If so many consider the apostrophe so complex and confusing to the extent some grammarians are now advocating we abandon its possessive form then for the life of me I cannot see how we can expect more complex rules such as the I before E, except after C with its many exceptions ever to be understood by everyone.

Both the greengrocer's apostrophe (pl: DVDs not DVD's) and the possessive form of the apostrophe are about the simplest notions one can learn in English.

Yes, these rules have nuisances but I'm not referring to them but only their most common simplest forms. (By that I'd exclude unusual forms such as whether it's best to use 'greengrocer's apostrophe' or 'greengrocers' apostrophe' or that it doesn't matter. Or whether three 'Ss' should be used when using the apostrophe such as Kiss's Building — the name brazenly embellished in the frieze on a building near me.)

My marks in English at school were rarely ever much above pass grade but even I had no difficulty in understanding the possessive apostrophe. In primary school we were taught this simplest of rules by just asking "who owns it?" then drop in the apostrophe immediately thereafter.

Q: Who owns the bat? If only one boy owns it then the answer is "It's the boy's bat." If multiple boys own it then "It's the boys' bat."

I cannot think of any rule much simpler than this, same with the greengrocer's apostrophe where just adding an 's' sans any apostrophe is similarly straightforward.

It seems to me that teachers of English ought to actually learn to teach as they did when I was a kid.

It's clear to me we need to bring the population up speed on the basics before venturing into esoterica, for all but the cognoscenti the Oxford comma can wait.

Proof positive it's mostly cosmetic, deeply problematic issus remain or we'd be able to uninstall Copilot.

Like you, I make the above comment based on my long experience from the IBM 360 through to Assembler, CP/M, OS/2, VAX, Linux and many others including Win 95, NT, W2K through to the present.

What you fail to acknowledge is that Microsoft has changed the Windows paradigm to such an extent that many users (but far from all) can no longer accept the horribly onerous terms and conditions imposed by Microsoft for the use of its operating system.

This is now a political issue. With Windows, Microsoft has by far a monopoly on desktop operating systems which amounts to many millions of users. Its monopoly means that any effective competition by way of a truly API-compatible software product simply cannot emerge (eg: ReactOS has been lingering in the wilderness for over a quarter century). In effect, with enforced lock-in, Microsoft has now hijacked—kidnapped—the user environment and experience then exploited the spoils for its own financial benefit.

A good analogy would be an ongoing patent on the position and layout order of the brake and accelerator pedals in vehicles with royalties payable to use them. Other manufacturers cannot innovate as different systems would cause confusion and thus be unsafe. In case you're wondering that's a definition of a monopoly.

Microsoft is not only forcing users to work in ways they do not want to work but also it's now milking and robbing millions of them of their privacy for its own financial advantage. Users no longer have an option to remain as they were and are coerced to upgrade from older less restrictive versions of Windows because Microsoft deliberately invokes planned obsolescence by not updating drivers nor supporting newer hardware in those earlier versions. Simply, Microsoft forces users to move to a more controlled and restrictive environments.

Ethically and environmentally that is unacceptable, and in any political system that isn't compromised by lobbying and kickbacks such bad behavior would be penalized.

Microsoft knows full well all that and that for users to escape its clutches they have to jump over barriers and hurdles that are practically impossible to navigate, they thus destined to remain captured in their unwanted dystopian environment. That's the narrative—it's Big Tech's plan, and grudgingly I have to admit it's brilliantly effective.

To undo this enforced lock-in and for everyone to escape Microsoft's clutches it would take billions of manhours of effort—time that would be much more productive spent elsewhere. Clearly, that's not going to happen. Right, coercion and exploitation pays off big-time; again, 'kidnapping' sums up Microsoft's actions to a tee.

Given the out-of-control behavior and damage done by Microsoft and other Big Tech players a point of inflection has been reached, it's now a political matter and the perpetrators will find the momentum very difficult to reverse completely. Cory Doctorow's 'enshitification' captures the zeitgeist along what needs to be done to bring Big Tech to heel.

It may take decades but at least it's a beginning.

Not only do the Big Tech monopolies have to be broken up but those responsible for conceiving and implementing the abuse in the first instance must be bought to account, hopefully by landing them in the slammer. What's happened isn't competitive capitalism as work but sheer exploitation and Big Tech's at the center of it.

If you think I'm bitter about this then you'd be correct, I am. Whenever I think of the many thousands of hours I've spent bypassing unwarranted and unreasonable restrictions brought on by coroprate greed and fixing crappy enshitified software my blood boils. That time should have been spent on more productive endeavors such as providing users with better programs and systems. Seems you've led a charmed working life not experienced by most of us.

Given your stated experience I should not have to refresh your memory of early Microsoft Windows EULAs (NT, W2K etc.) which incorporated terms to the effect "no user information will be sent to Microsoft". Now compare that with the Windows 11 EULA/terms and conditions, forced online user accounts etc. What has now happened with Windows 11 is the antithesis—a complete reversal—of the earlier paradigm. Here, one's once independence has been traded for lock-in and expensive rent models with exit conditions that are almost impossible to exercise in any practical way.

Seems you're quite content with this.

What's relevant here is that if your experience is as you've stated then you will be well aware of these glaring issues, so that raises the question of your dismissive attitude to the problems. Thus it's reasonable to assume it's highly likely you're more than just part of the Windows Insider program, probably an employee or such. Perhaps even AI generated content.

I apologize if I'm wrong.

That's your prerogative and no one questions your right. Presumably it pays well, but I'd foreshadow that as time marches on you'll find yourself more and more on the outer.

Good luck to you, you might need it.

Don’t jump to conclusions. I’m not “okay” with it. I’m using the best tool available for the job.

