it used to be that every phone vendor needed their own chargers (or at least adaptor cables but even that could be dodgy). Nowadays they all use 5V and most of them use a microUSB connector to deliver it.
That is because of a EU directive specifying that phones have micro USB for charging, not because of a diverse industry suddenly making sense.
(although, before that, the world had almost settled on mini USB.)
I've never missed paying the bill and have rarely called them to support my internet connection, but they'd rather get a new customer than keep me, even when I asked them to just match the new customer deal for me.
If that's the case you're simply doing it wrong.
Here is how you do it right: Call them up. Tell them that you want to cancel. When they ask why, tell them that $competitor is offering you a better deal.
They will balk and scriptedly explain that $competitor's service is inferior.
Ignore this and tell them that price is your primary motivation right now.
[...]
They've got a script, and you aren't the first customer to play through it. So use your own script, and stick to it. If/when you make it all the way to the Customer Retention department, they'll give you whatever you want to keep you around, and if all you want is a steep discount for a year they'll be happy to provide that.
And if they're not happy to provide that, tell them (again) cancel it. Rinse and repeat until you've got what you want.
And don't worry: It's much harder than you think to get a Customer Retention rep to turn off your service.
(In my experience this works for any value of $provider. Way back in the dial-up days I had free nationwide Internet for most of a year: Every time I called $provider to "cancel," they offered me another month or three for free, which I found to be fairly profitable based on my usual hourly wage at that time.)
Now that streaming is relatively cheap, and music is relatively difficult to walk down the street and just legitimately buy.
I prefer actual pressed/injection-molded CDs (to play in my Krell CD player...), and have quite a number of them.
But the rest of the time, I use Spotify. Spotify allows me exploration and endless background noise for way less money, billed once a month, than buying an exploratory CD or two.
And I don't have to maintain a database of my own music on my own servers to keep track of it all, much less manage off-site backups.
I used to buy music regularly, on CD, but the last music store here closed almost 8 years ago.
Not that CDs and other physical album sales were generally a particular profitable item for artists, either. The music industry is and was and by all observations will continue to be a completely fucked up mess when it comes to paying artists for recorded music.
Although I generally agree with you, I must say: As an American living in the midwest, I don't notice much about location-based blocking.
And when I visit another country (which I don't generally ever do), I'll hopefully be far more entertained by local customs and exploring things that are new to me, than I will be worried about whether or not my Spotify playlists are operating correctly.
I use a VPN provider which does not care what I do with it, or how much data I transfer. They guarantee 4Mbps, minimum, of symmetric bandwidth availability. They actively encourage people to use the service as they see fit, and even offer (quite slow) services for free to people living in very restrictive jurisdictions.
In the US, we have a long tradition of paying both to place and receive mobile phone calls and SMS.
We also have a long tradition of receiving landline calls for free, and also placing them for free to numbers in a specific local area. We have never had a custom of paying to answer a landline.
Nor, I must point out, have we ever had a custom of paying more to call a mobile number than any other number, as I understand is/was commonplace in some other parts of the world. When I would pick up my landline to dial a local number, it would cost me nothing additional, as with any other local number.
(these lines are blurred now that inexpensive landline-esque service is generally unlimited and flat-rate within the US, and many people opt for mobile plans that are similarly unlimited and flat rate (aside from data)).
That is what it is being used for in your use-case.
Looking around in the Worx Gallery (which, I must say, the very concept of which sours my mouth), it looks like it can also do just about everything else, too.
Hence, why it needs all of the permissions in the world (or at least enough of them that arguing otherwise is a moot point).
If you don't like it (and I certainly don't, don't get me wrong), there's Xposed modules that can fix it. (And Xposed modules that defy root-detection. And, and, and. See also: Cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, and DRM wars going back decades before DRM was even a TLA.)
Or, do it the old-fashioned way: One device for work, one device for other. Power off one or the other when not needed.
I still haven't upgraded Waze since their new "social" integration required a ton more privileges, mostly to phone private info. And this despite running XPrivacy - I just can't be bothered to go through the whitelisting for it, when current version works well enough.
