The biggest problem I have with Kobo isn’t even really something that’s their fault or that they can do anything about. Amazon through their Amazon Unlimited program has locked a bunch of major authors into exclusivity contracts where they’re contractually barred from distributing their ebooks on other platforms. That in turn means a bunch of major authors are just completely unavailable anywhere but Amazon, and of course Amazon ebooks exclusively only work on Kindle devices. It’s a vicious feedback loop where authors refuse to leave Amazon because it’s the market dominator by a large margin and consumers refuse to use anything else because all the authors are only on Amazon.

If you can make do with non-Amazon sources of ebooks it’s great to do so and we really need more people doing exactly that in order to convince authors that the Amazon shackles aren’t worth it, but it’s definitely a struggle sometimes.

Every day we get a little closer to Idiocracy being real.

Nah, it’s just velcro backwards. Or if you’re british hook and loop fasteners but Srenetsafpooldnakooh doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.

Unfortunately Republicans have spent the better part of a century brainwashing morons into believing that all government is inherently bad and the only things that can be trusted are corporations and billionaires. Somewhere around 30% of the population over here can be reliably counted on to vote in favor of Republicans that run on a campaign of literally destroying the government and allowing corporations to do whatever the hell they want and the morons think that will fix all our problems.

Even more unfortunately our only other viable party the Democrats are by and large bought and paid for by corporate interests so they also tend to do a crap job writing sensible legislation. Generally if they do manage to get something passed without Republicans gutting it there are almost always giant gaping loopholes in it that were inserted by corporate lobbyists to ensure the legislation is either completely toothless or increasingly commonly actually enshrines the destructive policies of the major market leaders.

Or a few big open standards and many competing implementations.

No, he has a point. Linux phones are not an alternative at this point because they aren’t even remotely close to feature parity. It’s like arguing MS Paint is a viable alternative to Photoshop. Currently there are few if any actual alternatives to either iPhones or flagship Android phones. The best you can do at the moment is one of the de-Googled flavors of Android but that only buys you so much and even then you’re losing a fair amount of functionality.

I actually bought a Linux phone a few years ago but the experience then was so terrible it wasn’t much better than a pre-smartphone like an old Nokia. It seems like things have improved a lot since then, but even now it’s not to a standard that a Linux phone is a viable alternative for anyone that needs more than just a web browser and basic calling and texting. Hopefully it will get there soon, but it’s definitely not there yet.

Libredirect, that is all.

Yeah and whoever designed that system needs to be fired. 40 years ago you could maybe call it a reasonable mistake (although it wasn’t really acceptable even back then), but these days anyone storing plaintext passwords anywhere is bordering on criminal negligence. Unless you have a damned good reason passwords should be hashed, but at a minimum at least encrypted with something reasonably secure.

The fines should go towards paying for road repair and upkeep as well as public transit. Better and well maintained roads will cut down on accidents and better public transit would cut down on the number of cars in the road which is a win for everyone.

Technically? No. The problem is that the existing laws legally speaking all apply to the driver, and tickets likewise are all issued to the driver, which doesn’t actually exist in this case. Cops were writing tickets and the company was paying them, but legally speaking it was a grey area and waymo could have disputed the tickets and there’s a decent chance they would have won. This legislation removes the ambiguity.

Both Apple and Linux are winning big with the double wamy of Win 11 being complete garbage and Win 10 being murdered.

I await the inevitable Republican backed federal law that preempts state laws and makes it legal except under a very narrow case that somehow would be beneficial to consumers.

Kill it from the other direction. Make it illegal to algorithmically adjust a users experience to prioritize interaction regardless of whether that’s positive or negative. Ultimately that’s the problem with places like Facebook, they weigh an angry rant the same as a positive one, higher even in a lot of cases. Things that make people angry generate a lot more interaction than positive things so it drowns people in hate and fear. If you treat any interaction as a positive signal things just devolve.

It’s not public demand, it’s a very vocal lobbying group. One that’s funded by Facebook. Ultimately though it’s all just an excuse, the goal is to collect the data and has nothing at all to do with any of the things they claim it does.

It’s the dot com bubble all over again. Going to end the same way that one did as well, most of these companies are going to go bankrupt, a few will just eat the massive loss, and an even tinier handful will actually come out ahead. I’m betting the event that’s going to finally pop the bubble is when OpenAI is forced to file for bankruptcy in another year or so despite its ridiculous stock valuation.

Hmm, considering how cheap these are to make (relatively speaking) could it make a good decoy? Basically set a bunch of these up in random places away from anything important with remote on switches and when missiles start flying power them up one at a time. They’re more expensive than the anti-missile drones (those are supposedly about $1000 a piece) but they might be more effective in their own way.

It should be noted that they absolutely must be taken under medical supervision. If not taken correctly or in rare cases even when taken correctly they can have very dangerous side effects up to organ failure and death. They’re usually safe but at a minimum during initial usage need to be monitored for side effects.

All that said yes, for people that need these drugs it really sucks that they’re trying to make it harder to get them. It’s pretty telling that they’re targeting programs that primarily benefit the poor for these cuts.

It’s probably worth pointing out as well for people that are unfamiliar with these drugs they are not strictly speaking “weight loss” drugs, rather they’re appetite suppressors. They make you feel less hungry and they also block the reward feedback when you eat so eating food is less “satisfying” which further helps control excess eating. The only dangerous part of these drugs is that they also partially (or rarely fully) paralyze your GI tract which can lead to various complications, particularly if you continue eating at the rate you did prior to starting the drug.

I did that with Windows 10. I still have that partition but I haven’t booted it in years. I’ll probably overwrite it with something more useful one of these days.

NATO is a partnership, no one country gets to unilaterally dictate what NATO does. Start a war that nobody (not even your own citizens) wants and it’s little surprise when everyone tells you it’s your own mess to clean up.

You can pretty much always assume that’s the case with the US legal system. The lawyers always win, sometimes their clients do as well but that’s a lot rarer.