Just double-checked. My current smartphone that I partially picked for it’s 3.5mm socket does have built in FM radio that works great and only functions with earphones plugged in.

One reason is that every implementation I’ve ever tried relies on using the wired earphones as an aerial and Apple magically convinced everyone that having a 3.5mm port is somehow a bad thing.

It’s not about more reusable hardware it’s about software being constrained to support existing hardware rather than ditch it to save a fee bucks on development.

Wrong. The real question is why do we presuppose that the output of creatively driven individuals must generate profit for a capitalist economy to have sufficient value that those people be permitted the basic necessities of life? Frankly I suspect most of our most valuable contributors to culture are never given the opportunity to be bad enough long enough to develop into their potential.

This whole “oh no, AI is going to take away our liveihoods” notion fundamentally accepts the false notion that people are only deserving of a functional life so long as the primary activities of that life is ultimately to contribute towards increasing the wealth of a tiny percentage of individuals.

It’s the same mistake that leads us to massively undersupport educators and carers and will have people freaking out about how they’ll “earn a living” once robots are able to do everything we practically require to be done.

People are fundamentally entitled to a living. If someone is being denied one, then look at the system that causes that not the specifics of that particular flavour of how it’s happening.

No. Wordpad is the one being discontinued. Paint is one of several programs that can now be uninstalled from Windows by end users without any special tricks.

People keep comparing this to how WotC had to give up more gorund than they started with after announcing their DnD bullshit. As someone who plays Magic I can tell you they do and get away with stuff like that multiple times a year and the DnD thing was a rare exception of people holding them to account. They’ve shown no signs of having changed things either.

Businesses who act like this know that in the long run they get very slightly more profit out of it than they lose from the times people stand up to them.

This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.

I’ve seen a claim that the old terms of service explicitly stated that you could do so so long as you didn’t update to the newer version. Which is probably fine for most developers who are already deep into a Unity project. (Though as Unity has now taken down their GitHub page with those terms on it, I haven’t yet seen anyone link to an easy to verify and read copy for people to see if that’s true or not.

There was some sort of similar issue a year or two ago and it wasn’t enough to drive people away. I suspect the long-term picture is that any given business either slowly grows to the scale that Unreal Engine is a better fit anyway and abandon Unity or very very very slowly we see Indies move to Godot. Though it’ll be more that new indies will form studios around breakthrough hits made in Godot and be Godot studios from the start (and replace older Unity studios as part of the natural turnover of small to medium sized studios) until there is a tipping point where there’s enough Godot developers floating around that it becomes easier for existing Unity studios to switch than to keep putting up with Unity’s shit. That’s a slow process though. 5-10 years imho (if ever.)

The wealth class were buying more money from the future. We’re now living in that future and all our money is disappearing into the pockets of the wealthy. Somehow this is an essential process in order for people to get anything done.

Alternatively, it’s probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.

eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a !alerts@california.gov and a !earthquakes@california.gov then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it’s probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.