Yes. I can't remember which cars (some base-model Hyundais I think) but I know I've rented a few that did have Android Auto but did not have any navigation included.
Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?
Verizon's "free" iPhone deal is you pay for the phone up front and then receive a bill credit. Here's the fine print from one of those deals:
$729.99 purchase on device payment or at retail price required. New line req'd. Unlimited Welcome, Unlimited Plus or Unlimited Ultimate plans required. Less $730 promo credit applied to account over 36 mos; promo credit ends if eligibility requirements are no longer met; 0% APR.Taxes & fees may apply. Credits will appear on your Verizon Wireless bill.
I don’t know or care much about the specific details but the article was written in 2025. Carriers run deals and give away iPhones or close enough to free or cheap that quibbling about the details is irrelevant.
If you think the iPhone is a status symbol you’re just wrong.
I'm not the one arguing iPhones are only status symbols. If anything, if I only had the money to spend on a single computing device there's a good chance I'd go for an iPhone due to excellent durability, typically long support timelines, lots of extremely cheap accessories available, high chance of low cost serviceability compared to other devices. There's also a pretty good used marketplace for such devices so picking up one used on the cheap and still getting a few years of use out of it is likely. I'd likely try and stretch to get that device instead of settling for a cheap $100 phone that will be a total piece of junk and end up being my only actual computing device.
I'm just pointing out the statement:
> What mobile plan giving you an iphone doesn't come with explicit debt?
isn't invalidated by some Yahoo article pushing a marketing promo that when you actually do the math and read the fine print its not really a "free" phone, its always some form of debt or bill credit or something along those lines that makes the phone "free". You're still paying for the phone in the end if you read the fine print. In the end one commits to spending several hundred dollars over 36 months or whatever or you pay up front and they give you bill credits if you keep the plan.
I am arguing they’re not status symbols and using how cheaply available they are as evidence that they’re not. Anyone can get one, some companies run free promotions, some do delayed interest programs, some amortize the price over a 2-year time period. Who cares? The details here weren’t important. Apparently Verizon ran some promo in the past and may again in the future giving away iPhones. Why be so argumentative over something so stupid? Not only are you actually wrong here, you’re arguing over the irrelevant details.
> Why be so argumentative over something so stupid?
I don't want people to believe untrue marketing statements and make poor financial decisions without actually bothering to read the fine print.
> some companies run free promotions
This just isn't true. They're not really "free". They come with lots of financial commitments.
> Apparently Verizon ran some promo in the past and may again in the future giving away iPhones
They still say they do on their website. If you're getting one "free" iPhone it comes with a commitment to spend at least $65/mo for 36 months. A commitment to spend $2,340 is a lot different from $0.
These are far from "free" phones. Can I go into a Verizon store, not give them a dime or sign any contracts and walk out with a phone free and clear to do whatever I want? No? Sounds like it's not really free then!
My point is if you're poor/homeless you're probably not looking to sign a 3-year commitment to spend a few grand to get a "free" phone. A lot of those people won't even pass the credit check to qualify to even sign up for one of these post-paid plans required to get the "free" phone. If you're really broke you would probably be looking at signing up for a lifeline plan and get yourself a cheap used iPhone instead of signing up for a $2,340 contract.
I already made and proved my point. The iPhone is not a status symbol, and major carriers can and do give them away in various schemes and did so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
You’re anchoring yourself to one payment scheme and ignoring others and it’s besides the point which is that iPhones aren’t status symbols even if these schemes didn’t exist and iPhones weren’t extremely cheap or freely available.
I don’t have anything left to say here besides that I proved my point unequivocally.
> major carriers can and do give them away in various schemes and did so in the past and will continue to do so in the future
They only do if you're financially illiterate.
> You’re anchoring yourself to one payment scheme and ignoring others
I'm being honest and taking about the real deal instead of blindly repeating marketing bullshit and lies.
> freely available
A commitment to spend thousands of dollars isn't the same as freely available.
The bank gave me this free house all I have to do is pay this mortgage for thirty years. But hey the house was free!
Once again, was the deal that you could walk into the store, grab a new iPhone, and walk out without signing a contract or other form of commitment? If not, it's not really free. It's bad financial advice for people struggling financially to get one of these "free" phones, they're often more expensive than buying outright and getting a much cheaper (or potentially even subsidized!) plan. Especially if you're just needing one or two lines. Many of these postpaid plans only really make financial sense once you're at like 4+ lines on it.
I'm reminded of seeing all those cell phones in the RadioShack mailer ads back in the day. Only 99¢! Dad, can't I get one? It's only a dollar!.
If you spent hundreds of dollars on box seats to a sporting event and they had a complimentary buffet, is that food really free or did it cost you hundreds of dollars? Would you tell someone struggling with money they could get free food, they just need to go spend hundreds on sports tickets first?
Maybe one shouldn't be so willingly close-minded to the truth.
> If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS
I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.
I'm saying if we'd decided that Earth-bound spending was more important and we should dig (and then maintain) wells in Africa instead of ever going to space, we wouldn't have useful things like GPS.
Let me start off by mentioning I'm generally for spending on space science programs and think the US should generally be doing more of it not less.
