Do they?

Because their actions imply otherwise.

Does it work the other way? Can I follow Threads users without being on threads.net myself?

I won’t say I didn’t have a bit of schadenfreude when Fort McMurray burned.

I agree, but to some degree, people own their government, and this government is, more than many, responsible for much of the causes of climate change.

I’d say the same thing if Florida sinks into the sea, or South Texas and Louisiana are swamped, or north Alberta catches fire.

Apropos of nothing, Saudi Arabia is the definition of a petro-state.

Chickens. Coming home. Roosting. Etc.

This is why the entire country of Canada is called Canada.

It’s called the Information Deficit Hypothesis.

And yes, it’s been proven wrong.

Pirate an old, pre-CC version.

That’s what I do. Admittedly it’s Photoshop 3.0 on a Mac Quadra.

As a Marathon fan since 1994, the plans for the new Marathon make me sad.

I’m thinking of my Bard’s Tale C=64 saves which easily fit on a 160k floppy.

He’s also a right-wing douchebag, if that helps.

There’s one notice, and it’s in the System Settings app. And it’s a little red dot beside the iCloud section. That’s not really the same league as what Microsoft is doing, or Even Google’s nag to use Chrome across all their Web properties.

You’re right about the first-party apps that you can’t remove, but it’s also not the same as, eg, Edge where those apps are used constantly and your preferences are reset on every update.

On my Mac I set my browser to Firefox in 2018. It’s never reverted to Safari, not once, where Windows really wants me to use Edge and goes so far as to not just reset it periodically, but also direct start menu searches and in-app web links to an ms-edge: url instead of using the http handler.

Apple has problems, but this isn’t one of them.

Microsoft would like to introduce you to EntraID.

That’s the enterprise version of this.

Apple doesn’t actually make it at all difficult to use a Mac or iOS device without an Apple account. You’re asked once during setup and that’s it. At most there’ll be a red dot in Settings>iCloud.

I realized I composed that entirely incorrectly; here’s what I should have said:

I hope they use full-motion video for characters, rather than rendered CGI models. This didn’t look great in Myst, and it was really nice when an enterprising modder added FMV back to Myst. I get why (FMV doesn’t always work with VR) but I hope they give us the option on day one with Riven.

Not saying pretty much says it all.

Please do the FMV bits “nicely” and not using pre-rendered clips like I’m the Myst remakes?

The PC OEMs really, really, REALLY want to get back to the 90s and 2000s, when the six-month obsolescence cycle reigned supreme and you couldn’t sit on the same Ivy Bridge machine for a decade.

That’s a large part of the push behind NPUs and AI: it’s the only way to get the cycle going again, because otherwise the PC OEMs are going to be looking at a market similar to automotive OEMs, mature, and where replacement happens at the customer’s discretion instead of the market’s.

Qualcomm lets them do this because ARM isn’t anywhere near as open and standardized as x86, and Qualcomm can–and will–sunset platforms whenever it suits them, resulting in millions of machines getting boat-anchored.

(side note: Apple doesn’t indulge in this despite selling ARM machines because Apple plays the long game, and would rather chase revenue from conquest sales than cannibalize their existing customers; it’s remarkably long-term thinking from an erstwhile hardware company)

I think I bought Shadow of the Beast for almost that much in 1988 or 89. Of course, it came with a t-shirt and cool Roger Dean poster, which added some to the cost.

Point being, games certainly were this expensive for a long time, and I’d agree with them being that expensive again, but for the money going to vulture capitalists who’ll soak me via DLC on top of that. And I won’t get a Roger Dean poster, even.

Now I’m wondering about hummingbirds.