Don’t feel so high and mighty.

Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.

Even before Google's edict I disabled enforced Android updates in case that at Google's demand manufacturers slipstreamed some restrictive code that cannot be later removed. One only has to look at the disastrous precedent with Windows 11 to see how insidious and ever-increasing lock-in works.

Fact is Big Tech cannot be trusted and there's a long lineage to prove it—MS Windows, Sun/OpenOffice and many others—and now Android. To avoid future calamities like this and to ensure survival of F-Droid, et al we urgently need to break Big Tech's nexus with open source independent of Big Tech's control.

I can only hope more manufacturers are prepared to fork Android to cater for the upcoming demand.

Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it can be lower than a tenth.

Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.

We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.

I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images.

My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click).

I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)

Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.

Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.

In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years

Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it

It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year

Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again

If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.

I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.

Don't worry, it'll be just like the real Fox news after the Paramount merger.

You can download the homepage html see the style block.

They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all loads shockingly well on poor connections.

They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.

Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.

I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.

Dead trees FTW.

I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that gets dead trees for NYT, WSJ, local rag, and more. I value news, so I pay for it, and it's still less than I spend on coffee each month.

The best part: The newspaper ends. No everscroll zombie addiction.

It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.

It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.

For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.

Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.

Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.

Youtube is a horrible way to watch videos. It's constantly pushing stupid content at me and refuses to let me tame it.

Almost all of social media is optimized for engagement as a way to attract advertisers. Instead of "hot" or "controversial" sort button I want buttons that sort for "factual", "relevant", "insightful", etc. Those will never be well correlated with "optimal for advertisers", so they need an entirely different model to work.

If a merchant requires me to disable any of my security, I leave immediately.

I initially signed up for Hulu to get the add-free experience. Then they started showing adds anyway and I cancelled.

Amazon Prime is a far degraded experience form what I initially got. The "free shipping" got entirely factored into increased prices. Prime video generally requires me to pay for anything I actually want to watch (if they have it in their catalog).

Video streaming, in general, sucks now. I don't want to pay for a subscription just so I can watch one movie. I also don't want to get 15 different subscriptions for a reasonable lineup of shows.

I ditched Spotify because I couldn't prevent it from auto-playing. Tidal is much better about that and they have better sound quality. They also pay their artist better.

I moved to Apple when they initially introduced OSX. Since then they've been driving heavily back to the walled garden philosophy.

Verizon was my telco for around 20 years. They suddenly decided that the phone I had been using for a year "wasn't compatible with their network" and kicked me off.

It's not a product problem. It's a problem of companies creating virtual monopolies. They don't need to meet the technical legal definition of a monopoly; if something like network effects makes it difficult to move away from them or choose an other option they are de-facto a monopoly.

This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).

In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!

In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.

Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.

In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).

So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).

What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).

That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.

The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.

In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.

It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.

Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.

For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.

Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).

I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.

Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.

Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.

Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.

No.

"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.

Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.

Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.

Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.

NYT's revenue and subscription base are both increasing quite well.

Ad revenue was up 20%, and profit was up 26% in Q4. Revenue was over $700,000,000. 12,300,000 people pay for the New York Times.

Moreover, daily newspapers (the ones that have survived) are only about a third (or even less) as thick as they used to be in the 1990s, their classified ads are now almost nonexistent. And broadsheet format newspapers were kill off at the same time for the same reasons.

The internet has been devastating for the industry, ipso facto, the loss of revenues - both for physical print and online - has resulted lower journalistic standards hence the shithouse mess the publications industry is in today.

Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.

They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...

Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.

The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.

And yes, riots can be caused by other things too - e.g. religious riots. But whatever it is, people have to care a lot about it, enough so to be willing to put their own life and limb on the line. This is not one of those cases.

News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.

That website is loaded with too many ads, I left it and am not going back.

Not

That website has too many ads, I'm getting an ad blocker and going back.

Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.

Correct. For the life of me I cannot see how this can ever work in practice.

For such a scheme to work all users would have to be physically and electronically locked out from accessing any feature of a computer that would alter its function.

This has to be sheer madness. Every general computing device from small embedded controllers, to Raspberry Pis to the most powerful desktop computers would have more in common with electricity meters and their embossed lead anti-tampering seals than present-day computers. Can you imagine the utter chaos of the state conducting regular anti-tampering audits of every state-registered PC? And what about the millions of legacy PCs that could not be adapted?

Moreover, using such a computer would be more akin to using an automatic teller machine with its strictly controlled and limited functions, the notion of "general computing" as we now know it would cease to exist.

The only practical solution is to make parents responsible—that is to ensure their kids do not have unfettered/unmanaged access to computers. Responsibility could be extended to all adults, anyone deliberately providing unsupervised/unfettered computer access to minors could be charged with child abuse.

If parents aren't prepared to extend their parental responsibilities to also include computing devices, phones, social media and such then the state could impose penalties. Of course, for that to work society would have to agree as it now does over outlawing the physical punishing of children (not that long ago that wasn't the case).

No doubt arriving at a society-wide consensus would take time but it's doable. Societal views do change, for example, when I was a kid we got the cane for misbehaving, caning kids is now outlawed often with heavy penalties.

Finally, I also find your point about the age verification debate popping up simultaneously in the US, UK, and EU as very troubling. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but evidence suggests there are many lobbyists acting behind the scenes of whom we are unaware (same goes with the encryption debate).

It's this sort of hidden subterfuge that's undermining and pulling our democracies apart. Little wonder that these days many citizens have little faith in institutions and those whose governance they're under.

Exactly. Also, changing business hours to suit specific work conditions would ease traffic congestion. For instance, a farmer would milk cows at different times of the year. Similarly, milk tankers would be on the road at hours set by cows' routines.