palordrolap

Ah. Paid-for search aggregation, not paid-for search. I hadn’t picked up on that aspect of their model for some reason.

Why is sociopathy and psychopathy not a condition requiring treatment?

Because people like that tend to get themselves into positions of power, and so prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Kagi can do it … for now, I assume. Maybe they’ll get to keep the privilege if they decide to throw some of that pay-for search money at Spez, but chances are that’s going to get stopped. Or their prices will go up. Again.

Hopefully archive.org have measures in place to stop people from yanking all their data too quickly. As least not without a hefty donation or something. As a user it can chug a bit, and I’m hoping that’s the rate-limiting I’m talking about and not that they’re swamped.

Rumour has it she used it for e-mail.

You’re missing the part where “democracy” means what he wants it to mean and he hopes that everyone else thinks he means what they want it to mean, regardless of whether those meanings intersect.

For example, Russia, China, and at least two of the countries with “Democratic” in their official name are democracies. Technically.

It’s a bit easier to not use a website than it is to leave a country.

A combination of browser settings and exceptionally rare usage of short link providers - as creator or user - means I’m not completely sure about this, but … were they putting ads on the short links somehow?

Because I figure if they weren’t they should have tried that.

And if they were, how expensive is running a short link service anyway? This feels like rummaging around in the sofa for loose change. Smacks of desperation.

Weary prediction: They’ll say “We’ve investigated ourselves and determined no wrong-doing.” and that’ll be it.

YouTube have been doing that sort of thing for years though. Do you remember the push to have everyone switch to a Google+ account with a real name attached?

They’d ask if you wanted to do the aforementioned, and if you said no, they responded “OK we’ll ask again later.”

No “Never ask me this again.”, just the implicit “f–k you, we’re going to pester you with this over and over again until you sign up.”

After they got enough sign-ups they quit asking. And then Google+ went down the Swanee, so they relented and decided that maybe it was OK for people to have pseudonymous accounts after all. It only took years for that to happen.

Can’t see how short-form content is going to fail in the same way, so there’ll be nothing here to teach them the lesson again.

Hahaha. “Don’t look at the rubbish we have now, have a look at this quality content we had before Spez sold the last bit of his soul.”

“And lo the corporations built their own navy, or maybe bought the US Navy which amounted to the same thing…”

The House of Lords serves as a check and balance against a government running amok. Now, they’re not necessarily a good check or balance, but every government needs one. Very occasionally they have been - to be mildly disingenuous - useful idiots. (And occasionally, obstinate asses, but I digress.)

Ideally though, we could do with a House of … whatever’s below Common, because if the ones in the Commons are commoners, what does that make the rest of us?

And how would we stop corruption in this lower, lower house?

But nonetheless, it would be useful for a government to have to take heed of people who are closer to the real world. (And I don’t just mean MPs’ surgeries or correspondence because the repercussions for falling behind on that are slim at best.)

What exactly is sending and receiving over such a link?

That has to be be a large amount of expensive fast RAM in the computers at either end trying to keep up with that.

Consumer-grade hardware is an order of magnitude slower, even for the good stuff.

Meh. They’ll continue to lie until they get caught and then lie that they believed what they said to be the truth.

Even, nay, especially in cases when that admission would indicate that they were an absolute clown lacking the capability to distinguish their rear end from their elbow.

Lies upon lies until a lie is reached whose truth is hard if not impossible to prove and the whole stack of lies will rest on that in an uneasy balancing act.

It’s not like they haven’t been doing that for centuries already. They attend courses on how to do it, for heaven’s sake.

Case in point: A reality TV show called Big Brother, named after the nebulous, terrifying, all-powerful overseer in George Orwell’s 1984, was created specifically to rob the name of its power.

The way things are going, libraries themselves will be outlawed.

“Homelessness is a direct political choice.”

Talk about a quote that can be read both ways.

It’s complex I guess. There’s a stereotype that doing a good deed in China usually ends up backfiring on the doer of the deed.

Here she died and was praised, but then, the backfire had already taken effect.

We could conclude from this that the only correct way for a Chinese citizen to do a good deed is to die in the process.

Then note that the praise could be not for doing the deed but for saving whatever other forces are at play from having to provide the backfire.

The hard part is determining the shades of truth of all the various aspects here.

Unsure if sarcasm