You know, I do buy some music.

From some artists.

Some of the time.

These days.

Now that streaming is relatively cheap, and music is relatively difficult to walk down the street and just legitimately buy.

I prefer actual pressed/injection-molded CDs (to play in my Krell CD player...), and have quite a number of them.

But the rest of the time, I use Spotify. Spotify allows me exploration and endless background noise for way less money, billed once a month, than buying an exploratory CD or two.

And I don't have to maintain a database of my own music on my own servers to keep track of it all, much less manage off-site backups.

I use Spotify because it works for me.

I used to buy music regularly, on CD, but the last music store here closed almost 8 years ago.

Not that CDs and other physical album sales were generally a particular profitable item for artists, either. The music industry is and was and by all observations will continue to be a completely fucked up mess when it comes to paying artists for recorded music.

Although I generally agree with you, I must say: As an American living in the midwest, I don't notice much about location-based blocking.

And when I visit another country (which I don't generally ever do), I'll hopefully be far more entertained by local customs and exploring things that are new to me, than I will be worried about whether or not my Spotify playlists are operating correctly.

I use a VPN provider which does not care what I do with it, or how much data I transfer. They guarantee 4Mbps, minimum, of symmetric bandwidth availability. They actively encourage people to use the service as they see fit, and even offer (quite slow) services for free to people living in very restrictive jurisdictions.

And it's cheaper than $9.99/month.

Replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED assembly is not a repair, but an upgrade.

Apple, meet orange.

Cable TV would devolve into each service like HBO having their own streaming site available on the 'Net. And Comcast would have no reason to exist.

Comcast would still have a reason to exist: To provide last-mile access to such sites as, say, hbo.com.

Just like any other Internet provider.

*shrug*

In the US, we have a long tradition of paying both to place and receive mobile phone calls and SMS.

We also have a long tradition of receiving landline calls for free, and also placing them for free to numbers in a specific local area. We have never had a custom of paying to answer a landline.

Nor, I must point out, have we ever had a custom of paying more to call a mobile number than any other number, as I understand is/was commonplace in some other parts of the world. When I would pick up my landline to dial a local number, it would cost me nothing additional, as with any other local number.

(these lines are blurred now that inexpensive landline-esque service is generally unlimited and flat-rate within the US, and many people opt for mobile plans that are similarly unlimited and flat rate (aside from data)).

Correction: Navy *pays* a company $0.01 to a company for the service of removing it and dismantling it.

It didn't sell anything.

That is what it is being used for in your use-case.

Looking around in the Worx Gallery (which, I must say, the very concept of which sours my mouth), it looks like it can also do just about everything else, too.

Hence, why it needs all of the permissions in the world (or at least enough of them that arguing otherwise is a moot point).

If you don't like it (and I certainly don't, don't get me wrong), there's Xposed modules that can fix it. (And Xposed modules that defy root-detection. And, and, and. See also: Cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, and DRM wars going back decades before DRM was even a TLA.)

Or, do it the old-fashioned way: One device for work, one device for other. Power off one or the other when not needed.

If a woman has had a violent boyfriend and he leaves Eninem's "Smack my bitch up" on her answering machine, that's a pretty blatant threat.

That wasn't Eminem. That was the UK-based group called The Prodigy.

(srsly. If you want to name names, please at least make sure that the names are correct.)

I still haven't upgraded Waze since their new "social" integration required a ton more privileges, mostly to phone private info. And this despite running XPrivacy - I just can't be bothered to go through the whitelisting for it, when current version works well enough.

Chances are good that Google already knows everything about your contacts. Google wholly owns Waze.

What is the difference?

That, actually, doesn't look all too onerous for such a product.

Of course I want my fancy remote-everything program to be able to manage the network, see the status of the network, use the network, vibrate, pair with devices, manage shortcuts (shortcut to email on the homescreen?), change settings (so that the remote apps can, you know, do their thing), draw on top (notifications), take pictures, use a microphone, use the camera, access files (do you like attachments with your email?) and read phone status and identity (it knows you're on the phone, just like every other app that handles audio).

I don't know why it needs precise location, but sheesh. At least it's not like Pandora, which is just a bloody streaming music player:

        find accounts on the device
        read your contacts
        add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge
        test access to protected storage
        modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
        view Wi-Fi connections
        read phone status and identity
        receive data from Internet
        install shortcuts
        run at startup
        full network access
        pair with Bluetooth devices
        connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
        change network connectivity
        access Bluetooth settings
        view network connections
        prevent device from sleeping

Your numbers are off by a factor of one thousand.

I used to have a Sound Blaster Pro which had some lightning damage. Something on the board had turned microphonic, and you could shout at the card and hear it through the line output.

Fun stuff.

Because nobody at Facebook is an engineer with enough knowledge to be capable of thinking of such things before endeavoring on a scaled test, right?

Oh, and by the way, maximizing the lifespan of a lead acid battery is a wee bit more complicated having them "fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently."

But I'm sure you already know that.