linkman

Mike Wuerthele said:

jkrarup said:

Some carriers have apps that you can install on the phone which will help identify or block known Spam callers. AT&T has one called AT&T Call Protect. There are also third party apps that you can purchase or subscribe to that also filter out Spam. Also set up a contact with the number 000-000-0000 and block this contact to block "UNKNOWN" callers. "UNKNOWN" callers are callers that block their caller ID so there are no number to identify them.

Unfortunately, the carrier apps seem to be losing the arms race to the callers. AT&T Call Protect started strong, but at least for the last three months, it has fallen far, far behind in blocking and identifying bogus callers.

I want it to be good, it was good when it launched. It isn't anymore -- at least not right now.

AT&T's Call Protect is $3.99 per month, and is only for business and postpaid customers. None of those requirements are appetizing to me. It lost me before it even launched.

AppleInsider said:

Other critics have suggested that it's unfair for Apple to claim revenue from content it doesn't produce or host.

Just like credit card companies?

daveinpublic said:

Phone looks great, but saddened that they didn't put the optical zoom on it. It's being sold for $749, so it's the cheap version now, even though it's priced higher than the highest end iPhone 2 years ago, 3 years ago, etc. which all had optical zoom.

No, the iPhone 7 Plus was introduced in 2016 at prices of $769 and up. The priciest 7 was $849. The iPhone 8 Plus started at $799 and the 256GB 8 was $849. https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/07/apple-announces-iphone-7-pricing-availability-pre-orders-start-sept-9-available-sept-16/

AppleInsider said:

While much of the engine's popularity stems from being a default, alternatives like Microsoft's Bing -- used in Siri searches -- have been criticized for sub-par results.

Agreed. Google's search beats the pants off of the competition for most searches. Most of the time that I have to resort to Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo I cringe. Bing's image search is fairly decent however.

Koliadascope said:

Rayz2016 said:

 But given the choice, won’t everybody just skip the ads? I might be missing something here. 

I'm guessing the thought might be if you're listening to music in the background while you're doing something else, you might not jump to skip every time a commercial comes on... maybe just the really obnoxious ones. The goal is to tune your ad preference like it does the music. It would be funny if the Skip did a skip to the next ad!

After reading the 9 to 5 Mac article on this subject it indeed appears that the listener skips to another ad; keep skipping until you get to one you like or are tired of skipping. The thought is that Spotify can charge more for better targeted ads and won't have to present as many ads (yeah, right), thus leading to better consumer satisfaction. I think if Spotify gets better ad revenue they'll keep just as many running and maybe not be as much in the hole in the financial sector.