Amazon took nine years to reach profitability.

I'm not sure Amazon is a good example here. The company famously opted to reinvest its free cash flow into growing the business, rather than saving them and booking them as net income. They likely could have been profitable sooner otherwise.

Also, I am not aware of Amazon receiving billions in government support in the 1994-2001 timeframe.

Not for you, but for them to track your kids.

Indeed, because even if it's not user-repleaceable, any phone repair shop can do it. (It's also crazy to buy a $1k+ phone in the first place, goddamn, there are fine options for much much less.)

It's annoying, but adapters are cheap. I'm not going to lose sleep over $5.

They did, the whole industry uses USB-C now.

And there was "Project Star Trek": back in '92 they got System 7 running on a 486. It was shelved as Michael Spindler pushed for the PowerPC instead, but it existed.

While a sudden simultaneous shutdown is sometimes unavoidable, there is no reason why everything has to come back up at exactly the same time. Certainly, supercomputers of decades past didn't expect that all systems would spring to life simultaneously.

Something violent happened to Uranus. Why do you think it's tipped over on its side?

But Tomb Raider: Anniversary is already that, and still looks perfectly good. And if you want it more strictly faithful to the original, there's the recent remaster. So this is absolutely unnecessary.

It's one of those things that only seems obvious in hindsight,
Bravo or brava to the engineer who proposed it.

Score one for K'Breel and the Council of Elders, I guess. We'll get you next time, you crafty Martians!

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are still included with every Apple device. The current versions are fully up to date and are free for any device owner.

What Apple has done is put the AI features and licensed stock images behind a paywall. Which isn't great, but those weren't core features to begin with; the iWork apps existed long before they were added.

To quote Apple: "Yes. You can continue using Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform for free. And while these apps remain free for everyone, an Apple Creator Studio subscription offers premium templates, a library of high-quality, royalty-free photos and graphics, and powerful intelligence features."

Why would an otherwise routine software update even come with new EULA terms?

Off the top of my head, I can't recall an Office for Mac update ever coming with a new EULA.

While Office 2021 is affected by the expiring license, it's still under support until Oct 2026 and users just need to update. It only reverts to read-only if you don't update.

Thank you. I had been wondering about this precisely because Office 2021 is still receiving updates.

So this is really only an Office 2019 issue. Which still isn't great, but it is at least older.

And from the sounds of things, this only impacts the retail-licensed version of Office 2019. The volume licensed LTSC version doesn't rely on an activation server or certificates.

So who is to blame when someone uses a model that has had the safety rails deliberately stripped off, like a Heretic or Abliterix fine tune? These are generally couched in "for research purposes only" terms, but I use an Abliterix fine tune of Gemma 4 26B-A4B as my "daily driver". It absolutely never refuses anything, although it spends a lot of time patting itself on the back for understanding what I say well enough to paraphrase it (reasonably) accurately.