I paid my property taxes online and got a receipt for it. They never took it out of my account, nor did they send the money to the county. I never noticed it. The county sent me a bill with a late fee. I finally got the late fee removed, but it was a pain in the butt.

Let me tell you, nobody at certifiedpayments.net had a single care about that late fee. It was only because the county was "nice" that the late fee was removed, and they made it clear that they didn't think they had to, they just thought it kinda felt right.

How do you scan a QR code if you break your phone? At least even non-smart phones could get text messages. And to answer your question, you get several passkeys. If one quits working, you user your backup. One service gave me a set of one-time-use passwords.

Passkeys are The Shit.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.xbrowsersync.org%2F

I use DuckDuckGo for about 90% of my searches. DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its results. It does just fine about 90% of the time. If I'm not getting the results I think I should get, I go to google.

So, yeah, while admittedly small, DuckDuckGo stats are still impressive to me:

The search engine is predicted to serve over 30 billion private searches in 2023. Its user base now tops 100 million worldwide.

Apple certainly has a monopoly over it's app store. And the monopoly company is much more open with it's app store.

I stopped using Amazon's app store because the apps didn't get updated as frequently as they did on the Play store. At least it was an option. I've never used it, but it looks like Samsung has an app store, too.

I'm a little perplexed by this. I used Amazon's app store many years ago. I see it's still a thing: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fmas%2F...

Find something even remotely close to the Amazon app store for an iOS device. Or, the ability to even sideload apps on an iOS device. OK, I know that is supposed to be in the works, but I've been hearing about it for a while now. I still haven't seen it actually working yet.

> Meanwhile the government spent $42 billion on rural broadband and still haven't connected even one person

What? I live out in the middle of nowhere, and I got fiber to my door this year, courtesy of a federal grant. And writing the words, "I have fiber to my door" is something I NEVER thought I would be able write.

I could see a good use of this being to lower prices during off peak hours in order to shape foot traffic a little better. If they use it to jack up the price for surge pricing, they will lose as much of my business as humanly possible.

So, discounts to encourage a better customer experience == good. Price gouging to just be price gouging == bad.

That's my two cents.

> Mixed nuts are an ultra-processed food.

Citation needed. If the ingredients are peanuts, cashews and almonds, that's not an UPF. If it has a long list of ingredients you can't pronounce, then it's an UPF.

Let me DuckDuckGo that for you:

The suit accuses Oracle of collecting the data in various ways, such as through the use of its BlueKai tracking cookies, and then selling the information directly or through its “ID Graph” and other related products and services derived from its data.

More detailed info on BlueKai here (it was a company they bought):

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2020%2F06...

I have a work account tied to an Office license. That's the only one I use frequently. All the others I only use when I have to login to do something. For example, when Microsoft had a nice forum for Asp.net, I would login to to post a question. They screwed that up so much that I now use Reddit or Stackoverflow.

I now have email through Zoho, Gmail, and Outlook that I use through a web browser. Of those three, Outlook on Edge is the only one that routinely stops downloading emails if I just leave it open all day in a browser window.

Good ol' Microsoft.

I think no local account on Windows would be the final straw for me. I would switch to Apple. I mean, I have an Apple sitting right next to me. A few things I like about Windows better, but I could sure learn to live with an Apple if need be. I do have an account on Apple because I pretty much had to, BUT for some reason, I trust Apple more than Microsoft.

I used Linux on the desktop for almost a decade, but I needed to use Visual Studio.

And this article on Redbox selling the code for a digital download from Disney dvd bundles was very interesting, as well:

https://copyrightandtechnology...

Although it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the royalty issue.

It seems they have a video-on-demand service, as well. I did some digging, and this 2017 article says they signed an agreement with Universal to have rentals available the same day the retail version was released:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2017%2Fdigit...

So, it looks like some kind of physical media deal was in place, as well as for its video-on-demand service. Without seeing the actual agreement, who knows what was in it.

I got charged a fee on my electric bill that I should not have been. I looked into small claims court. Depending on where you live, they can make you pay the legal fees for the other party if you lose. I could just see having to pay 5000.00 dollars for a bunch of lawyers they had on retainer if I lost. I had three people, including a supervisor, at the the company that actually did the work at my house say that I shouldn't have been charged the fee (because the people I pay my bill to is not the same company that owns the lines). I was still a little nervous about the possibility of losing.

In the end, I filed a complaint with the utility commission in my state. The company I pay my bill to finally credited me for the fee. I was happy.