Email got broken to a ridiculous extent as far as self-hosting goes. Any IP you'd get from your ISP or from some server hosting, VPS, cloud, etc. provider is already in black listed range. If it isn't openly blocked it's silently black holed half of the time. If it isn't now it'll be next month.

There's a second layer of craziness going on, that even if you want to use something dedicated like Amazon's Simple Email Service and pay per email and have them take care of everything you'll have your application denied! Some say it's just the first spam filter, but it isn't, and the problem remains that even after the appeal they deny lots of people, for absolutely no reason at all!

What the heck does that mean? Can't do national roaming? Can't do any SIM from the US so you need to use a card from abroad in roaming all the time in the US? Can't do roaming on a US SIM so you need a foreign one when you leave US?

Actually just the opposite, everything is coming from the vendors and you just need to not drag your feed too much in packaging and uploading it to your site. Or from the OS itself, like CPU microcode: https://www.kernel.org/doc/htm...

Unless you're something like Purism doing your own PureBoot and being engaged in a (losing?) battle with disabling all Intel ME management facilities and similar I don't see where that much effort is needed to support some x86 platform with all relatively standard components. Sure, if you see here or there a problem with some specific hardware combination you're using you might have to reproduce it and open a ticket with your vendor and follow up on that but it shouldn't be that much of an issue.

I'm neither fine nor not fine with anything, I'm just pointing out the "charge back time" is gone for the vast majority of people having this game. Not what you might want to discuss about being right or wrong, but what actually is. So you need to get into some kind of lawsuit, err arbitration possibly.

It's a 10 years old game! Good bet most of the people that "bought" this didn't do it over the last months.

"even use GPS tracking" isn't a low power use as you seem to imply, it's expected for the phone not to last the whole day that way. Many phones don't even last a whole day with regular semi-light usage anyway but GPS is surely not that. You might want to have it on for navigation, or if you want to log some track precisely but you use it for a couple hours and that's it; even then that might eat into your battery enough so it doesn't last the whole day.

You're saying that Android's tracking network that DOES NOTHING for now it's "the best"? By which metric?

Doesn't Apple have the best (by far) such tracking network and the iDevices have WAY better battery life, with smaller batteries? Never mind that Samsung had it just as well since 2020 or so, and they're the top Android seller ... this horse has left the barn and you're quite late to the bickering party.

It doesn't assume ONLY minutes of daily use, it assumes many things, like indeed a certain reading speed, general usage (indexing, serch, etc.), how WiFi/bluetooth/back/frontlight is used and so on. Specifically Kindle at some point had a pissing contest with some competitor where they were counting 60 minutes of use per day as opposed to 30 for the competitor and at some point they said, ok we are going to count 30 minutes ourselves too, now your Kindle has double battery life, from two weeks to a month.

In any case it's highly misleading to compare 13 hours of non-stop running with whatever longer time where the device isn't used for 95%+ of the time.

It's bad enough when people mention the battery life in "months" without saying how many minutes of daily use it assumes, but even worse when comparing one device's actual use with another one's nearly all standby.

Even if it's nearly impossible to get just a dumb monitor with the panel you want that only has a bunch of HDMI inputs and you kind of need to get something "smart" just don't connect it to the internet, and let it be just a simple monitor/TV. Weren't Roku just recently in the news for locking up your device until you accept the new (very onerous) T&Cs? Nobody needs that, nobody needs ads around or during everything, and nobody needs a permanently connected webcam (often +microfone) controlled by some OS that's way worse and closed and against the end user than Microsoft ever had the audacity to produce.

That is across all versions...

Even if some Fords have is as an option since 2007 (at least) it can very well be the case that they don't have it in these much fancier somehow-self-driving systems. Cost saving, of course.

Teslas don't have it anymore in the cheaper models. No ultrasonic parking sensors too. They're doing everything with cameras, not that many too! Sure, there are blind spots but they say they can compensate by just keeping track of everything as the car moves. Bad luck for anything that doesn't keep a fixed position like dogs and kids.

This is how Tor works and it has its users and uses.

Not sure if you meant it ironically but you can buy Office by itself. Not sure what the bundling is, I mean sure if you subscribe (starting for free?) to the online version (if you need for example the web version) there would be some space for you, like there is for Google Docs, but a web based document editing thing doesn't really make sense without some cloud storage. I guess one could always want to use Microsoft's online Word or Google's Docs to edit directly documents from Dropbox or Mega, but I doubt this can be much enforced by anything except the market.

Speaking of Microsoft what was apparent after the last bricking bug https://arstechnica.com/gadget... for Android was how bad we have it with these "walled gardens", and in this case it was with the "open" Android. Specifically:
- you can't backup your device because you are denied access to mostly everything, from OS data to app data (note that it isn't even "to sell cloud storage" because the online backup is equally bad, as in not storing app data)
- you can't boot something else, all the discussions we ever had about Secure Boot and Windows starting since at least Windows 8 are nothing, you can still boot anything on any PC, and you can even do it in a "Secure Boot" fashion if you prepare well
- even if you could boot something else you can't get the keys to your own encrypted storage

We're talking about access, Secure Boot authentication and data encryption available to you, as the owner, authenticated in any way possible, before anything bad happens, of course, not that a thief can't get the encryption keys or the evil maid can't boot something, that of course is by design. All points were particularly relevant as the mentioned bug was probably something simple, like a permission or symlink, which could be easily fixed by just booting from something else and running something trivial.

And the point I'm trying to make is that basically all are available for all PCs. You can make backups as you like both for files and images of whole drives, you can manage your Secure Boot and boot anything (including wildly different OSes) and you can have your Bitlocker recovery keys. When you manage to have your "open" OS worse than Windows things are dire.

Microsoft got fined for bundling a media player and/or a browser with the OS. Samsung (we are talking about the top Android manufacturer?) gives you (depending on the phone and region) a Facebook app you can't install (because of course, the admin and owner of the device doesn't have permissions to uninstall apps!) and it's all fine.