For work our projects use .NET Framework so it needs to run on windows.
For personal use it's a combination of mostly Valorant, which refuses to run anywhere but windows... and short term productivity loss because it's simply the platform I know my way around.
For my homelab I naturally have Linux running though, and the second Valorant supports Linux (lol) I'm gone.
Well for a ton of the more niche tools I can see why they wouldn't integrate them. I say that even though I can't live without them at this point haha.
But file locksmith, env variable viewer, basic stuff like that... Really should be built-in
Sure, that 'fixes' it. The real question is, if that information is retrievable anyways... Why is it not a built-in part of windows. You get the error popup and it should just show two buttons: "Ok and "Find which program is using it"
I'm excited for the roadmap of better sharing, group management and improved ownership. Unfortunately in its current state having a shared "family" library of pictures next to personal pictures is only possible with various workarounds (and all of those have significant downsides). Until then I'm just using it for myself, but it's been great so far.
A paid service is something that is going to have running costs on the side of the provider. E.g. the cloud backup means they need to buy/rent storage space. If they were to do something like a service for remote machine-learning (for people that do not have the hardware to properly do that) that would be a running cost of renting gpu-time.
A paywall is a feature that would work perfectly fine without any external factors, but its blocked because you didn't pay.
Some nuance is needed of course. Often a paid service could be self-hosted (thats why I love being able to self-host the machine learning in immich, with a different design choice that could've totally been a paid service).
My country just finished their plan for cutting costs, just about every sector got hit. People are crying out about having to pay more, cuts to the support of the weakest members of society, cultural heritage going to get into disrepair, investments in education being put on hold, etc etc.
If the richest person in our country gave 15% of his capital (or half his income last year) the entire cost would be covered. One, single, fucking, person.
About the HP thing, your point seems to be that because people do not use the tools given to them (that would make the fight easier if used properly) things get too hard later... If people are kneecapping themselves by thinking 'all I need is dash and slash', well they kinda had it coming.
To properly link your mapping to your identity, someone would both need to be able to link whatever online username you're using to the one in street complete. Which could be either easy or very hard depending on how correlated they are (same username maybe?)
And even then the accuracy will probably not be great, maybe up to the city. Any more specific than that will be hard unless the edits are very obviously centered around a street.
The 2G/3G is in the spook's fake cell tower. They're not taking the data from a provider, they're acting as if they're the provider and doing a downgrade attack.
Not to mention just about every "serious" app (gov't, banking, etc) check safetynet before even turning on. (Hell I've had a gov't app refuse to start because I had developer options enabled, on a completely 'clean' phone)
So emulating them isn't gonna work and websites do not always prioritize working on mobile anymore ("just install the app")
For ads at least the argument can be made that the content you consume is not yours and as such you should not be allowed to choose how it is monetized.
Google unilaterally deciding this is like Firefox or chrome adding ads to websites. Which is like no... They're the medium through which content is consumed.
When it finally arrives you should run some tests to ensure the drive is not bad. This repo is a decent resource: https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing