> How?
How do we usually stop companies from being monopolies? Do that.
I don't accept that phone operating systems are a natural monopoly and that it's OK to have only 2 companies in a position to control them.
653 karma · joined November 25, 2017
How do we usually stop companies from being monopolies? Do that.
I don't accept that phone operating systems are a natural monopoly and that it's OK to have only 2 companies in a position to control them.
Stop Android from being a monopoly.
This solution has the same problem as the Windows browser ballot — it starts from the assumption that the OS must continue being a monopoly.
I have a computer that I use to play podcasts, and the subscription list (a file) is synced to my main computer, so I can edit it from there.
Syncthing is also on my Lineage OS phone (until my Librem 5 arrives) so I can have a shared Downloads folder.
In the past, I used it to sync a subset of my music collection to my work computer.
It's reasonably usable for a geek.
Climate change isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.
“Advanced” economies rely on otherwise-unnecessary consumption of resources, irrespective of environmental damage, because there's no effective social penalty for harming the environment.
Clean energy won't help: demand always increases at least as fast as supply.
Is it to make the best tool for conversation, or is it to make money? If it's both, how important is each?
...
Ah. We can't. Chrome is closed-source, because Google wants to... Say, why is Chrome closed-source? What do Google add to Chromium that they don't want you to see?
(Yes, I know that's impossible. My point is PayPal is effectively a monopoly.)
I suppose they're on US Pacific Time and cut it fine on the deadline.
I suspect we're just training people to click the Whatever button. As that's most “normal” people's response (I am not normal), the courts will eventually rule that a first-use roadblock doesn't produce informed consent, so doesn't excuse you under the GDPR. Hopefully, then, websites will stop performing a superficial impression of caring about privacy.
(Explicit informed consent is the GDPR's last-resort excuse, which you only need if your use of personal data falls outside all of the GDPR's automatically-acceptable justifications for using and storing personal data.)
The reason they're paying so much for it is that you didn't do the refactoring last time. Every time they refuse a refactor, all their future costs genuinely go up.
If they ask why the refactor is needed, why you didn't do it properly first time round: “You're constantly refining your business processes to satisfy ever-changing business needs; that's what I need to do to the code.”
That does sound a lot like Amazon is a relevant monopoly here.
If you just chase money all the time, you always end up with shoddy crap — there's no incentive to be any better than barely adequate, so you're constantly riding that line.
We only end up with nice things when someone dedicates time and effort _despite_ market forces. Mediocre businesses and their besuited human avatars spend so much time insisting they're “passionate” because even _they_ know that giving a shit is the only way you get anything other than crap.
Is there some reason you can't make a fork/distro of Firefox?
Chromium is open source, and Chrome may _look_ 99% identical, but we have no idea what hidden differences there are between Chromium and Chrome, because Chrome isn't open source.
Gmail has an option to forward all incoming mail to another address, so when you do eventually leave you won't miss any mail.
> It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why.
Maybe you're used to all people sounding male or female, so sounding like neither seems unfamiliar.
Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.
The response to this AI voice demonstrates that a lot of people automatically hear any human(ish) voice as either female or male, one or the other. Similarly, people automatically recognise individuals as either female or male, one or the other. There's a very narrow band of presentation that won't be read automatically as one of those two options.
See how difficult it is to stop your brain from making automatic (possibly false) assumptions.
And it may be irrational, but wrongly-activating brakes feel like less of a risk than wrongly-activating steering or accelerators.
And anyway, “lots of things are untrustworthy” is not a good argument for trusting something else.
It's unethical to leave life-and-death decisions to a black-box algorithm, when I know it was written for the primary purpose of gathering more money. Safety is a constraint, not their goal.
(A service like Liberapay might make this easy for you to do.)
It would be nice to have a way to auto-play each piece (something like https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/dronezone) so that I can start the music automatically (e.g. from a script) without having to click.
And anyway, it's “to improve your experience”, so you can't opt out. It's for your own good. Remember, Big Brother loves you.
I know it was their first product, but I would imagine they get much of their revenue from other avenues, such as Android's built-in totally-not-antitrust web search app, and YouTube and Gmail and web ads...