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The widespread practice practice of product+service bundling needs to be regulated and mostly prohibited.

For example, bundling subscription services with you car.

A service that allows you to purchase books bundled with an e-reader.

Hardware should not be bundled with services, and there should be a service neutrality requirement.

You know who you are...

Eh, whatever, short answer, no...

In other news:

This may or may not be a good thing, but it's still chum for the republicans

Watch the fun

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So, if you are looking for some evil guys who hacked you (PEGASUS etc.) lately, they are sitting just here...

Our infamous drone war has largely faded from the headlines. Aside from one strike that went horribly wrong during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, there has been vanishingly little coverage of what's going on with the signature American tactic of the war on terror: remote-controlled death robots.

So I was rather taken aback to discover President Biden has almost totally halted drone strikes, and airstrikes in general, around the world. It's a remarkable foreign policy reform, but also a remarkable failure of both government communication and media coverage. A hugely significant change in foreign policy has happened — and almost nobody is paying attention.

Immediately after taking office, he set up a new system requiring White House approval for any strikes outside of active war zones (and later published Trump's loose rules that enabled so many civilian massacres). Now that the occupation of Afghanistan is over, that requirement applies almost everywhere, and it appears Biden is extremely reluctant to grant approval. Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. (Precise figures are unclear because some strikes are classified.)

This drastic reduction in airstrikes, like Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, was genuinely politically courageous and morally correct (though both fell short of a full imperial rollback). Some well-earned bragging is in order.

Biden nearly ended the drone war, and nobody noticed

Which LISP should I learn? Years ago I read about Scheme and wrote some hello world level code. I learned about lambda functions and currying. I also looked at racket. A few years ago, much of my day job involved the JVM and I was getting sick of Java so I got a book on Clojure, which is a very nice language, but I never wrote any.

A few days ago I downloaded and built the latest version of DrRacket.

Should I go straight to Haskell? Or what about other functional languages? Is Erlang worth a look?

I need something stimulating to distract my brain from the mundane nature of everyday life, and mediocre programming languages.

Today, the President is announcing that the Department of Energy will make available releases of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices for Americans and address the mismatch between demand exiting the pandemic and supply.

Says a lot about his climate shtick.. You are supposed to believe that releasing a couple of days worth of consumption will make a difference, and he is hoping it will buy some votes. Was the strategic reserve's real purpose always just to manipulate prices for political gain?

he is also focused on how consolidation in the oil and gas sector may be resulting in anti-competitive practices that keep American consumers from benefitting when oil prices fall.

Gee! To bad Carter didn't think of that...

I suppose, if they really wanted to increase global supply, they could drop the atrocious sanctions against Venezuela and Iran and Russia, but, you know, that's not what the game is about.

Poor democrats, they have nobody to run in 2024. and in the midterms, they are working hard to lose as many seats as possible, more than 2010... Reelecting your old relics that make and break promises is certainly helpful in that regard. By all means, carry on

In January of this year with the changing of the guard, the democrats have made the FDA (and the CIA/NSA) into sacrosanct institutions. Anybody who dares to criticize them will invariably be tagged as "Q" and consequently be accused of being anti-vax and downmodded as far as possible, something to be expected from ari, zumi, barb, and DM, and the rest of the democrat mod squad, so it was especially disappointing to hear it from mcgrew, I never took him for a worshiper.. Here's to a speedy recovery for all of you

EDIT:

Well, as the DNC Mod Squad continues its little crusade, I found out what got them started on this one. Evidently Trump criticized the FDA for not certifying his favorite tabloid medicines, and as we all know, whatever Trump is against, the democrats must defend, no matter what it is. So now, everything aimed at the FDA is about the vax, and only the vax when my criticisms are based on other things much more serious, it's quite the reversal. This is reflected in many of their obsessions, seeing any criticism of themselves as being "Trump", which partially would explain the downmods, just lashing out. Republicans are illin', but democrats are sick, with denial. Talking about the voters, the Party is doing great, can't burn the money fast enough. They love your boundless spirit and ambition.

EDIT 2:

More downmods! Democrats gone wild! Under normal circumstances this would be seen as abuse, but not this week... Keep it up. Do 'em all.. You know you want to. Show me what you got.. Too bad you can't mod journals, eh?

A jury found defendants in the federal lawsuit related to the Unite the Right rally in 2017 liable for four out of the six claims against them, but were unable to reach a verdict on the remaining two claims.

The jury found all defendants liable for civil conspiracy and racial, religious or ethnic harassment. They also found James Alex Fields, Jr., the perpetrator of a deadly car attack, liable for assault and battery and infliction of emotional harm against several of the defendants, claims for which they were cumulatively awarded $12 million in punitive damages.

The federal lawsuit alleged two dozen white nationalists and white supremacist organizations, including Richard Spencer and the Ku Klux Klan, organizations conspired to commit violence during the rally. During this rally, James Fields drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, which killed Heather Heyer and injured others in the chaos.

Charlottesville jury awards millions in damages in ‘Unite the Right’ trial

Day One of the Great Decline