It’s actually a scam pushed by Big Water to get you to use more water and line their pockets.

Email is becoming obsolete anyway. I only use it personally to register accounts online. I have an old email address that I got 20 years ago. I haven’t checked it in years. It holds several hundred thousand emails and was constantly full of junk mail. It just became totally useless to me a long time ago.

We use email at work, but not as much as we used to because there are better ways to communicate since everyone has a phone. We don’t even use the computers in our offices much anymore because it’s just easier to use a phone. The execs have tablets that they carry around, then dock at their desks. They don’t even have desktop computers anymore.

Usually the product with the most money behind it wins, unfortunately.

I don’t see where is says the first 300 requests are free. The cheapest plan is $5/month for 1000 requests and $0.005 per each additional request. I would only use it once or twice a month, so it’s not worth $5/month. I’d be willing to pay per request like with Chat GPT, but it doesn’t have that option.

Wait, that’s the government’s stance also.

I heard several news stories stating that they had, but I guess that’s my fault for believing the news. I just assumed they would get something right eventually.

There’s a reason they got rid of that motto.

My mom won’t pick a date for me just because I’m married.

I completely disagree with you. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I don’t want any damned racist robot doctor telling me what to do. I just want my good old human, racist doctor treating me; like God intended.

What is (e) nice? Is that when you take the e out of your niece?

How is that different from 99% of threads?

It works very well in my brake system.

Obviously you missed the announcement that it is, indeed, the end of the world.

Some people just hate everything. They’re usually the ones that think they could do everything better than the people who are already doing it, but they haven’t done anything themselves except complain.

That’s like saying “the government takes our money, wates it, spies on us, and abuses us, and nobody cares”. We all care, but what are you going to do about it?

I don’t think he’s coming back, just like my dad.

I hope that’s true, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Do you know when that will be?

if this monopoly is broken.

That’s the important part. My point is that the government is like a lion going after toes rather than the jugular. They could easily go for something more significant, but they’ve chosen not to. I think it’s because they care more about the show than the result. Not even Google could take on the federal government if it really wanted to break up the monopoly. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve seen these shinanigans too many times

I wasn’t that tech savvy when I got my first desktop in 1994. Until then, I had only had a Commodore 64. I started with AOL because it seemed like the only way to get on the internet. Once I figured out that it was a horrible and expensive product I switched to a flat rate provider, rather than “by the minute” (which was a scam when it took 2 minutes just to download 1 webpage). The instillation disk came bundled with Netscape Navigator for free. I used Netscape from 1995 until it morphed into Firefox, and then continued using Firefox until a few years ago when better FOSS browsers came out.

It was never that hard to switch derault browsers in Win 98, and Netscape was not only free, but very heavily promoted everywhere.

My son uses Windows. He has machines running Windows 1 all the way up to Windows 11. He loves retro computers. He also has a couple Linux machines, but he prefers Windows even though he constantly talks to me about how horrible Windows is and how many things don’t work properly and the surveillance that is embedded in the OS. I know that Microsoft is trying to be as evil as Google. That’s why (as I stated on a different comment reply) I think the government went after the default browser issue because it was the softest target. Also, when they won they just forced Microsoft to make it easier to change the default browser, which gave them a victory in the media, but did nothing to curtail Microsoft’s tactics.