It stops them from automatically playing in most cases (though there is a bit of an arms race there just like with ad blockers), but it doesn’t stop the video container from floating. And some sites start the video when you click to close the floater, then you have to scroll back up to shut up the video, and some interpret scrolling up to video as “oh I want it to float again”, so you need to close it a second time.
I’ve also never watched it but I’m on the fence about being glad I haven’t spent the time and curious about just how bad it was. Especially considering I liked Lost (including the end) and while the later seasons of Dexter had some flaws, I still enjoyed them.
Also Canadian, I’ve had horizontal sliding, single hung, and casement with that turning mechanism to open/close them. And I remember seeing windows that were hinged at the top and pushed outwards in high school. Not sure what held them open though.
Yeah the MS support forums are very hit or miss. And even the hit ones usually start with a response that doesn’t appear to understand the question very deeply, followed by a “that didn’t work”, “I said in my post that I tried that and it didn’t work”, or maybe a “that’s not what I’m trying to do, I want to do x”, and then a reply with useful links.
Though to be fair, problems can come from software the user installed or fuck ups they’ve made to settings along the way. Or quiet sabotage from another user.
Once upon a time I provided phone support for Comcast and had a caller call in unable to access Facebook. I did the usual script and found her internet was otherwise working. Narrowed it down to a dns issue. I was aware of the hosts file because I was using it for ad blocking at the time so had her open that up on a whim (which I would have gotten in trouble for since it was off script). Sure enough, it was there. Someone didn’t want her accessing it.
Who knows what kinds of methods people have used to discourage other things on shared PCs. Is edge really broken or did the user’s kid get tired of everyone clicking “make it the default browser” when it begged each time it was opened so they wrote a small program that kills it as soon as it starts?
Car culture means that anyone who does gain a monopoly will still have a ton of small competitors. Delivery services have existed for centuries before Uber. All it did was offer a single interface for a wider area so it can take a cut. Ultimately, I don’t think local deliveries or taxis are profitable enough for there to be a cut for some middleman unless the market is artificially restricted (which it was for taxis, hence Uber being very welcome when they first started up until people realized they were looking to take over what the taxi racket was doing, not give the public more choices).
Classifying drivers as employees for such apps might prevent the non-profit iteration that just charges drivers an infrastructure fee but otherwise allows them to set their own prices. IMO the approach should have been to open up how they charge fees and pay drivers, change it to be commission-based with the drivers getting most of the money. But that might be getting too close to challenging how most of the rich make their money (it’s not from their own hard work).
IMO memorizing those multiplication tables was one of the most useful things they taught in elementary school. They are teaching tricks now that separated the kids who were good at math from the ones who weren’t (since the ones who were good could figure out a lot of these tricks on their own to get through the grind of pages of questions quicker), but knowing my multiplication tables was and still is an essential part of doing quick math in my head.
Personally, I don’t really consider what we’ve got to be really VR yet. IMO that won’t come until we have interfaces that take direct nerve input and override our sensory inputs. And given how our economy runs, I don’t think I’ll trust any company that develops that, as much as I really want it.
Though I also wonder if our brains can handle switching between that and reality. After playing hours of Horizon VR, I noticed having the feeling a few times that my hands weren’t real because I got used to thinking that when I looked at my fake hands in the game.
In the university physics classes I took, if the final answer was 47/69, then that was acceptable because the goal was to show you knew how to get there, and the actual value didn’t really matter.
Also, when the final value does matter, each time you round a number (which you often do when it’s a division you want a calculator for), you’re adding error to the final answer. So avoiding using a calculator as much as possible will increase the accuracy of the final answer when there’s many steps.
That said, they didn’t disallow calculators and didn’t want to see long division or multiplication steps.