In our area all of the FM stations are IHeartMedia or Cumulus staple brands, with the few famous channels allowed to keep their branding but they fired all of the local DJ's and replaced them with "DJ's" that are all cookie cutter Random Factoid Top 40 Celebrity News spewers.

Many of the AM stations are independent stations that either play good music or at least have local news. There's a IHeartMedia and Cumulus Talk station in there, and you can pick up other conglomerate stations farther away, but the local stations are still locally owned and operated.

To say that I listen to AM more than FM would be an understatement.

That's the confusing thing though. it's not a failure. The rover had a life expectancy of three months and survived for a year, completing all of it's objectives.

If anything, not saying anything about the rover in fear of perceived failure hurts them more because people begin to forget about it vs announcing that the mission is officially over and tout the successes that it had.

To be fair, in 2014, if you went to google.com and searched for Firefox chances are you would get the same virus.

Just about every search engine was ad hijacked for popular software downloads and probably still are. That's why 3rd party ad blockers are as essential as antivirus anymore.

historical context: https://slashdot.org/comments....

Its a laptop, so definitely an OEM.

The only OEM that I know of that is devoid of crapware is Microsoft themselves, and even then Surfaces have some bloatware regarding the warranty and health checks, as well three installs of Office 365 for English, Spanish and French.

Even back in the day when Microsoft was touting the Signature Edition PC's which were supposed to be 3rd party OEM's devoid of crapware, the OEM's would sneak it in as part of a device manager package that was necessary for basic operation. Lenovo's and HP's were notorious for this with their Lenovo Vantage and HP Support Assistant software.

As much as I Loathe Acrobat, this move by Microsoft is going to push a lot of enterprises towards Edge, especially if it means they can finally ditch installing Acrobat Reader.

I know in our organization, 3rd party PDF readers including Edge, do not support the full feature set of Acrobat. Specifically electronically signed signatures via certificate. We pretty much had to either set edge to download every PDF our users run into and open them in Acrobat Reader, or force certain sites to IE compatibility mode. Edge supporting that alone would allow us to finally ditch IE for some of our intranet purchasing forms.

Microsoft Buying Netflix is even more stupid then the Yahoo bid. Especially at 190 billion.

You would be literally buying a name of a shell company for B Movies with a business model that's in a death spiral at best due to the movie industry creating their own streaming products. The only advantage they have (besides Stranger Things reruns) is they still have overseas contracts with movie studios, which once they expire, will be replaced by that movie studio's own streaming service.

It has to be either the time of day you tried to tune the radio, or the AM receiver in the radio you're using is of low quality. I can routinely pick up 650 AM Nashville and 750 Atlanta in Western Pennsylvania at night with just about every radio I have short of the absolute cheapest receivers.

Pretty much any 50 kilowatt AM Station at night can broadcast a 1000+ mile radius with relative ease. In a situation where power is limited and/or infrastructure is severely damaged, its the only reliable way to reach a large audience live without a large bandwidth or power cost.

I hope PG&E has plans to build more nuclear plants, because if you think you got rolling blackouts now...

No one, and I mean NO ONE short of environments and hardcore grid cutters will invest in a solar system for their home if it doesn't pay for itself within the lifetime of the system. You cut the credits that low, you better have UPS's and Coleman lantern subsidies for low income families since half the time their electric is going to be out.

You could use the credit card for verification, but I'm sure they'll use PayPal for verification, and that could possibly be forged.

As for the fee itself. $8 is a little too steep for what you're getting.

-Priority for search doesn't mean anything if your name is common and there's 5000+ premium users with the same name.
-Half as many ads? At that price there should be no ads. I'm sure that $8 month covers any and all ad revenue that person would generate and then some.
-Longer Video and Audio could be a plus, especially if we're talking upwards to 1 hour or even live streaming. There is a pretty sizable group of content providers that would jump ship from YouTube if a viable alternative was available, and if the monthly accounts result in higher shares of profits to providers without the copyright shenanigans that YouTube makes people deal with, it might fly...

Personally, if it was my call, I would've made the fee a yearly cost, and under $60. that way its almost an impulse buy like Xbox Live is and it keeps users on it for a year to maximize user activity since most users will try to get the most out of the year long purchase. Even at $5 a month it would have been much easier to swallow.

Pretty much this. If the new Google project requires developers, it will be dead and gone in two years or less guaranteed.

No developer trusts any Google project to be stable at this point. With Google, It's either it will flop and we'll kill it in two years, or it will be successful and we'll kill the API that made it popular in two years. Looking at Daydream View, or their various TV streaming endeavors, or Even Android and Chrome, which have basically been a moving target when it comes to their API changes (The latest being Manifest V3) is a big enough history sink to know what their treatment of developers is like. I'm already seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to the Nest Speakers, which seem to do less and less (For example the disastrous YouTube Music switchover and 3rd party actions disappearing) every 3-6 months and will probably be dead in a few more years.

Love or Hate Microsoft, At least you're guaranteed at least a 5 year window when it comes to a project that flops over there, and their API will be stable between newer versions with a relatively defined beginning and end of life cycle. Even Windows 8 you could still make an app and publish it on their store until next year, and it was so bad and so hated they gave their users windows 10 for free just to kill it dead.

12 Years is a lot of time to track children. It's a very good possibility that most children in the chart simply turned 18 and graduated to standard poverty.

They were making a killing on hardware. Most competitors were a little above half the price of a Pixelbook. The problem is that they finally figured out that people don't want to pay $1200 for a web browser that has as most a five year life span.

As for Ad Blockers, The day Google kills extensions or ad blockers either through bans or changes to API policies (they're trying with Manifest v3) is the day Chrome dies. Either the world+dog switches to Firefox or they switch to Edge in the hopes that MS forks Chromium. (Although MS is also supporting Manifest V3 so not much hope there either).

The Poles are the problem.

In PA for example, pole attachments can take up to 3 months just to get the right of way to put a new line on the pole, then if necessary the Fiber Co has to pay the companies already on the pole to move their wires that need to move up or down the pole. If it's a Broadband competitor, they're basically going to take their good old time to move their wires for a competitor, and they have a 3 months deadline to move it. So there goes half a year and all you've done is sit on your behind.

If you want to know why Google Fiber was digging shallow trenches instead on using pole attachments, this is why. It was quicker to dig holes then to attach to the poles.

This is what killed it in the first place.

Developers aren't going to burn resources on a maybe. Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation are a sure thing. Steam and Epic are a sure thing. Google is a maybe at absolute best, especially with Google's notorious habit of Graveyarding projects.

On day one, they should have announced a 5 to 7 year minimum commitment to Stadia. At least it could have quelled those fears and got developers more interested in Stadia.

When a "Developer" gets a open source app, publishes the app on the store under the original app name and bundles the install with extras, The extras being adware, spyware, or malicious code.

The Microsoft store was notorious for this years ago. If you searched for any open source app, chances are it was on the store by some unknown developer that repacked it. It appears that Microsoft has cracked down on this recently since the store seems to be much cleaner than in the past.