Skull giver

I totally agree, but unless there’s something wrong with their mental faculties, they can choose back pain over TV savings. The downside of freedom of choice is that people make the wrong choices all the time.

Even if you cut 120 dollars a month, a good mattress will still be half a year or longer in the future. And that’s with a normal one, not a medical mattress.

“Best by” often means “will lose taste over time and taste worse by” when it comes to chemical products like these.

If this stuff contains lots of sugar or no natural compounds at all, give it a try, I guess. Especially if they’re sealed in a box. Trust your senses, don’t try too much at once if you don’t know if it’s still good, and don’t swallow until you’ve verified there’s no taste of rot or other grossness. If you want more safety, have a bottle of vodka ready to rinse your mouth with in case you do notice a bad taste.

If these powders are completely dry and stored airtight (and the packaging isn’t damaged), you could probably store them for literal decades without a problem. If there’s stored in uncoated cardboard (no sealing lining), maybe treat them as mold infested, even before their expiration date. The way they’re stored makes all the difference.

I fucking hate apps. Maybe I don’t hate them enough to warrant 120 a month, but I can see why people pay extra not to have to bother with figuring out what show is on what app and how to search and cast and browse the damn things

If they use the TV box all the time, why do they have those apps?

You showed them the price difference. They clearly value the current setup over the savings. Unless they’re using your money to pay for all this, just drop it.

Bluesky people don’t care about federation and the main server is the only relevant one anyway. In theory other platforms like Twitter and Facebook could start speaking ATProto, but I doubt it to be honest.

The web is controlled by the IETF+WHATWG+some other acronyms but that doesn’t stop Google from inventing stuff like WebBluetooth and putting it in their browsers. Just because a standard is run by the community doesn’t mean it won’t be extended with proprietary options, just that those proprietary options won’t break everyone else’s experience.

Thanks to COPPA, American kids under 13 actually have very good protections online. To the point companies like Google and Valve will forego profits so they don’t have to comply.

Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.

And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.

If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.

And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.

Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.

I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.

Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.

Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.

Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!

What I wonder is how we’re going to deal with the differing speeds of planets causing relativistic effects.

There’s Barycentric Coordinate Time but I don’t think that algebra is going to make it to any clocks.

Unix Epoch time would be religious to some

Windows’s FILETIME uses “the number of 100-nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 12:00 A.M. January 1, 1601 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)”. Not even computer timestamps are universal, and the 1970 date was just result of nothing more than convenience. You can pick between the AT&T standard or the Microsoft standard.

The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.

I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.

I think RCS comes with some autodiscovery capability (by sending a request to a magic HTTP URL over the right APN, haven’t read the spec in a while) but it does make sense that carriers push it in profiles as well.

Linux has support for updating various Lenovo models through a piece of software called fwupdmgr. If your laptop is support, it should show up automatically in Gnome Software or similar package managers.

For your laptop, Lenovo has a “Bootable CD” download option for non-Windows users. It’s intended to be written to a CD (but a flash drive will probably also work), for example by using one of those USB DVD drives.

If you don’t have a flash drive for some reason (and I doubt you’ll have a DVD drive in that case), you can try to make the Ubuntu bootloader boot the ISO, though that’s not something for beginners. Here are the official instructions in case you still want to try, but I don’t think I’d bother.

The easiest method may be to contact Lenovo and ask them how to do it. I think they’ll refer you to the bootable ISO. If they don’t make their updates available for anything but Linux, you’re going to have an annoying time.

Spending the five dollars on a flash drive to write the bootable CD to would be worth it in my opinion.

To answer your question: if the software manager doesn’t offer you the firmware update already, the easiest (not necessarily easy) way would be manually adding a bootloader entry to your Grub configuration to boot the update ISO you can download from Lenovos’s website.

The second easiest way would probably be to extract the firmware updater from either the Windows download or the ISO file, extracting the .efi files and the .rom files, placing them on your EFI partition, and using the boot menu to manually boot the firmware updater.

