What a great name!

I haven’t paid much attention, but I had some myCharge units I bought at Costco last year get recalled. I suspect a lot of these have cheap batteries from suppliers that don’t put much effort into consistent quality. That’s “okay” with alkaline batteries where the worst that happens is they leak and maybe ruin the device they were in. Have poor quality with a lithium battery and you get a fire or even explosion. I suspect with Anker or some of the other brand names at least you’ll actually get a recall if there’s a problem. A lot of the other no-name, fly-by-night brands on Amazon or elsewhere probably don’t even give you that.

!oddlyspecificplaylists@sh.itjust.works

Ah yes, Crenshaw’s Law in action

I’ve long wondered about how that became a strong profanity

They were bought and basically no longer exist. Hot Topic was going to buy them but then GameStop came in with a higher offer. For a while they launched ThinkGeek retail stores in shopping malls but eventually shut them all down and now they basically only exist as some tchotchkes in GameStop stores. Even the website just seems to redirect to the main GameStop page now, not their “store” within the GameStop webstore.

My school offered (from most popular to least popular):

1. Spanish
2. French
3. Chinese (I think Mandarin)
4. German

I think my child’s high school offers the same, although I don’t know the relative popularities. I’m confident Spanish is still most popular, and judging by the number of posters around the school from German classes trying to convince kids to take German, I’m thinking German is still not very popular.

I have been in some heavy downpours that have done just that.

TIL Zynga still exists

Our family had a 286 PC-compatible running Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, built by someone at my dad’s job; I think he built and sold computers as a side gig. Looking back I strongly suspect all the software he included was not paid-for, or he bought it once and kept reinstalling it.

If it was pre-compiled that could also cause issues not just across operating systems but also the architectures, right? Like x86 on desktop versus the ARM architecture most mobile devices use?

I always have a case. Basically every phone I’ve tried has felt too slippery without one to me, so I get one that’s a little more grippy

I’ve had a Kindle for a long time and considered upgrading to a non-Kindle device but was concerned that they don’t seem to get manufacturer updates for very long. This could make that more attractive!

All the abovementioned practices were facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority shareholding in Glovo. Owning a stake in a competitor is not in itself illegal, but in this specific case it enabled anti-competitive contacts between the two rival companies at several levels. It also allowed Delivery Hero to obtain access to commercially sensitive information and to influence decision-making processes in Glovo, and ultimately to align the two companies’ respective business strategies. This shows that horizontal cross-ownership between competitors may raise antitrust risks and should be handled carefully.

I suppose it can work if they still face robust external competition, like how Hyundai and Kia own stakes in each other and use their combined efforts to compete on the global market, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if even that has anticompetitive implications in their home market of South Korea, both for consumers and workers.

I read an article a while back highlighting how many “tech bro” products seem to be about eliminating human interaction, like grocery or meal deliveries, or self-checkout in stores. There is a convenience factor for these things at times, of course, but with the way many of these executives seem to be pushing exclusively using their services and having zero direct interactions with other humans it starts to raise questions about perhaps their own interpersonal skills and why they want to eliminate the human interaction. This feels like more of the same.

You should file a police report or a report at IdentityTheft.gov. Give as many details as you can, but also recognize as another commenter mentioned that the names you’re seeing are probably also stolen identities. This almost certainly won’t result in any real action unless an investigator can tie enough cases together to identify a suspect. The main reason to do this is you can then go to the credit reporting agencies and place a fraud alert on your records, which should require anyone opening a credit account for you to do extra verification that you’re actually requesting it. If you don’t have a formal report that request only stays active for 1 year but with a formal report they’ll keep it active for 7 years, or at least that was the case a few years ago. You should also freeze your credit report if you haven’t already, which will make it inaccessible to anyone who would want to read it, such as a potential lender. It does become a slight pain to unfreeze it anytime you’re actually applying for credit, but makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to successfully apply for credit in your name.

Similar, I had lasers coming out of the side mirrors but would have to take my hand off the “button” so it wouldn’t cut down the signs, telephone poles, mailboxes, people, etc.

“It is my conviction that all of this should have been a part of the Thunderbird universe a decade ago," Sipes says. “The absence of web services from us means that our users must make compromises that are often uncomfortable ones. This is how we correct that.”