The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)

They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.

That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.

Me too but here’s one useful function:

Perhaps you are aware there is an ongoing event, say for example a football game, or an election, or an outage of your email service provider. You go to one of these “scream into the void” social sites, search on the topic, and learn what people are saying about it. Maybe someone knows what’s really going on, maybe some of those people have some interesting insights and you engage with them, not unlike you and I are engaging right now. Others can observe, perhaps contribute, and after the event has concluded, everyone goes their own way. Hopefully in the end the interactions are beneficial for all.

There’s a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.

Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.

This whole thing happened 30 years ago now. Wow. These two must be in their 50s now. It was such a media circus at the time.

Damn, I’d even works on mobile

There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.

When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.

I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.

A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.

Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.

So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.

This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.

Will be interesting to read the arguments and hear what experts have to say.

There is some precedence that corporations do have first amendment rights.

A hypothetical argument from TikTok is they think they are allowed constitutional rights, in this case to publish whatever they want, in the act of doing a commercial activity and that the law which was passed to force a sale to a local owner is a violation of their right to speak freely.

I suspect TikTok operates in the USA under an American registered entity that is wholly owned by a foreign entity. Whether that grants or removes any such constitutional rights seems unclear.

Next, it doesn’t seem like the law intends to block TikTok’s “speech”, rather it specifically allows the executive branch to block this particular type of foreign entity from doing business on American soil on the grounds of security, enforced most likely by blocking it from doing business with the app stores. This also has precedence - a lot of it, in fact - when it comes to security. The US blocks all kinds of foreign businesses from trading with American businesses. Like arms dealers and drug dealers.

So TikTok will need to defeat the idea that even as a foreign businesses they don’t need to be subject to the whims of the executive branches power to block foreign businesses AND that even congress doesn’t have the power to write a law that gives the executive branch this power (because, ya know, they just DID write that law).

And then TikTok will need to win on the idea that somehow their rights have been suppressed.

Seems like a long shot to me and the precedence that would be established by making it difficult for Congress to write laws that give the executive power to block foreign entities because it risks their unlikely right to speech in the US seems a bit whack.

TikTok hasn’t shown themselves to be particularly politically savvy so far.

As popular and as well loved as their platform is, they are getting kicked in the ass by the powers that be.

I think their survival now is predicated on them finding more powerful allies.

Wonder how this works with car insurance. Os there a future where the driver doesn’t need to be insured? Can the vehicle software still be “at fault” and how will the actuaries deal with assessing this new risk.

I wonder if a P2P ride-sharing system could be made to work. Or if it would be rife with scams and dangers.

Solution in search of a problem.

I guess a mobile alert that lets you know the cycle is finished could be handy? Ability to schedule a load to start later? Maybe a maintenance or problem alert? Depleted detergent and fabric softener reservoir?

Possibly an energy usage chart for the nerds out there who like that kind of thing?

But damn, all of that shouldn’t need more than a few kb a day max.

My solution is a bit old school: A raspberry pi connected to my network and running miniDLNA. It has an externally powered USB hard drive. My TV runs Android and I have VLC installed. Any DLNA client works including Xbox and mobile phone apps too.

I don’t think mini DLNA is even updated anymore so eventually my solution might stop working but it’s been running solid for 10 years

Imagine you’re a government lawyer working on the US case and you show up to a deposition and pull your iPhone out set it on the table.

What are the chances that your Apple ID and iCloud are mysteriously banned for violations of the terms of service for which Apple can’t share the specific reason because of “policy related security reasons” before the week is out?

Ooh. Imagine the content of the investor calls if there is another blackout.

There would no longer be any hesitation to ban or censor everybody involved.

A lot of things are annoying about flying but one of the top is when phones are ringing and beeping unanswered (or worse, answered) non-stop.

I think airplane mode is more for the sanity of the crew than anything having to do with safety any more.

I’m on my 3rd set of Xbox one controllers. The old Xbox 360 controllers would last for years before needing new electrical components. But these new ones are just junk. I tried to resolder one but the tolerance in there now so tight that I ended up frying it… So gave up on that idea.

If there’s anyone who wasn’t sure Trump is for sale…

Now you can buy an almost-US President, just 500 million bucks. Chump change for a handful of billionaires who could get it back double with a few policy changes in their favor.

Google almost killed Gmail for me - I’m on a deprecated google apps free family plan they tried to kill recently. It was going to cost over a hundred dollars a month to move everyone on my personal family domain to a professional plan to keep it, and at the last minute they retreated and kept it free.

But for me that was a warning shot I can’t ignore. Way back I ran a Microsoft Exchange server for the family, before that postfix with squirrelmail. But I’m tired of all the tech support that came with it, so some kind of permanent, relatively spam free email option that we call rely on for decades would be welcome.

OpenAI’s existential problem is that they’ll eat their own lunch and then have nothing left. The reason people make useful content now and give it away for free is because they can get paid for the traffic.

Take that traffic away and all the content goes behind paywalls and login screens where OpenAI can’t touch it.

Anecdotally everyone has an anecdote about this topic because it concerns a basic function of the human body. It’s too bad that so many people believe it’s a moral character problem making the topic nearly impossible to talk about openly.