Or, to answer more succinctly: if you don’t get those updates already, there’s no easy way without a bootable medium. Sorry. Tell Lenovo to publish the firmware updates through the standard Linux channels like they do for other laptops.

The EU actually ruled that iMessage isn’t a gatekeeper because it’s not used enough to be considered important for now. I do believe China is forcing phones to be RCS compliant though, so it’s still mostly about government pressure.

They have to if they want to support payments over RCS (it’s in the spec). Gotta love telecom specifications!

Luckily that stuff isn’t too hard to get around

I thought the whole point of iOS was that carriers couldn’t decide about pre-installed software?

Unless you mean “if your carrier supports RCS services”; in that case a lot of people are in for a disappointing surprise.

OP probably lives in North America, where texting never got displaced by messenger apps. Well, except for iMessage, but that’s a messenger app hidden behind a texting app, with confusing quirks like the terrible video quality OP reports.

Google’s RCS client works on every carrier. Samsung’s RCS client works on a small minority of carriers, most of which get their RCS servers from Google. Plus, RCS is barely encrypted (messages were sent over plaintext for the longest time, and end to end encryption is something Google had to invent).

The 4G spec should’ve made RCS support mandatory instead of optional. We wouldn’t have had this problem if it did. Then again, thanks to RCS being terrible and SMS/MMS being even worse, encrypted messenger apps managed to attract mainstream attention, which probably wouldn’t have happened had RCS succeeded.

Apple has indicated that it’s implementing standard RCS. That means no encryption and no weird additions.

They’re trying to get end to end encryption into the RCS standard, but the committees making that standard also have a lot of people from law enforcement agencies, so that’s never going to happen. If it does, assume there’s a backdoor in the standard.

RCS is quite terrible. Very few carriers still host RCS services. The only reason it works is because Google decided “fuck it, if you guys won’t provide RCS, we’ll just set up our own server for everyone to use”.

My country has a total of 0 carriers that run RCS servers. Only Vodafone had them, and they shut them down, because nobody used them. Everyone who uses RCS here uses Google’s servers. Wikipedia still lists carriers that have shut down RCS services so even the limited list of RCS capable carriers looks bigger than it is in reality.

I don’t know how Apple will implement RCS, but if they use carrier services (which, by the way, often are rented from Google as well), there’s a good chance RCS still won’t work. The only reliable way for Apple to add RCS is to copy what Google did and host an RCS server themselves.

I’m glad Apple is finally adding support, but I don’t blame them given how absolutely terrible the uptake among carriers was.

Honestly, I’d rather have Apple open up iMessage than for them to enable RCS, but regulatory pressure from China has made them include RCS anyway, so they might as well support it in the rest of the world.

To be fair, this is only a problem in countries where texting never died. In a lot of countries, apps like WhatsApp have taken over the role of the standard messenger over a decade ago, and everyone has one or more messaging apps they actually use.

The funny thing about RCS is that it’s not encrypted, and is designed to be run in carrier networks, where law enforcement agencies can read every message sent back and forth. If RCS had been taken up rather than WhatsApp or Line or any other competitor, our privacy situation would actually be much worse. In a way, I’m kind of thankful for RCS being so terrible.

Texting happens over MMS. MMS is plain terrible. I think the size limit is 160KB or something like that. There are also resolution limits. My carrier has turned off MMS support a while back, so I can’t even receive media like that anymore.

iMessage works around that by not using SMS/MMS unless it really has to. Same with Google’s RCS implementation, actually.

Hopefully, once RCS for iOS lands, you’ll be able to have a modern texting experience with your wife. Until then, stick with apps like Signal, who have been developed after 2005 and therefore can carry more than four pixels of video.

It should be noted that RCS won’t be encrypted (unless both ends use the Google messages app) so it’s still worse than iMessage or Signal. However at least the memes will work.