I block YouTube ads on all my devices by paying for YouTube Premium. It feels refreshing to be able to pay for a service I enjoy and therefore not be served ads which I don’t enjoy. It seems like a win-win to me. Doing something like this, while technically interestingly, seems like far more trouble than it’s worth for 99.99% of people, especially when there’s a reasonably priced way to block ads that also supports the service.
There’s nothing to prevent them from allowing people to donate without a tax deduction AFAIK, but they don’t allow it. In the US, most donations no longer actually get deducted from taxes anyway due to the greatly increased standard deduction since 2017. I think something like 85-90% of people now just use that and don’t itemize.
That’s a great argument for decentralization of search engine usage. The more small players with different ranking algorithms we have, the harder it is for SEO to work.
That’s the bottom line. Kindle books will now be fully locked into the Kindle ecosystem and if Amazon decides to take back something you’ve “purchased,” you’ll have no recourse. I’m done purchasing ebooks from Amazon because of this.
At least as recently as 2014, I was aware of some random Windows 3.1 (yes) machines running in a corporate data center owned by a very recognizable Fortune 500 company. At the time, they were upgrading all their Windows PCs from XP to 7 and this 3.1 box showed up. I confirmed that it was, in fact, real.
Same. Windows used to be pretty good from my perspective. Then, Microsoft started stuffing it to the gills with spy- and bloatware, so I moved on. Windows 10 was ok, but 11 is unacceptable.
One such repeating case ended up settling for over $10B, so it was definitely worth it!
To clarify, they spent decades litigating the same fundamental issue for each year’s tax filings, with each filing year taking multiple years to get to court. The plaintiffs won every single case until the government finally settled all the remaining tax years for that amount. Each year prior was worth hundreds of millions.
I assume one could start and then cancel a subscription, though, so you could just pay about a buck every time you want to use the app. That’s a lot of friction, though.
I have iCloud+ base tier, but I use it just for iMessage, Drive, and other non-photo apps (I back up my photos to my NAS). I don’t back up my whole phone because all the data I care about is already backed up. I also like being able to use Private Relay when I want. All that is to say that for me the $1 plan is great and I still have plenty of space for shared album photos from events (which I later will move off of iCloud). But I get that I’m a pretty unusual use case.
There's a button at the top of the event page (after it's created) to add it to your calendar, but it's a bit strange that you even have to do that manually.
I think they may have locked it behind iCloud+ because one of the big features it offers is a shared photo album, which of course utilizes iCloud. Anyone without iCloud+ is essentially going to be unable to use that feature. And yeah...it also pushes people into paying for iCloud+, though you can get on the $1/mo plan in order to access this, so it's not like it's very expensive.
It is DRM, it was just cracked a long time ago and they couldn’t apply a fix since the discs and players aren’t internet-connected or meant to be patched.
There were absolutely obnoxious ads, including pop-ups and pop-unders 15 years ago, but at least they were generally contextual rather than targeted to your ad profile.
They’ve removed that limitation now, I think. That said, I still haven’t found any use-case for Copilot within an Excel workbook that works (probably because I’ve only ever asked it to do very difficult things since I don’t need it for easy stuff). So there’s that.
Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not important enough to me to give them kernel access to my system. I’m sure many gamers disagree with me though.
That makes me doubt it’s his lawyer. Lawyers shouldn’t publicly discuss their clients in a manner that paints them in a negative light. Fire the client first.