Chances are good that Google already knows everything about your contacts. Google wholly owns Waze.
That, actually, doesn't look all too onerous for such a product.
Of course I want my fancy remote-everything program to be able to manage the network, see the status of the network, use the network, vibrate, pair with devices, manage shortcuts (shortcut to email on the homescreen?), change settings (so that the remote apps can, you know, do their thing), draw on top (notifications), take pictures, use a microphone, use the camera, access files (do you like attachments with your email?) and read phone status and identity (it knows you're on the phone, just like every other app that handles audio).
I don't know why it needs precise location, but sheesh. At least it's not like Pandora, which is just a bloody streaming music player:
find accounts on the device
read your contacts
add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge
test access to protected storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
view Wi-Fi connections
read phone status and identity
receive data from Internet
install shortcuts
run at startup
full network access
pair with Bluetooth devices
connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
change network connectivity
access Bluetooth settings
view network connections
prevent device from sleeping
I used to have a Sound Blaster Pro which had some lightning damage. Something on the board had turned microphonic, and you could shout at the card and hear it through the line output.
Because nobody at Facebook is an engineer with enough knowledge to be capable of thinking of such things before endeavoring on a scaled test, right?
Oh, and by the way, maximizing the lifespan of a lead acid battery is a wee bit more complicated having them "fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently."
Slashdot Mirror
That is because of a EU directive specifying that phones have micro USB for charging, not because of a diverse industry suddenly making sense.
(although, before that, the world had almost settled on mini USB.)
Youtube? Really?
Youtube doesn't work on my Sonos gear, and chews up data on my cell phone.
Spotify works well in both places, and is lean on cell data.
Years on a contract? I call that "moving."
Contract ends? I call that "moving, again."
I don't think I'd expect the same streaming services if I moved to another country, any more than I would expect the cuisine to be identical.
I think that repetition is doing nothing to support your point, and that it wastes your time.
I also am averse to adding anything to food for the sake of "color."
I don't know what "a commercial problem" is. Is it about advertising? Because I've never encountered "a commercial problem," as far as I know.
If that's the case you're simply doing it wrong.
Here is how you do it right: Call them up. Tell them that you want to cancel. When they ask why, tell them that $competitor is offering you a better deal.
They will balk and scriptedly explain that $competitor's service is inferior.
Ignore this and tell them that price is your primary motivation right now.
[...]
They've got a script, and you aren't the first customer to play through it. So use your own script, and stick to it. If/when you make it all the way to the Customer Retention department, they'll give you whatever you want to keep you around, and if all you want is a steep discount for a year they'll be happy to provide that.
And if they're not happy to provide that, tell them (again) cancel it. Rinse and repeat until you've got what you want.
And don't worry: It's much harder than you think to get a Customer Retention rep to turn off your service.
(In my experience this works for any value of $provider. Way back in the dial-up days I had free nationwide Internet for most of a year: Every time I called $provider to "cancel," they offered me another month or three for free, which I found to be fairly profitable based on my usual hourly wage at that time.)
I don't have Comcast as an option, but I can upgrade my own VDSL to 75Mbps if I decide that I need to do so.
So?
If they want all of the comforts of their own home, perhaps they should not leave it.
And if you keep repeating the same thing over and over again, people will believe you.
You know, I do buy some music.
From some artists.
Some of the time.
These days.
Now that streaming is relatively cheap, and music is relatively difficult to walk down the street and just legitimately buy.
I prefer actual pressed/injection-molded CDs (to play in my Krell CD player...), and have quite a number of them.
But the rest of the time, I use Spotify. Spotify allows me exploration and endless background noise for way less money, billed once a month, than buying an exploratory CD or two.
And I don't have to maintain a database of my own music on my own servers to keep track of it all, much less manage off-site backups.
I use Spotify because it works for me.
I used to buy music regularly, on CD, but the last music store here closed almost 8 years ago.
