys my company sends out really are anonymous, insofar as they don't contain a tracking ID and don't ask for a name.

They do, however, ask for our site and our job title. Which would be just fine if I was Engineer #81 of 200 working out of corporate HQ. Instead, our job titles are unusually specific - Mine is basically "$Teamname Engineer 3", of which there are only two in the entire company, and we're based out of different satellite offices (we're all remote, so my "site" is just the company's largest physical office in my state - A whopping 12 people on-site, maybe 50 including remote workers).

So is it anonymous? Technically yes, functionally no.

No argument, but none of that was on trial. They didn't lose because they largely ignore hate speech, misinformation, bots, etc - All of which are basically legal except in very specific contexts (licensed professional advice, incitement to violence). They lost because they lied about user privacy and their efforts at moderation.

This isn't apologia, but it's an important distinction to keep in mind. The first amendment is an effective defense of the content itself; it's not a defense against deceiving their customers and regulators. So why am I writing this? Because Zuck's appeal to 1A is merely another lie - Whether this stands or is eventually reduced on appeal, he's already spinning the PR away from the blunt fact of "we lost because lied", to the far squishier "Meh, moderation is hard, so sue us - Oh wait, you did LOL".

Great question! Just convince the 34-time Felon in Chief to obey the Epstein Files Transparency Act of December 2025, and maybe we'll have an answer.

You're barking up an empty tree here - I'm no fan of Biden, but the Executive didn't have the power to ignore the judicial seal from March 2013 through January 2024, when they were ordered unsealed for Giuffre's case (pity she conveniently ate a bullet before it could affect the election). Not coincidentally, January 2024 (under Biden) coincides with the first substantial release, followed by progressively more throughout 2024 as the data could be verified; and continued to be released in batches, right up through inauguration day when undeniable financial records were finally on the table, and instantly squashed by the incoming administration.

Meanwhile, the Executive also can't just ignore acts of Congress, such as the Epstein Files Transparency Act; yet here we are still debating "why" the files haven't been released as ordered.

Do you really want to compare the right's evidence-free hit-piece against Clinton against hundreds of thousands of pages of in this debate? But hey, whaddya know, it looks like Clinton is mentioned extensively in the Epstein files. If only POTUS would obey Congress and release them all, you might finally get to take down Slick Willy! Good! Lock all of the pedo trash up, but maybe let's at least start with the diaper fouling the Oval Office before we head back to dredging the swamps of Arkansas..

The word "DAC" is conspicuously missing from this press release. Every single detail I quoted only applies to the 1-2cm between the DAC and the jack (or if we're willing to hold crappy aftermarket headphones against Sony, maybe 2m in total between DAC and ears).

People are responding to my comment like we're talking about end-to-end high-entropy multi-GHz signals. Comparing the human auditory range with modern ultra-high-speed DACs, we may as well be talking about DC for all the difference it makes.

We don't disagree about DACs - The one relevant component Sony was suspiciously silent about.

As for the rest - If they have such serious signal degradation between the DAC and the jack, I stand by my assertion that it's fundamentally broken by design. Keep in mind we're talking about mere kilohertz signals traveling under two meters, this ain't exactly trying to squeeze 10 gig over 100m of UTP. If there's still significant jitter on the outputs half a million cycles later, I repeat, "design flaw".

"Key components made from oxygen-free copper" are irrelevant to "uncompromising [digital] sound quality".

"Screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment" are irrelevant to "providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful [digital] bass, an expansive [digital] soundstage and smooth, extended [digital] high frequencies".

"Carefully-milled slabs of copper" are irrelevant to "improved [digital] sound".

C'mon Sony, do better! At least in the analog world nobody could disprove the audiophiles' ridiculous superstitions. Digital, however, is either mathematically flawless, or fundamentally broken by design. There is no "better" or "worse" - Well, at least not until you run it over Bluetooth, which takes all of the above as a challenge to make it worse.

The famously creepy birthday card was from 2003, making it clear they were already sharing "a wonderful secret" prior to 2004.

Please explain how a 2007 tiff led to a 2004 break-up. And for the record, every account except Orange Daddy's describes that tiff as involving Epstein poaching the... uh... "enigmas" from Mar-a-Lago.

