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Comment Seems strange to admit publicly. (Score 3, Insightful) 36

Perhaps I'm just a bad judge of public opinion; but I'd think that identifying yourself as 'the spam party' would be something you would avoid at all costs.

The electorate will forgive you a pointless quagmire war, a few hundred thousand surplus infectious disease deaths, or similar minor matters; but surely loathing of spam is not merely bipartisan but essentially universal. I'd assume that even 'direct marketing' scumbags don't enjoy sampling their colleagues' product involuntarily.

Comment A curious juxtaposition... (Score 1) 7

It feels a trifle incongruous to watch the AI bros fretting about how their oh-so-good-with-unstructured-inputs-and-definitely-not-brittle pets with chat with one another in on the glorious posthuman internet; while simultaneously running scrapers distinguishable from DDoS gangs only by their deeper pockets against the rest of the internet.

It's almost as jarring as seeing Cisco trying to act like they are in the same zip code as the cutting edge.

Comment Re:What are they talking about? (Score 2) 19

Aside from various occasions when Edge just seems to grab defaults(particularly from PDFs); there's the "second chance out of box experience" that is specifically designed to periodically assist you in repenting of whatever bad-customer choices you may have made during the OOBE; and (at least from mid-2023 or so, possibly earlier) Office will default to opening links in Edge rather than default browser in order to, more seamless or something. There are also a lot of places in the Windows UI(like links in the 'settings' application that invoke edge straight into a bing search regardless of default browser and default search engine.

I have no idea what if any lines exist for legal purposes; but they are not shy about pushing edge good and hard with both OS and Office mechanisms; including on systems where the user has already installed something else and set it as default.

Comment Re:My hometown and alma mater (Score 1) 37

New Jersey has Camden, whose unofficial motto is "Worse than Detroit", but it's so depopulated it's not considered in many surveys.

Anyway, I suspect this "manufacturing academy" will run a year or two or three, not do much of anything, then be shut down with Apple writing off the loss as well worth it for the goodwill with the government.

Comment Fair Access to Banking Act (HR 987 and S 401) (Score 1) 213

The bigger question is why aren't there laws requiring payment processors to blindly accept all payments and only report fraud.

Because not enough Americans have called their Representative in support of H.R. 987 and their Senators in support of S. 401. These bills, collectively the "Fair Access to Banking Act", would do much as you suggest.

Comment Serious artistic value = get out of jail (Score 1) 213

Incest is illegal, and depictions of incest are also illegal in many states.

Laws banning depictions of incest are unconstitutional under Miller v. California if said depictions have serious artistic value. This is true under both current state law and the proposed interstate definition of obscenity.

Comment Re:Common GUI API (Score 1) 214

What is the POSIX specified API for graphics, again? There isn't one.

True. Regulators would need to pick a GUI API stack as the baseline for interoperability, much as regulators picked POSIX.1 stack back in the day. I'd even be fine with a regulation that requires an OS publisher to support "either X11 or Wayland" because applications meant for one can run in the other through XWayland or Weston, as can apps made for the subset of Win32 supported by Winelib.

Comment Re:Apple Mobile Device Service (Score 1) 214

Does Apple allow users to play their own personal music files on the iPhone?

The included Music app plays music that was synchronized onto the phone using either Finder for macOS or iTunes for Windows. Apps other than the included Music app play music loaded onto the phone as files, such as through libimobiledevice for Linux, but these songs can't be part of the same playlist as music rented from Apple Music. Combining purchased and rented music in a playlist is a big sticking point for my roommate.

your roommate could stop renting music from Apple, and instead procure music files in other ways.

That's a lot of CDs to buy and store, especially when a relative's letting her use an Apple Music subscription without charge.

Comment Re:Apple Mobile Device Service (Score 1) 214

If I want/need to listen to something from [major record labels] I use one of the free streaming services

Free streaming services behave more like noninteractive radio than like an interactive jukebox. All playlists are shuffled. This is because copyright law in my country (USA) provides for a cheaper performance royalty for qualifying noninteractive services.

the thing is to get software which exports a list of the songs and playlists you have and then get copies from wherever available on the internet

Say I've extracted her playlist as a list of artists and titles. Right now, Amazon appears to have a monopoly on selling lawful DRM-free downloads of major-label music over the web. Google closed its store years ago when rebranding its rental service as "YouTube Music", and Apple's store has always run in a proprietary native application, not the web. So it's either enrich Jeff Bezos or "No, I'm not buying two thousand dollars of used CDs just to be able to use that Linux thing you keep talking about."

Gradually move away from an iPhone to a device you actually own.

Which device might that be that operates on the major cellular networks in the USA? I've read takes that one doesn't meaningfully own an Android-powered phone in the same sense that one doesn't meaningfully own an iPhone. In the interest of reliability, Google has been locking down Android tighter and tighter over the years since Android 10 changed W^X behavior so as to break (for example) Termux.

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