Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

It would just be funny, and that's apparently good enough reason in Musk's view.

His Nazi bar will always be Xitter to me.

I think this may be a signal that streaming services have achieved satisfaction-parity with cable.

Both deliver mostly similar service, both endlessly churn content, raise prices and spam viewers with more ads endlessly.

There was a window when streaming was actually a better experience than piracy. But they've fixed that problem, and bittorrent is once again the least aggravating way to get your couch potato fix. It isn't about the money, it is about steadily making the service worse than it was when the subscriber agreed to pay for it.

Kindle, I mean Calibre, of course for managing and sideloading my own documents onto my Kindle.

Amazon have been changing lots behind the scenes lately. Last model or two paperwhites are harder to get DRM-free versions of files out of (no personal backup). The Colorsoft doesn't play as nice with products such as Kindle.

And they've been adding restrictions on how you can sideload books over the years too.

So no, it's not a consumer friendly move. It is only (and would only ever be) a move that helps Amazon.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

Whether or not mathematics qualifies as a science is more a matter of philosophy than definition.

When a scientific theory is proposed, you can choose to believe in it or not — but belief doesn’t affect whether the theory accurately describes reality. As independent experiments accumulate consistent results, confidence in the theory increases because the data keeps confirming it.

Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, turned out to be incomplete when tested at extreme scales. Still, within the limits of everyday experience, it remains perfectly accurate. For centuries, every possible experiment agreed with Newton’s equations, so people accepted them as “true” — and for practical purposes, they still are.

Climate change follows the same logic. It’s supported by a vast body of observations and consistent models grounded in well-established physics. Most scientists accept it because the evidence is overwhelming. Yet some, like Trump, reject it — not because the data is lacking, but because when facts clash with ideology, the mind often builds a comforting alternate reality instead.

The thing with science, is you can stop believing in it, it still works. Trump doesn't believe in climate change. That doesn't prevent the climate from changing.
2+2 is 4. You can ignore me and think it's 7, but if you got 2 apples and someone gives you two more apples you still get 4 apples in the end, not 7.

office365 on the web - while not perfect - works on all OSes and printing is just about generating a PDF, which you can pring no matter the OS you're using.

Now, sharing files is a pain since you can only collaborate from OneDrive (or SharePoint) with office, but still. It kinda works.

If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon. Who cares what their experiences are.

But seriously, what about the not-kids? Australian adults, are you having to show your ID when you get a DHCP lease? Do a lot of websites who didn't have mandatory logins, now have 'em?

How does it work, and what has changed for you?

Europe is now eyeing similar bans, as well as proposals for a late-night "curfew", curbs on addictive features, and an EU-wide age verification app.

LATE-NIGHT CURFEW?!

If Europe isn't careful, they're going to teach a generation of kids that it's ok to do their FTPing during business hours.