OK, now I respect the Chinese government's troll move.

Even if electric power, water, sewer, trash pickup, and gas for indoor heating (in areas that get snow) are included in your rent, other services with recurring payments include home and mobile Internet access, renter's insurance, car insurance, and health insurance.

A lot of shows on streaming services are never released on DVD.

When I've asked others what has improved about GitHub over the past seven years of ownership by Microsoft, people have told me free private repositories are the big one.

I don't get it. What's your issue with Spotify that you imagine Amazon, of all companies, is better at?

Spotify pays poorly per play, but per play is a rotten metric.

Payout works the same (all subscription fees are pooled, then paid out according to total plays) so music services are "punished" according to the payout-pet-play metric for connecting people to the music they will listen heavily to.

The best services on on this metric, will be services which most subscribers don't even use - maybe because they don't even know they have it because they got it bundled with their cable TV etc. Obviously this is not sustainable or desirable.

I have sympathy for artists, and little for Spotify. But it's also artists who are primarily responsible for the authoritarian copyright mess we have today, from Sonny and Cher to Jean-Michel Jarre to Metallica. Not sure I like the revolutionaries more than the old regime. Especially when they push garbage metrics like payout per play, and their most usual solution boils down to "you should pay me, not all those others you listen to" or "you should listen to less music besides me".

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

Your suggestion is defeated by parents' habit of handing a phone to a child as a digital babysitter. It's how we lost comment sections on animated videos on YouTube in December 2019.

That's right! Trump and his administration are certainly seeking control over media with more hamfisted, overtly threatening means.

But do you remember project jigsaw?

Back in the glory days, the government didn't have to threaten Google. They leapt at the opportunity to please them. They pretty much came to them asking, "where do you want your people installed?". In neoliberal philosopher Tim Snyder's terms, they certainly obeyed in advance. The aggressive punishment of people with even mild takes like "you should take the vaccine but we shouldn't force people to take vaccines" was probably not even government's idea, but the idea of small people eager to show which side they were on.

Are we better off now that the velvet glove is off? Not by much, honestly. But there's no way ahead where you don't come to terms with how damn bad the Biden-era responsible centrist consensus was.

It's not just for Microsoft anymore

Until 2009, no other device could play iTunes Store purchases, and there weren't a lot of other legal downloadable music stores. This was one factor for the iPod to iPhone progression. Another was that Google required cellular telephony support in all certified Android devices prior to sometime in the 2.3 "Gingerbread" cycle, which made it impossible to make a direct counterpart to the iPod touch.

No, communism isn't mentioned there either.

You can play Apple Music from the Music app on the phone. Unless I missed something, you can't play it from other apps on the phone. And the Music app can't play files written by libimobiledevice, only the music library. You need iTunes to send music to the phone in a form that the Music app can play.

My roommate tried that patch with my help, and iTunes stopped being able to sync purchased music to her iPhone.

I researched online and found these limits:
- iTunes app for Windows uses a driver called Apple Mobile Device Service to sync to an iPhone, which (like other drivers) Wine cannot run
- libimobiledevice for Linux can sync files but cannot update the music library
- The Music app included with iOS can play only music from the music library and cannot import files
- VLC app can play music from files but cannot play rented music from her Apple Music family plan, making it impossible to mix the two in a playlist