the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical

Do they? I don't automatically assume there's anything unethical about the more expensive option in any other product category. The PS5 itself costs more than an XBox Series S, probably not because Microsoft is morally superior to Sony.

Buying things at their retail price and using them in a way the manufacturer didn't intend is not shitty, nor abuse.

Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.

I think you said that people who do things like build a cluster of PS3s because they're a lot of compute for the money are shitty, and that they're abusing the fact that Sony priced them low in the hope that people who bought them would also buy games. I disagree with that position.

If you meant something else, perhaps we don't disagree.

Three states (Louisiana, Texas, Washington) do that. Others don't.

As to why, the simple answer is the state government made a law. They get to do that because the state constitution says so, and it doesn't conflict with any federal law. If you keep asking why, you'll usually end up with a root cause like the people who have power want it that way, or at least don't especially want it a different way.

The fact that other places do it differently has nothing to do with anything.

I was in a collision with a cyclist once. He ran a red light and came out from in front of a box truck in a turn lane right in front of me on a road with a 45mph speed limit.

He was badly injured, but I was driving a sports car with a low, long hood, so the injuries were to his legs instead of his chest or his head. Large four wheel drive pickup trucks were already the norm in the area, so he was lucky in a sense.

Because big players (other than StackExchange) never adopted OpenID where you could paste in an arbitrary URL for your identity provider.

Also, OpenID probably shot itself in the foot by using a URL instead of something shaped like an email address, which would have allowed a zero-effort upgrade for the user if an email provider also wanted to offer OpenID.

We certainly shouldn't keep half our population incarcerated indefinitely, but maybe half of the killers. The offender here had been serving a life sentence for a prior homicide.

There was supposed to be a distinction, but it doesn't look like Reddit is handling it very well anymore.

A ban or "permanent suspension" (an odd name) is for ordinary bad behavior. You're meant to know you are banned, why you are banned, and how to appeal if you think you didn't break the rules.

A shadowban is for spam or repeated ban evasion where an intentionally abusive account operator expects to get banned and will waste resources and make fewer successful posts if they can't tell they're banned.

This was meant to be the same kind of distinction. Ordinary abuse leaves a "removed" placeholder and spam vanishes.

I think after XMPP, Google Talk, Wave, Hangouts, Allo, etc... people should know better than to adopt a messaging service from Google.

Yes, I know RCS is theoretically an open standard, but if Google can keep me from using it, it effectively belongs to Google.

Minority leader Tim Knopp said:

we are deeply disturbed by the chilling impact this decision will have to crush dissent

Give me a fucking break. As a legislator, you have no shortage of ways to dissent including access to media, the ability to speak on the floor of the legislature, and the ability to vote on legislation. What you can't do, if you want to keep your job is not show up for work every time you know you're going to lose a vote so that the legislature can't do business.

Attempts to implement communism at the scale of a nation state have always involved significant concentration of power. It may be impossible to do otherwise.

Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.

My aunt spent a long time working in education in the USA, much of it in leadership roles. When she incorporated lessons on critical thinking into the curriculum, it resulted in a lot of pushback from parents who did not appreciate their kids applying the lessons at home.

People who actively resist the use of critical thinking will seem cognitively impaired because they are, in fact intentionally impairing their cognition. My intuition here is to blame religious fundamentalism, but that's not a well-researched position.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

• I have enough toilet paper
• There are no refrigerator trucks full of corpses
• Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year

Yes, I think I'm better off than I was four years ago.

I would have liked to see harsher penalties for all involved, but a cop getting real prison time for his involvement in killing an innocent person under color of law is encouraging.

After renting a couple cars with electronic door poppers, I find them plainly worse than mechanical door latches. They're a solution in search of a problem, and some implementations are hazardous.

That means if Google’s verification system gets widely adopted, browsing the web could become a headache.

Using a phone to scan a QR code in order to access a website on my desktop is a headache even if it has no dependencies in particular.

Microsoft tried to make Windows Server popular. Apple sold a server OS and even its own rack-mount servers for a while.

The people using servers, and often the people making the decisions about what to use have a high degree of technical knowledge and skill. The things that drive popularity in consumer operating systems such as being preloaded on devices and having a polished GUI don't have as big an influence on experts.

Customizability, reliability, and performance do have a big influence on what experts choose, and Linux wins on those points. There's also the history of proprietary Unix being big in the server/supercomputer market, and Linux is an obvious successor.

Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.

It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don't invite any reporters.

They bullied Syncthing the same way. Fortunately, Syncthing-fork is still developed and available on F-droid.

I understand a well-curated app store (which Play Store is not) placing some limits on apps getting all files access. In a modern security model, that's not a permission most apps should have, however synchronization and file management apps obviously should have it.