Too lazy to read the source. Does this include digital books? In the last 5 years, I've bought books almost exclusively on Kindle. I've only bought a handful of physical books. They take up no room, never get damaged, can be read anywhere (as long as I have my phone, tablet or laptop with me), they can still be lent out, etc.. There are tons of advantages to buying a digital book vs a physical one.

So does Florida have an Amazon headquarters? I'm too lazy to google it. You know, since they're enforcing the whole return to office policy.

From google, either @gmail.com or gmail hosted domains. I'm speaking as a sysadmin who manages a pretty sizeable mail system. Google and MSN are responsible for a good percentage of the spam and phishing attacks out there.

Google should clean up its own house first. The amount of phishing and spam that comes out of Google mail servers is ludicrous (same with Microsoft). But I guess it's easier to block others that to fix your own problems first.

Has someone who cut his teeth by first using Gopher and Archie as search engines, I can tell you that it wasn't a legend. In my personal experience, Google search results were far superior to Altavista's pretty much on release.

Google search became a near monopoly because the other search engines can't compare. When it first launched, it was far superior to the competition at the time (Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, etc..) To this day Google search is far superior IMO to the other search engines that exist (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, etc..). People use Google search because it gives better search results. I personally couldn't care less what default search engine is set in a brower or device; I always changed it to Google if it allowed me to, or ignored the built in search engine and go straight to google if it doesn't permit me to change the default search engine. It just works better IMO.

Who goes in person to pay a bill? The elderly, those who still pay things by cash or check, and have no phones, computers, and most likely no internet at home. And for some, it's for the social interaction. Just because it doesn't exist in your world doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Sure, if you're in the US. Blizzard games are available internationally ;)

I haven't read anything regarding this exactly, so I'm not sure if it's addressed in any way. My 10 and 12 year olds play Overwatch, and have for a couple of years. They bought the game for the XBox. Neither have a cellphone, nor will they at any time in the near future. I play Blizzard games so my phone # is already going to be tied up to use with my account. Not to mention I wonder what the legality of this requirement, due to the fact that they are minors, and that my country has very strict privacy laws, even more so for minors. So not having a cellphone means that they won't be buying battle passes. This is a really, really stupid move on Blizzard's part. I hope that falls by the wayside, like the Diablo 3 marketplace did.

I was about to say the something similar. This rolled out in Canada at least 5-6 weeks ago. It's nothing new.

But streaming games takes local hardware out of the equation, other than screen size/resolution. All the CPU and GPU work is done on the server side. It's nothing more than an interactive Netflix.

Since we don't have HBO Max in good old Canuckistan aka Canada, due to a deal between HBO and Crave, I'm curious to know if this means that we'll be seeing this on Crave north of the border?

Vendors also have the option to sell in multiple stores/chains, and sell from their own website.
Epic does not have this option with IOS. They can only sell using Apple's App Store. You are comparing apples (no pun intended) to oranges.

If I want to buy gas for my car, I can either pay through a credit card (for which there is processing fees). But I also have the option to pay cash, or with a debit card. I can also choose to go and buy gas at a multitude of different gas stations. Apple has 100% monopoly with the Apple store (unless you jailbreak your phone, but not gonna go there). This is probably where they are going to get in trouble.

I genuinely don't understand why anyone wouldn't have both a PC and consoles (yes plural). I also have younger kids. Consoles are better for them than PCs (what do you mean I need a 20 minute windows update?). Their friends also are on Xbox Live or PSN. Now when Sony embraces cross platform play this will be less of a requirement, but until that day...