But I'd once again push back against the idea that GPS wasn't "Earth-bound spending". Its entirely an Earth-bound thing. GPS is useless on the moon, its useless on Mars. It doesn't help space probes go to other plants. It doesn't help our space telescopes. We didn't really learn new things about going to space by building our GNSS (although IIRC we did confirm some concepts related to time dilation). We didn't build new rocket designs to put them in orbit. They weren't the first things we put in space (although they were some of the earliest things). They were not space science systems. GNSS are inherently Earth-focused spending (global being a key word there).
We didn't build Transit or GPS or GLONASS or Galileo to explore space, we did it to measure things on the Earth. GNSS are very much Earth-bound spending, and would have happened regardless of us putting a man on the moon or sending probes to Mars or beyond.
We didn't even originally build the rockets launching a lot of this for science reasons or for looking towards exploring space, we originally built them to blow up people far away from us. The Atlas LV-3B for Mercury was a modified ICBM. The Gemini Launch Vehicle was essentially a modified Titan II, a nuke-capable ICBM. These rockets were being built and launching payloads regardless of if we put people on them and did science with them. IMO its a good thing we also did science with them, but its not like they were originally built for public science like NASA programs.
Personally I'd rather have a manageable stream of little bad things consistently over time rather than suddenly having a mountain of bad things one day.
Debian Testing works entirely fine for that use case. Each package gets ~2 weeks of shakeout in Unstable before it gets there so there is chance most of the teething issues with new version is handled already, and is more than most rolling distros do
Given the government trying incredibly hard to ban abortion and the Supreme Court musing they should overturn Griswold I don't their ideas are "do not reproduce".
I'm not able to continue to receive mail at the apartment I lived at a decade ago. It turns out after I stopped paying for the apartment I lost the ability to control that mailbox.
This is a normal thing to happen in the physical world. We really shouldn't have such strict connections between email being a primary identifier for a user, requiring only a single one on an account, and not letting users change what they consider their primary email address. Email addresses can and should change over time. If someone really wants to ensure you have a piece of digital real estate one should get into the "ownership" game and get your own domain. People somehow end up buying and selling houses all the time which is far more complicated paperwork-wise, and yet we act like registering a domain name and configuring it for an email provider is just nearly impossible for normal people to handle.
Is there an RFC for email to redirect email for a user no longer at that address? Not exactly like setting up mail redirection with the postal service, but similar in outcome.
e.g. a server connects to the gmail MX server, and gets a response like "example@gmail.com now found at foo@example.com"
There's probably a ton of issues with this approach, but it would make switching email providers simpler on the user-end.
Most email platforms support some form of forwarding. Its not quite the same as your suggestion that's similar to an HTTP redirect but still the ability to configure your email user to just pass along those emails to another address is a common feature. These systems usually just rewrite the envelope recipient address and reprocesses the email based on that new address.
In the end though this still requires that original user to have exclusive ownership to that username in perpetuity and requires the email hoster to continue to actually host email services. It does nothing if, say, Google wanted to shut down email services on @gmail.com or start requiring paid accounts or whatever.
It's a giant pain in the ass in the real world. I don't think we should accept such friction for switching providers online just because we have such limits in superficially similar operations.
I don't disagree but how would that work given the existing internet infrastructure? The gmail domain and MX records will always necessarily be at the behest of google and so the label 'xyz@gmail.com' will always necessarily be 100% under their control.
The only real solution is to use your own domain and MX records, which anyone who cares about keeping a vanity email address should do. Which to me is the virtual equivalent of keeping a PO box or such.
Having migrated off an @gmail to a personal domain, yeah it's a pain, but you rip the bandaid off and you're free. Changing the address on my mail sucked when I bought a house, but it would be silly to never ever move because changing your mailing address is unpleasant.
Its not really just superficially similar, its incredibly similar. Its their servers, its their domain. If they want to stop hosting email services on their domain and delete gmail.com IN MX records they should be allowed to do so in line with whatever contractual promises they've made. If an apartment complex wants to shut down and tear down the building they can do so once they've completed all lease commitments.
What are you suggesting happen otherwise? Once you're an email provider you're forever committed to being an email provider for those users until the end of time?
I've self-hosted email systems for businesses for nearly 20 years. I've actually had far easier times delivering to Gmail/Workspace clients than Outlook. Outlook constantly breaks strict DKIM with some of their protection scanning nonsense for emails that seem to get good deliverability almost everywhere else.
No. It will do things when shuffling the email through its various scanner platforms that will make their systems think the original sender is outlook's systems. So then when their later downstream service looks at the email it's like "cool an email from Outlook, let's see if Outlook is allowed to send for this domain...hmm...seems like outlook isn't allowed to send and I'm supposed to reject emails coming from unapproved senders so rejected!"
The way it sometimes bounces emails around in their own systems lead to them sometimes mixing up who actually originally sent the message. This causes all kinds of problems and seems entirely unique to their crappy setup.
In our case, we're a small business, and we don't do email marketing. So I'd say that anything of ours that gets dropped by Outlook isn't trash. The only non-hand-typed email we send are transactional - actually transactional as in "here's your invoice" or "here's you're tracking number".
You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!
presumably you control the urls you are sending in the email. As a result if you want to use query strings that's fine. The issue only arises when you use query strings to implement tracking on someone else's site instead.
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