The end is nigh?

[Snakeadelic]

Undertoad, on the advice of friends, loved ones, family members, AND my therapist, I only look up skeeeeery stuff if I think it is likely to directly impact me. I use neutral search strings to limit the hyperbole in the responses and avoid most major news outlets for information. As an example, when I typed in the search string "changes to Medicaid in 2017", the third result on the list and the one I read first was a medical journal. They're not perfect but they're sure's hell not MSNBC either!

Also, THANK YOU for the data-usage information. As long as they don't start timing me, I should indeed be just fine, since my favorite kinds of websites are pet/livestock breeders, photo aggregators, and other such low-size destinations. No HD movies for us--our TV is probably too cheap to see the difference. Still, I've been known to spend more than 8 hours a day online, so that's where my "charging by time increment" worries were coming from.

[Undertoad]

Tidal is a flaming piece of shit that has been failing since before its announcement. Sprint bought into it because they are incompetent. There are no actual Tidal customers. Not literally, there are probably about 300,000 actual Tidal users worldwide. (Spotify = over 40,000,000)

Tidal doesn't own Prince songs. Prince's estate and Warner Music owns Prince songs.

Prince, in a terrible mistake of understanding how the new media world will work, decided to limit his streaming to Tidal. Prince intentionally decided that his music should only be limited to a certain number of fans. A very very small number of them. You should ONLY be angry with Prince for making that decision. He thought it would make him more money but exclusivity deals are failing to do that...!

HOWEVER, that exclusivity ended when Prince ended, and Spotify will start streaming Prince in February. (That was also announced yesterday)

ALL music streaming services that will survive have a free ad-supported model, accessible by everyone.

NOTHING to worry about. N O T H I N G

[Mountain Mule]

One of the forums I frequent was hacked on election day. It styles itself as "the most active liberal discussion board on the Internet," a grassroots group with no ties the official Democratic Party (although it sure has a lot of ads asking for money to support various official dem causes and candidates ). That board descended into chaos and it took them a couple of days to get up and running once more. Members had to register all over again and lot's of concern about individual's privacy being breached. Needless to say, they're a paranoid bunch at the moment, and one question that came up was how hard would it be for Доналд Трамп hacker's to purge sites that don't wholeheartedly support the new administration. Sounds like an awful lot of work to me. Plus, would it really work? Couldn't sites that got "purged" just keep on setting shop all over again the way that one did? No one on the other site ever really answered that question and I'm just curious.

[Undertoad]

As long as there are backups, any site can be easily re-created.

[xoxoxoBruce]

But somebody has to put in the time to do it. In the mean time, the public clamors at the gate. Goddamnit, it's been Nine and a half minutes, where is he?