Not that CDs and other physical album sales were generally a particular profitable item for artists, either. The music industry is and was and by all observations will continue to be a completely fucked up mess when it comes to paying artists for recorded music.
Although I generally agree with you, I must say: As an American living in the midwest, I don't notice much about location-based blocking.
And when I visit another country (which I don't generally ever do), I'll hopefully be far more entertained by local customs and exploring things that are new to me, than I will be worried about whether or not my Spotify playlists are operating correctly.
I use a VPN provider which does not care what I do with it, or how much data I transfer. They guarantee 4Mbps, minimum, of symmetric bandwidth availability. They actively encourage people to use the service as they see fit, and even offer (quite slow) services for free to people living in very restrictive jurisdictions.
And it's cheaper than $9.99/month.
Replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED assembly is not a repair, but an upgrade.
Apple, meet orange.
Comcast would still have a reason to exist: To provide last-mile access to such sites as, say, hbo.com.
Just like any other Internet provider.
*shrug*
In the US, we have a long tradition of paying both to place and receive mobile phone calls and SMS.
We also have a long tradition of receiving landline calls for free, and also placing them for free to numbers in a specific local area. We have never had a custom of paying to answer a landline.
Nor, I must point out, have we ever had a custom of paying more to call a mobile number than any other number, as I understand is/was commonplace in some other parts of the world. When I would pick up my landline to dial a local number, it would cost me nothing additional, as with any other local number.
(these lines are blurred now that inexpensive landline-esque service is generally unlimited and flat-rate within the US, and many people opt for mobile plans that are similarly unlimited and flat rate (aside from data)).
Correction: Navy *pays* a company $0.01 to a company for the service of removing it and dismantling it.
It didn't sell anything.
That is what it is being used for in your use-case.
Looking around in the Worx Gallery (which, I must say, the very concept of which sours my mouth), it looks like it can also do just about everything else, too.
Hence, why it needs all of the permissions in the world (or at least enough of them that arguing otherwise is a moot point).
If you don't like it (and I certainly don't, don't get me wrong), there's Xposed modules that can fix it. (And Xposed modules that defy root-detection. And, and, and. See also: Cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, and DRM wars going back decades before DRM was even a TLA.)
Or, do it the old-fashioned way: One device for work, one device for other. Power off one or the other when not needed.
That wasn't Eminem. That was the UK-based group called The Prodigy.
(srsly. If you want to name names, please at least make sure that the names are correct.)
Chances are good that Google already knows everything about your contacts. Google wholly owns Waze.
What is the difference?
That, actually, doesn't look all too onerous for such a product.
Of course I want my fancy remote-everything program to be able to manage the network, see the status of the network, use the network, vibrate, pair with devices, manage shortcuts (shortcut to email on the homescreen?), change settings (so that the remote apps can, you know, do their thing), draw on top (notifications), take pictures, use a microphone, use the camera, access files (do you like attachments with your email?) and read phone status and identity (it knows you're on the phone, just like every other app that handles audio).
I don't know why it needs precise location, but sheesh. At least it's not like Pandora, which is just a bloody streaming music player:
find accounts on the device
read your contacts
add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge
test access to protected storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
view Wi-Fi connections
read phone status and identity
receive data from Internet
install shortcuts
run at startup
full network access
pair with Bluetooth devices
connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi
change network connectivity
access Bluetooth settings
view network connections
prevent device from sleeping
Your numbers are off by a factor of one thousand.
I used to have a Sound Blaster Pro which had some lightning damage. Something on the board had turned microphonic, and you could shout at the card and hear it through the line output.
Fun stuff.
Because nobody at Facebook is an engineer with enough knowledge to be capable of thinking of such things before endeavoring on a scaled test, right?
Oh, and by the way, maximizing the lifespan of a lead acid battery is a wee bit more complicated having them "fully charged and kept that way, and discharged infrequently."
But I'm sure you already know that.
Please look into Pale Moon.
Built from Firefox sources, it is the closest thing to the lightweight and flexible browser that Firefox promised to be that I'm aware of.
Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, etc.