How quickly most companies have walked back all of the “moral” stances they have taken over the last few years, all within just a few weeks of the political winds changing, should be a lesson to everyone that there is no such thing as an ethical publicly traded company.

They will do what they think will make the most money for the shareholders, no matter what. If you want them too “pay”, the only choice is to stop giving them money.

There is a better chance that user reporting for this will be disabled more so than it is that this would make a difference. You know that right?

If this latest drama with Apple Maps (and Google Maps) is what pushes someone over the edge to looking for more user respecting options then the people further gone than I would really be comfortable getting used to. Both companies regularly do much more than should do more to turn you off.

There might be things that are better these days in the technical sense. But there is always value in having something “good enough” that is freely available and compatible with nearly everything that has speakers to use to keep those technically better yet more expensive options in check.

Better than every year or so no one can play the games they supposedly “bought” due to some technical hiccup for a random yet lengthy amount of time than some percentage of people be able to more easily play our games without paying us. -some Sony/gaming industry stooge probably

In all seriousness, people need to stop being so willing to put up with this sort of easily foreseeable failing with the current way of doing digital goods. If I can’t use it without the blessing of someone else it is not buying, it is borrowing, and that severely impacts the value proposition for me personally.

Technical issues WILL happen. It is the nature of the beast, it is just terrible engineering to build what is essentially dead man switches into your customers products.

Not sure if this is still the case, but with Steam it used to be that if you didn’t put the client into “offline mode” ahead of time the client wouldn’t open, let alone allow you to launch a game once the connection was lost.

I hope they took care of that by now.

I use Joplin. They have a sync server you can host for yourself.

Them stop talking Mark.

Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.

Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.

I use 2 matching Synology NAS systems. 1 backs up to the other daily. Then one of them backs up to Synology C2 weekly.

I couldn’t care less about 8k since I can’t even see streaming 4k content without using a platform infested with DRM.

I wish I could get found guilty and still be able to negotiate on equal footing with the prosecution about what my punishment was going to be.

I haven’t played it in awhile. But last time I did, it still seemed to be doing good on the custom maps I used to play. Like Helms Deep.

Probably either Left4Dead 2 or the latest Hitman game

As the general rule I feel the same about more or less all of the “AI” that is available to consumers from the likes of Google, OpenAI, etc.

It just seems more like a different way to do things with digital assistants or search engines that we have already been able to do for years.

But once its on why would you ever turn it off? /s

I am less surprised that the information is out there than I am that the bodyguards of such people are allowed to either bring along their personal devices or install random crap from the public app stores on their work devices.

I never understand how people are surprised with this sort of thing happens.

They did something on company property that the company probably would not approve of and got let go for it. And it sounds like they seem to think they company should be providing space to do it.

People really should learn to keep their political opinions out of the office where your opinions might run counter to the person that controls your ability to pay your bills.

Phones are becoming less and less interesting by the day.

Once they get to the point were all of the options that don’t require incredibly inconvenient sacrifices in functionality to maintain the interesting stuff like a video game console then that will kill interest in the market for me.

If I can’t do anything besides basic smart phone crap I might as well just buy whatever has a good camera once every half decade or so and be done with it. So whatever top end thing Samsung or Apple are putting out.

I’m not sure Google has fully thought through what it means to just be a worse version of what Apple puts out, but with more ads.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Everything in these kind of cases tends to be a negotiation. So if the starting point by the DOJ is “break them up”, then I imagine they are willing to settle for something much less undesirable to Alphabet.