Thanks, that's nice to know. I do still however like the convenience in certain situations of just pressing AirPlay on the phone and not having to use the physical remote (or Remote app).

You should take the time to fully read my comment, the first thing I said was that "it's one of the best", I then later said "I'm sure there are other compelling options", by implication I acknowledged there may in fact be better options. I wouldn't know for sure if there are better options since my experience is limited to Apple TV, Android TV and my Samsung Smart TV.

The article was about why people care for AppleTVs and I stated my own personal experience with why I'm happy with my AppleTV which I chose in the first place mostly because I already had an iPhone.

You should choose whatever platform makes you happy, it honestly has no effect on my satisfaction with my own choice, I don't understand why you seem to feel affronted by what I said and quite frankly your getting annoyed by it is entirely a problem of your own making.

Because it's one of the best media streaming devices available for TVs for those who don't care for broadcast TV.

I don't watch broadcast TV and before I got my Apple TV my daily routine on my Samsung Smart TV was:
- Press power button on remote and wait several seconds
- Press "Smart Hub" button, wait for it to appear
- Navigate to desired streaming App, wait 10+ seconds for app to start

Now with the AppleTV, I don't need a TV remote at all anymore, I press the Menu button which wakes up both the AppleTV and TV itself. It's where I left off, possibly paused from where I was. It's got plenty of CPU power so is fast to start or switch apps as desired.

My wife and I also very regularly AirPlay Spotify from our iPhones to the AppleTV, it's a one tap process from the phone and automatically wakes up the Apple TV and TV.

And then there are the other arguments of Apple compared to other offerings. For example, Android (and Android TV) serve Google's advertising business, while Apple TV like other Apple products adheres to their policy of respecting user privacy while making the experience as easy as possible for users.

AirPlay aside, I'm sure there are other compelling options, but the AppleTV to me was affordable, supported AirPlay and I was confident that as a popular platform it would be well supported by media streaming services.

SARS still absolutely intends to move away from Flash, but they stuffed up and didn't get it done in time. They actually got the tax filing for individuals done last year, as well as a lot of other commonly used forms, but still had other use cases to complete.

Although it's entirely due to their own incompetence, given the predicament they found themselves in, can anyone here suggest another fix which would allow organisations to file their monthly taxes in just a matter of weeks?

From iFixit's own website:

That sucks, clearly a well planned theft by someone in the know. Did you not have 2FA enabled on your Gmail? I personally use their Authenticator app.

Having at one point in my life having done customer service for World of Warcraft, I cannot recommend enough that everyone use Authenticator options wherever available for online accounts, especially high value ones such as Gmail. While in your case it was clearly someone based at the school, in general there is a enormous industry in the business of compromising accounts of all types.

Thank you for the clarity on the grounds of denial, knowing this I now have the same feelings as you on the matter.

NotPetya largely used EternalBlue to exploit unpatched Windows computers.

If Mondelez had simply kept reasonably upto date with Windows Updates, the damage would have been highly limited, or possibly non-existent. The fact that they claimed damages of $100M means that countless computers were not upto allowing the malware to infect them over their network.
I hope Zurich wins, because in the same way that insurance companies are not expected to pay out for accidents as a result of a clearly unroadworthy automobile, insurance companies should not be expected to pay out for damages due to grossly negligent IT practices.

Your average large merchant doesn't "pay" for the fraud, instead they pass the cost onto their honest customers. Rather than big merchants paying out their profits, they instead charge every honest customer a few cents extra to cover the fraud costs and maintain their same profits.

The little independent merchants do unfortunately suffer, as they're not the ones with the clout to improve the situation or the market share to have their honest customers cover the cost.

Newer versions of Microsoft's RDP protocols are very advanced and performant. On my iPhone 6S running Microsoft's RDP client and connecting to my Windows 10 Pro computer over LTE, I get almost completely smooth video experience watching YouTube on Chrome.

See below for more insight into their more recent improvements:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/01/11/remote-desktop-protocol-rdp-10-avch-264-improvements-in-windows-10-and-windows-server-2016-technical-preview/

Right now, at 200 comments, it reads

"Disclosure" in the headline has been incorrectly typed out is "disclsoure".

