I thought their only loyalty scheme was taking your data hostage.

It looks like a behavior modification program, but I'm not sure why they bother when the OS/App ecosystem is a behavior modification system already.

There are definitely outliers. Another one is law professors - on average they've done quite well.

You can do the math yourself if you like (data here, just adjust for inflation), or just read someone else's summary.

Do you want to pay roaming fees on a 8-ish gig download?

Dunno what your carrier charges you, but most that would be a painful fraction of their yearly income.

Several of my friends are professors. Most of them have been advising students against Ph.D programs for decades. It was obvious in the early aughts that professor-production was exceeding demand, and schools had a vested interest in producing ever more, doing a severe disservice to its custom-uh, students.

The game now really has to be, don't get one unless you have a specific target in mind - definitely title and industry, preferably a specific company you've talked to. You have to recognize the risk and have backup plans.

Basically, do not just keep getting degrees because you are avoiding the real world/really like school/whatever. Maybe a masters, depending on industry.

And being a professor is increasingly a shitty job (from a pretty great starting point, to be sure). Average salary hasn't gone up since the 1970s. (Seriously, look it up.) Culture war bullshit is poisoning the academy, and the MBA-infested administration has decided to replace you with adjuncts who don't even get minimum wage (from that pool of doomed Ph.Ds, remember the big about them working against student interests?). Outside a few schools, it just isn't a good job any more and will keep getting worse.

We are destroying our schools from multiple angles, and seeking work in a declining industry is a very risky bet. There will be something on the other side, but that might take a while and who knows the relevance of your particular Ph.D then.

All advice from a college dropout, salt to-taste.

This story has no relevance unless it was really the act of orca revolutionaries intent on retaking the seas from those irritating land dwellers who keep floating crap all over.

If the most important metric was reducing traffic, blowing the bridges would be the way to go.

But it isn't.

The important metrics are complaints, intra-city transit time and indicators of impacting routine life (like commercial indicators, Broadway, that sort of thing). As in, making the infrastructure work for the humans that live there without blowing up anything important.

If so, they're incompetent.

Why are you wasting your time telling obvious, silly lies in a place where people who know what happened are all over?

You burn your own credibility for in exchange for people laughing at you.

I realize it is The Register, but who cares what Mr. Man thinks of your browser?

Mozilla, the org, is in a bad spot, and I don't expect it to make it over the long term.

The browser is the best of the lot for me. I want privacy, security, and customization.

Chrome is a bucket of ass on the first and the third. I do not intentionally run spyware, end of story.

Safari gets a gentleman's C on the first, mostly because the third sucks.

Once Firefox dies, I think I'll need to pick up my personal proxy development again, because that (together with a block on google IPs) will be the only way to handle ad/privacy/security issues.

In a dish.

Or take a lesson from urban street-parkers. Leave a sign, "Doors unlocked, nothing of value inside".

If people knew he was outsourcing support to the pig butcher outfits, it would impact the economic security of this scam.

(C'mon, it is a logical affiliate opportunity for him.)

Everywhere I've lived, cops are generally utterly disinterested in property crime unless the victim is connected, the loss is huge or the media gets interested.

Less than 10% are cleared in California now, and yes, they used to be better at it.

I'd say "demand better politicians who will demand better cops", but, hey, we're speedrunning the authoritarian shithole path (we are on to political assassinations as of today), so, uh, that ship has sailed.

I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this sort of corporate bullying from Oracle, when alternative JVMs and DBMS are *right there*.

I can take a stab at this.

First, it is surprisingly difficult to verifiably eliminate a piece of software from a large environment. We went through this exact exercise a couple years back because we didn't want to pay Oraclegeld. The first 90% is easy. But then you're dealing with Java running on weird devices that are difficult, expensive, or both to replace. And employees who for strange reasons try to keep a copy. And vended applications where swapping the JVM voids your support contract. And all sorts of other weird situations.

And second, these are universities. Schools in general are not exactly famous for having an iron grip on their computing resources. Their IT capabilities in general are different than businesses because their focus is different. And structurally, there are frequently organizational silos and redundant departments with their own budgets for historical reasons, so I imagine even trying to inventory all the computers a school "owns" is can be a challenge in some places. (This is certainly true in the US, I'm guessing English schools are subject to similar pressures.)

So it doesn't surprise me at all if they just couldn't pull it together. Even with centralized administrative control of our machines, it was a multi-month and surprisingly costly effort for us.

The answer to your question is, Microsoft structures their offering strategically as part of the sales pitch.

There are lots of different plays, but the most obvious version is, Microsoft salesdroid will ask if you're using Slack and come back with, "tell you what, Teams will cost you nothing, we'll zero that." Now $manager can either pay for Slack too, or replace it for "zero cost".

That discount probably goes away next sales cycle, but in a 20k person company, saving that $5/head/month (or whatever it is) means someone hits their bonus target this year.

Tada!

Snack size?