A[n LG] spokesman said, "our focus on customer satisfaction is paramount.”
Ok, that got a solid laugh out of me.
Gabe Newell really nailed it there. I buy tons of games on Steam. I also used to subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from Google. But now Netflix has junk and I need to subscribe to 10 services and they occasionally deleted my partner's downloaded shows while traveling because they couldn't validate the license. I can't even play HD videos from any legal retailer on any of my devices other than a Chromecast as they aren't under the media lobby's control.
But say I was to download a movie from a torrent site. It would probably be a higher quality than streaming services would give me, I can play it offline with no concerns about license expiry and it will still be 4k on every device I choose to watch on. I could also take a screenshot and share to my friend (which may cause them to purchase that content!). It's basically all upsides. Maybe slightly more difficult to find the content than something like Google Play rentals, but really not much and the tradeoff is the greater choice of content available.
It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.
I really don't get Discord. Why would I want all of my chats in different top-level sections? I much prefer just having a list of groups that I am a part of. I do like sorting them into priority and low priority but that is all I want and it is independent of "server".
Basically it is a way to provide unfair education. By forcing the student's parents to pay for as much as possible you are ensuring that only wealthy neighborhoods get good education.
This is why DisplayPort is the better connector. Because they don't have their thumbs up their asses.
It always saddens me how much user pain has been caused and money wasted in implementing DRM which as far as I can tell hasn't succeeded in preventing a single movie or TV show from being available on torrent sites.
In practice probably largely. But I doubt they say explicitly.
The printer is sold at a loss so that they can gouge you on ink, so you would need to factor that into the equation.
...however $400 seems like a lot of ink.
Yes, that is also true. Prices are not directly related to cost, but to consumer's willingness to pay. However in the long term there is a pressure to provide low prices and lowering cost will allow that.
Yes. "Knowingly" is the hard part here. Reddit will of course say that you agreed to their terms of service and that the terms are reasonable because otherwise they couldn't operate their service. However it is definitely true that many users didn't realize that they were giving Reddit permission to sell their content (even if it is the logical conclusion).
People have different definitions of "the fediverse". To some people fediverse is ActivityPub, but to some people it is any federated protocol.
SMTP is a federated protocol, so some people would consider it part of the fediverse.
POP3 isn't federated, it is standardized but different POP3 servers don't connect to each other in regular process of the protocol.
I mean of course they do. Reddit's job is literally to redistribute those photos and it is well known that they will be used to generate profit.
Maybe there is a little grey around around "selling" but if they have the right to redistribute them I don't see why they wouldn't be able to redistribute them directly for money as opposed to just redistributing them with some ads on the page.
DisplayPort supports audio.