As someone who worked as a Blizzard Europe Customer Service Agent many years ago, I can believe this.

On some Swedish forum some "clever" kid posted a "hack" which would let you get anything you wanted on your WoW account for free, the advertised process was something like:
- Change your account's country to a particular EU state.
- Change your billing type to some direct debit system.
- Enter bullshit details.
- Buy what you want, and it works.

Except what they didn't realize is that when the end of month batch would run in a few weeks, the system automatically suspended any service with "invalid" details. If you purchased game time, your account would be frozen, if you purchased something like a realm or faction change, that particular character would be "locked" from play, all until the "bounced" payments were reimbursed to Blizzard.

Now, any intelligent person would instantly avoid this due to it literally being fraud. However, due to the weeks delay due to the nature of this billing system, many naive kids racked up a significant amount of "bounced" transactions which largely locked them out of most of their characters which had realm changes even after they fixed their game time.

This made for a very difficult couple of months for support staff with many kids literally crying that Blizzard "set them up", lulling them into a false sense of security. The truth of the matter is that this is just the nature of that payment method, legitimate users of it never knowingly let anything ever bounce because it was common practice for merchants to blacklist that payment method to anyone whose payment bounces, Blizzard being no exception. It's a really crappy system from the point of view of the merchants, but it was (probably still is) a very popular system in those countries and presumably works very well overall for subscription services.

Due to this, Blizzard locked customers from being able to change their account's countries after this except through customer service with documentation proving your new physical address.

Moral of the story, if you're stupid enough to commit fraud in the first place, don't do it for services where you have something to lose.

As much as I love the idea of an ansible, and while I'm no physicist, I have seen it stated time and time again that quantum entanglement doesn't get you instantaneous communication.

You're right about the exclusivity issue, but what you quoted from the parent post was highly inaccurate in their quoted prices, see my comment here: https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...

As someone actually living in South Africa, why on earth would you mention a specific country in your argument to make yourself not only factually wrong in this case, but also appearing highly misinformed?

Cost of movies in South Africa (Logan as an example, as per https://www.takealot.com/all?q...):
USD 10,08 (incl tax) - DVD (at supposed 18% discount, converted from ZAR 129)
USD 13,20 (incl tax) - BluRay (at supposed 22% discount, converted from ZAR 169)
USD 27,26 (incl tax) - 4k (at supposed 18% discount, converted from ZAR 349)

Amazon US:
USD 14.99 (incl tax?) - DVD
USD 11.99 (incl tax?) - BluRay
USD 19.99 (incl tax?) - 4K

The only $2 price I have ever seen are maybe bargain bins for older movies, or dodgy pirated DVDs sold by street vendors (which I haven't seen in a few years now actually).

Netflix (now offered here), is charged in USD, at exact same rate as in the US, however, thanks to exclusivity bullshit by local network here, some shows like House of Cards are not available on it.

Based on comments I see on Slashdot, it seems that many people assume that regionalisation and geoblocking of online services is just so that the same thing can be sold "cheaper" in certain markets. Sometimes that's true, for example, I used to work for Blizzard EU CS, and they deliberately isolated Russian servers as they paid lower monthly subs. However, in most non-third world countries, like Australia/NZ, Western Europe and South Africa (not technically 1st world, but for a lot of consumers here, it kind of is), the reason for regionalisation is a legacy of before the internet, where companies got exclusivity arrangements on media from the overseas publishers.

Before the internet, there was value to having these middlemen who made their money by importing media and making it available. With the advent of legal media distribution over the internet they realised they were becoming obsolete, so they used their pre-existing legal arrangements to prevent publishers from selling direct to consumers in their markets, forcing those markets to still pay them a cut. To summarise, these days consumers in all markets outside of the original publisher's, are essentially paying a kind of "tax" to shmucks from these "distribution" companies for essentially doing nothing.

As you can see above, we here do not really pay less, but also annoyingly, we also get less content available as local distributors often can't be arsed to make some content available here, or the content we get is delayed. Hence people use geoblocking circumvention services such as VPNs to to get around this complete bullshit.

As a final comment, when us South Africans see comments like yours, it reinforces our belief that most Americans don't really know anything outside of their own country.