Laugh

A good baseline philosophy is that nothing really matters on the internet, especially on forums and social networks like Lemmy, etc

As long as you genuinely weren’t an asshole, it’s just funny that someone would block frivolously in such a small community of people

If you were an asshole, the block is a moment to self reflect

No one who could use that money is getting a cent of it

It’s just another way to funnel taxpayer cash away from tax payers

Ahh yes of course, I guess I went straight to assuming it was HPE doing the investment

They’ve still got a pretty hefty server division and increasingly not using HP/UX, no?

Self preservation seems like a fairly obvious motivator

I don’t think you can bind a future executive like that, especially given the precedent set by Trump himself

Oh, I feel like I’ve gotta let you know the (post 2003/7?) Microsoft formats are technically “open” in that the spec is available for anyone to implement, license free

They saw ODF coming and made sure to kneecap any advantage

#3 is an incredibly recent development. You don’t need to go back even half a decade before everyone was happily gargling Microsoft

Microsoft had an almost total stranglehold on Office productivity software for about 3 decades, only their formats really mattered. I think they still have over 3/4 of business & enterprise market share.

Google’s productivity suite is probably in 2nd place in terms of usage today (much more popular than office outside of business) which I believe doesn’t have an external file format, followed by either LibreOffice (via OpenOffice, the originator of ODF) or maybe even the Apple suite.

Essentially the support isn’t super ubiquitous because, especially until recently, the percentage of documents created in that format is quite small compared to the Microsoft formats

HDHomerun is the commercial solution that is relatively painless assuming you have something that can run a client that supports it

Open source, you probably want to look at tvheadend and a USB DVB-T tuner (hauppauge still make decent ones I believe) attached as the next most straightforward option, it can take a little bit to get set up but it’s pretty seamless once it is. Same caveat about clients

That’s a bit world war-y, now isn’t it

I don’t know if I’m typical, but neither desktop or laptop are ever fully off for me under normal circumstances, sleep mode is the default

It’s not unheard of there to be English language tracks that drop in random French, Italian or Spanish words and phrases

It’s just regular cultural exposure to other languages ultimately. No rule says you need to stick to one language in a song, so some musicians throw in some stuff from other languages they’ve heard, because why not

I’ve always wondered why Americans “take” things so much. “Take a shit”, “take a shower”, “take a look”

You “go for” or “have” those things in OG English.

As someone from the UK where bum refers to arse 99% of the time, this was mildly baffling for a moment

Tax is the compromise

The French have a good historical case for what should happen if that fails

Kinda

In a normal transaction without a phone you use a plastic card issued by MasterCard/Visa/Amex (or a local processor). The processing company charges a merchant a small percentage fee on that transaction to the business. In some places they might add that processing fee to the bill, but that’s illegal in my country nowadays.

When you add Google/Apple into the mix, they’re importantly not replacing anyone, they’re just adding themselves in to basically just replace the “plastic” part with “virtual” in what I said before. So the payment processor still takes the same fees they always have, it’s just a phone talking to the card reader rather than a chip in a card.

So how do they make money? I believe Apple just charges the bank a small percentage, which I imagine they reconcile out of the payment processor fees. Google, on the other hand, I think offers it to banks for free, because as is tradition, they’re more interested in the data.

Why is it somehow so much worse that this is a train?

Like it’s feral behaviour wherever you are, but somehow very slightly more expected this was on a plane IMO

Worse, the NSA is (theoretically) below the government in the pecking order

Palantir are trying to elevate themselves above governments

That’s a bad thing because ostensibly democracy allows us to influence the government, there’s very little we can do to influence palantir

UK/EU has had contactless payments via our bank cards for about 2 decades now. America caught up eventually some years later

When phones got the ability to act as our bank cards, it made sense for them to use something compatible with the same technology that was already deployed

Funnily enough, America (and I guess also Korea, given the companies) dragging their heels on standard contactless is one of the main reasons why Samsung/LG briefly put out a couple of generations of phones that had a magnetic stripe mimicking payment feature in addition to standard NFC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_secure_transmission)

Data centres notoriously don’t have heads, but I love the enthusiasm