As for Maxwell... You don't find it just a wee bit curious she made that claim after an off-the-record meeting with Blanche? Immediately following which she - by complete coincidence, of course - mysteriously got a transfer and became (according to fellow inmates) the de-facto princess of Club Fed?

And looking into the future and predicting your demand for evidence - We agree completely! Congress even passed a law demanding the release of exactly that evidence, which Trump's DOJ instead spent months and millions redacting the names of billionaires while, oopsie, forgetting to redact the victims' names.

Say, remind me again - Why would anyone stonewall the release exonerating evidence?

You don't know how to argue, or debate, or even answer comments, do you? Mindless passion is still mindless.

Try rebutting what I said. Can you do that for me? I'd appreciate it.

Corals have been regenerating themselves for several hundred million years. They don't need human help.

Corals have been around for several hundred million years. They survived the comet which killed off the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages and glaciations, the most recent being a 400-500 foot sea level rise just 10-15,000 years ago. They routinely bleach themselves while shifting populations of the critters which give them color.

We puny humans are no threat to corals.

What can a $2000 phone do that a $200 phone can't (gimmicks like folding screens or ruggedized aside)?

You mentioned in another comment IT folks are surprisingly fine with "clunkers" - But in my experience the simple explanation is, performance is not a metric by which most IT folks measure phones. The speed of a phone is utterly irrelevant. We have gaming rigs at home that would probably violate ITAR if taken out of the country; we have dedicated VMs at work with so much horsepower the underlying hardware must have cost a substantial fraction of our annual salary. Why do we also need a supercomputer in our pocket at all times?

I use my phone for email, SMS/IM, light web browsing to look something up in a pinch, GPS when I'm not in my car, and cheesy games while waiting for an appointment. Occasionally I watch a YouTube video or the like, and have yet to see a stutter not caused by the network itself. All of that works perfectly fine on a $100-200 phone. The primary metric I do care about is battery life (and maybe storage to a lesser extent); and on that axis, weaker (but still modern) CPUs often have significantly longer battery life.

Now, I realize I've given you an easy "must be nice to be you" here, and I'll admit that if everyone else is approaching this from the perspective of "this is my only computer", I can appreciate wanting somewhat beefier hardware. But again, we're talking about blowing $2k on one of these; just get a decent laptop and a cheap phone, and it'll still be an infinitely better user experience.

1) $Company has a contract with $Vendor to never let AI anywhere near their data (e.g. PHI);
2) $Vendor (along with 99% of companies on the planet) has a commercial Facebook account;
3) Facebook unilaterally changes its TOS to allow AI to hoover up all their customers' data.

IANAL, but how is that not the textbook definition of tortuous interference? Facebook is making it impossible for $Vendor to honor its preexisting contract with $Company, and neither $Company not $Vendor can do a damned thing about it.

You misspelled "proud". You have 90% of the functionality for 6% of the price and 0% of the risk of your screen cracking in half from normal use six months from now while Apple refuses warranty claims on the grounds you were somehow holding it wrong.

I love the idea of folding screens, but what we have available so far just isn't worth the hassle or price for a tiny bit more screen. Meanwhile, $2k will buy an amazing tablet or a pretty decent laptop. If the sole feature that puts a phone ahead of a tablet or laptop is being a phone - Just get a $100 phone and a $1900 laptop.

Don't get me wrong, How does that contradict my thesis? If there's a 100% chance of being caught, that has zero effect on "impulse" crimes, and in the transactional case where the reward exceeds the punishment, it's still "worth it".

My comments about the level of punishment were primarily for emphasis on the cruelty of our current imperfect system - The "deterrent" effect is meaningless if we have a 100% success rate. More to the point, if we wanted to live in that world, we wouldn't have the third through eighth amendments. It would be a heck of a lot easier to catch criminals if the police could randomly bust down our doors with zero judicial oversight, or hey, why not mandatory body cams for everyone all the time?

But we do have a bill of rights (in the US), we don't allow police unlimited discretion, and we have quite a few laws around where, when, why, and how surveillance is allowed. The facts speak for themselves - We very clearly don't want to live in that world.