> Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds.

To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.

Especially annoying because if I remember correctly people gave Google some irreplaceable backup tapes on the promise that there'd be a complete archive, and within a couple of years it'd turned into Google Groups...

Fuck I sounded so fucking pompous in 1984. I mean fuck.

We all did.

That's nice, but the rest of us didn't accept anything to agree to provide a legal system that would enforce it... and there's no reason we should.

> We have a system of laws that decide which private contracts are enforceable and which are not.

And we are arguing that private contracts like this should not be enforceable.

> we have decided

I have not been consulted on this matter.

Unless you're on the supreme court that will continue to be the case

Sounds like you agree with me that “we” haven’t decided.

Yes unfortunately we don't get a say

Did you not vote?

"we" is a strong word here. More like some people 50-80 years ago decided to at worst rule against the worker's best interest, and at best chose to ignore it and pretend things would work out with a "gentlemans' agreement".

Why not. Doesn’t sound that crazy.

That’d be direct democracy, which is not such a bad idea.

E.g. in Switzerland, citizens can propose constitutional changes, challenge parliamentary laws, and some decisions automatically go to vote.

Citizens of California can pass laws directly, amend the constitution, and recall elected officials.

Probably the biggest reason we don’t have more of that is that people in power typically see it as a threat.

Aw, man, not this shit again.

Yes, they should be regulated. Or more likely outright shut down.

Nonetheless, at the moment, it's a real risk, and plenty of people do in fact think ahead and not make themselves dependent on those services.

> kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college.

Please stop posting kindergarten-level distortions of neuroscience. It burns.

>Please stop posting kindergarten-level distortions of neuroscience. It burns.

Simply denying things doesn't make them untrue. Please don't do this. It burns.

They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.

So an automatic "I am a lazy piece of shit and think my time and convenience are worth more than yours" warning? I guess that's useful.

I always felt like it was "I prioritized a speedy response on my phone instead of an elegant response from my computer at a later time".

As in, "I put it on you to better check and follow-up before acting on this…" ;-)

... which is why the institutions that assign responsibility and consequences need to make it really clear that excuse won't fly. With illustrative examples.