Check out the moderation and you can lose it again :)

I think you have to include Office in the list of things they used to do "right" or at least in a way that supported their business. Notably Excel, which used to be the absolutely most usable spreadsheet that there was. IMO Word peaked with Mac version 5.1, but it used to be pretty good too. Both are now more difficult to use than LibreOffice, and also have more stupid bugs. The one that keeps irritating me with Word lately is saving a document which ends in a list. If and only if you leave the cursor on the last character of a document like that, it will add another (blank) list item AND another paragraph after it when you save. Not sure if this only happens on a quit save or not, I haven't bothered to find out, but either way it's fucking trash.

Anyway, ahem, the point is that Windows and Office had synergy. TBF though, some of that was skullduggery. Specifically, Microsoft was caught using internal functions for Office apps, where the public (published, documented) functions were literally the same functions but with a delay loop. If they had been the same function but with a semaphore they might have had a valid argument about being more familiar with their internals, but that was just obvious anticompetitive fuckery.

It's clearly not due to the content

Yes, it literally is.

The idea might be that the candidates become popular if they have plans which will help the nation, but anything but 100% direct democracy is both the process and principle of allowing The People to decide who will best do that, not specifically how to do that. And nobody has a 100% direct democracy where The People vote on every decision, so every single government which describes itself as a democracy is by some percentage a popularity contest.

Democracy is the idea that people get to vote, even if it is for the wrong reasons. If you don't want them to be able to do that, then you do not want Democracy.

Indeed, the electoral college and first past the post elections are both anti-democratic. The electoral college was instituted specifically to allow slave states to wield more power than was warranted by their policies. And FPTP ensures that people fall into the trap, by punishing them if they vote their conscience or ideals. If Democracy is what is desired then yes of course the states which attract the most population should have the most voting power, that would be Democracy!

Unfortunately, Democracy is vulnerable to Crony Capitalism, which is a typical outcome of Capitalism in general. When you allow control of production to fall to those who have the most capital, then they wield that control to get more and more capital until they have enough to corrupt every process. You simply cannot have Democracy and uncontrolled Capitalism at the same time. Yes you can have Capitalism, but you cannot have it without meaningful controls which are clearly absent in the USA, especially since Citizens United.

The Founding Fathers created this problem by not limiting the powers of political parties in the constitution. They didn't even mention them. The alleged reason for that is that they felt that they shouldn't even exist, but that's obvious bullshit. Not limiting them ensured that they would not only exist, but they could wield basically any amount of power. What we see on "both sides" is that the parties are under the control of Capital.

We have two extremist sides which are extremist in both the same way and different ways. Both major parties are committed to doing the will of capital. One of them is also committed to destroying the concept of human rights, which they can do because it is only a concept. If nobody will protect your rights, they effectively do not exist. A lot of people appeal to religion to claim that they are inherent things which people have, but that's obviously false; if they were, nobody could take them away from you. You don't even have the rights to your own thoughts if you don't have the right to remain free, as people can tamper even with what you believe if they can subject you to enough abuse.

Which ones?

They never will be missed.

All it will cost is $1 a year plus all American's PII and PHI and FTI

People did think of that. It's called PRT. We can't have it because of the influence of the worldwide automobile industry's lobbying on various governments.

Try the large #9 with avocado on it, to die for.

Speaking of which, is car automation to die for? We had the technology for self-steering vehicles in the 1800s. It's called rail.

They still had keyboards in TOS.

Presumably there will also still be vintage computing nerds in the future.

Despite how it seems to you, that is both right and correct.

It's correct because that's how it works, and it's right because requiring that articles in a given language be written by someone who speaks that language is a requirement for it to be known whether they are slop.

If you want translations, use a translation tool.

If you want details to be propagated from articles in languages you don't speak into the articles in languages you do speak, then make that happen.

If you don't want to put in the time to account for the barriers in place to prevent slop articles, Wikipedia doesn't want your input. Make your own encyclopedia. You may use Wikipedia articles as your starting point. GLWT!

There's plenty of "AI"-related processing which could be delayed and nobody would notice. Training of new models, for example. You get [access to] a new model a couple days later and you won't even notice, because you get it when you get it already. Google is also sufficiently distributed that they can simply move this processing to another location, since both the queries and the results are very small and there will be no appreciable delay associated with doing the processing far away.

Focus group results are subject to two pretty obvious problems. One is that the kind of people who want to do them and have time to do them are not usually the people you actually want input from. Two is that the criteria for selecting focus group members can be selected for the purpose of getting a desired result, you read research that says certain types of people want certain things and then you select people like that to give positive feedback for your shitty ideas.

The question is why you're kissing his O-ring.

You mean the one that removes links to child porn and cuck videos?