victords

This sort of thing is quite common in a lot of places.

Years ago I remember that I wanted to buy one of those Rock Band sets for Playstation that came with the whole band. But they were so expensive back in Brazil, that I did the math and it was the same price to fly to Miami, book a hotel for the weekend, buy the set, and come back.

What a stupid concept. I love it.

Thins like that is what keeps me from going all-digital in pretty much anything.

Books, movies, games... The fact that one day you could wake up banned for something and lose everything you bought during years is absolutely awful.

I've heard plenty of criticism about PHP. Making things "too easy" was never one of them lol

Also, the EU is far from being this "digital warrior" some claim to be.

I'm partial to the subscription service model because most of my life I could barely afford a console or a gaming PC to play a lot of games, so it seems much more accessible.

But regarding the argument that we will have a bunch of different service which we would need to subscribe to: Is that really a downgrade?

We already have exclusives for consoles. There a number of games you can play only on Xbox. Then there are the games you can only play on PS4. And then there the PS3 games, which you will need yet another console because there is no backwards compatibility...

One way or another we already have this fragmentation today. Subscribing to multiple services actually seems cheaper for me.

> In their business plan Google (now Alphabet) favors a "greater good" for society rather than purely revenue optimization

No, they're not.

They just have better PR. They're both for profit companies with their share of controversies, but Google just has better PR.

That's too bad, but I can't help to think that it's a nice feature.

Yeah, I got the same impression.

Maybe I was too young at the time or not so much involved in Tech to really pay attention, but I think what happens today is worse.

I never saw that as Bill Gates being evil and more a very competitive and ruthless person, which is an important distinction to make.

And so they have an office in a politically stable region: The UK!

Quest is a great little piece of hardware that I'd like to buy since my PC is not good enough for VR games, but having to create and tie a FB Account to it just seems wrong.

I agree with you that society should support them. But not the companies.

I think the companies should provide benefits uniformly for all its employees, but the government should provide the extra benefits for adverse situations, such as these for parents.

I think Sweden has a similar model (?), where parents have sick days for their children where the government pays your salary when you take these days off to take care of them. I believe it's called VAB.

Microphones cannot speak, but the Echo can.

So the 2T dollars company is the decent one?

I honestly don’t think they do.

I really think that’s just a personal project of a Russian billionaire that has enough free time and pretty much unlimited resources.

Ah, yes, instead let's just sit down in front of another piece of plastic typing on a keyboard to give unrelated advice on the internet about how bad it's to waste your life in front of a piece of plastic.

It’s still retaliation. No way around that.

> There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers.

No, there should be this expectation. If I have a photo of myself that I'm not comfortable being saved somewhere, there should be an expectation that when I delete this from a service, that service will actually delete it.

The expectation should be that the service will do what it said, not that it hid everything very well.

The monopoly is not in the smartphone market. It’s about the monopoly behavior within the applications marketplace.

Google can have the argument that you can install different stores in their OS (or even apps directly), and so you’re not locked into the Apps provided by their store. Apple can not make the same argument.

With Google now also kicking them out of the store, I don’t think that’s a battle they will win.

However, I really hope they do. Against both. That would be a great victory for the consumers.

He's not been really out of the public sphere.

He has always been involved in a number of social issues through his foundation and have been very vocal/public about them.

Maybe we're just hearing a bit more about him and his thoughts because he's involved in looking for a way out of Covid through his foundation, and has famously 'predicted' something like this.

To be fair, that is not uncommon today.

Amazon itself proud themselves in claiming they're "the most customer obsessive company". Or Facebook's and its mission to connect the world.

So, I wouldn't say it's bizarre to see that today, but it's bizarre to believe their leaders today.

Nice, I did not know they had that!

Is there a way to subscribe to this? Did not find an option for the reports neither at the Status page or at the Blog page.

Are there malicious reasons for doing that?

Let's not forget about the Xbox gamers working from home that are secretly playing games during boring meetings.

With all due respect to adult actors, but the “Einstein visa” being given to a porn actress is hilarious.

To be fair, his comments were unacceptable at that time as well.

That's quite a jump to conclusion... I don't think that the issue here is Brazil's position on capitalism or innovation, there are other companies providing similar services there.

The issue seems to be a juggernaut company like Facebook, with all the flaws that it has, trying to enter the payment sector of a developing country without regulation or notice.

Follow up question: In general, when a diff is generated, is the standard process to just do a manual code-review and CI, or do you also test it manually to check for unexpected side-effects?

> At what point are the citizens of a country responsible for changing it for the better?

And how would they do that?

The HK citizens by themselves will not win this fight, the writing is on the wall. They either get help from abroad or flee.

It's naive to think that a region with a population of less than 10mi will make China backdown, considering China's history.