They did use the same voice actress as the video game on the Windows version, I can confirm. Or at least it was a very good imitation.

I was really hyped for Cortana on Windows and then that faded pretty quick. But I remember hearing her voice and thinking how cool that was.

Scammers are crafty assholes.

Your health insurance information may have been leaked. There’s been a ton of data leaks as of recent and it’s not unlikely that a list of health insurance providers and their customers are on the dark web somewhere and this is where they got that information about you.

Worse about these data leaks is that a lot of the ones being announced happened months ago, so it’s likely we still have some leaks that haven’t yet made it to the news to let people know their information is out there.

Getting your health data from the pharmacy may have just been the next step in their plan of getting to you to trick you into giving up money, or somehow using your information to do something illegal.

Some home Internet plans do. I’ve seen AT&T had in their terms that if you hit 99GB, they would throttle your speeds.

This was years ago, so not sure if that changed or not.

Satellite plans often had limits too because they didn’t want to encourage lots of usage on their satellites. I haven’t checked in a few years, but last I checked, these weren’t throttle limits either, sometimes they had hard limits where you just couldn’t connect anymore once you hit the limit.

Mine does that. It has a big button on the back that just turns on the brightest setting and then turns it off. The button on the handle will let you cycle through 3 brightness settings and then the strobe effect.

It’s just some off brand, probably from Amazon, that my uncle bought for my dad and I took when my dad passed away.

Yeah but it’s a different experience, if that’s what OP is looking for in terms of how it delivers the search results.

But if this is solely about the quality of results, then yeah, my recommendation for Bing is irrelevant.

Have you tried Bing? I’ve been using Bing for over a decade now as my default search engine and while people give it crap, I’ve only had to go to Google a handful of times over this span of time and even then, I can’t remember a time that Google had what I was looking for either.

Bing is customizable so you can get rid of some of the fluff that comes with searches that you don’t want that bloats your results. Like you can get rid of the colorful background, the trending news sections, the Copilot LLM results, etc.

One plus that Bing Image search has had over Google for many years now is the ability to let you see the full screen image without doing any funky stuff. Like when you just want to load the jpg/png in the browser without the Google/Bing banner surrounding it…Bing Image search lets you do that with the click of a button. Google removed this feature years ago which was so shitty.

It’s not perfect, not like old Google perfect, but that combined with an adblocker like uBlock Origin and my PiHole works for me to remove from sponsored results (not all, unfortunately).

It has its own set of trackers too. I’m no fan of Microsoft and know this, but we’re at the bottom of the barrel with decent search engines anymore.

I like Bing for the other perks like trending news, Bing Rewards (no joke, I have cashed in for over $400 worth of free stuff from a PC VR headset to fast food gift cards just from doing daily searches), and I use Copilot from time to time as a quick ChatGPT alternative (using ChatGPT, but doesn’t require an account to use so good for a quick Incognito session if needed) and also nice with the history under your account. I prefer to use Copilot in Bing than the Windows app since I don’t want that crap installed to my computer and would rather keep it to the browser.

You may also check into extensions for whatever browser you end up going with. There are a few extensions that can help customize your search results like easily removing a website from the results, for example.

If you can, turn off unknown callers from being able to reach you.

I’ve done this and it’s been wonderful. The spams have actually decreased significantly since I don’t answer the phone for them at all anymore.

It’s under Settings > Phone (have to go into Apps in iOS 18) > Silence Unknown Callers

Anyone who is not in your contacts gets a ring but the ring doesn’t go to you so you don’t hear it and don’t answer. They can leave a voicemail but scammers never leave me voicemails.

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I don’t think so. Either that or it’s going to be pricey and not likely to work with a cell phone natively like how it is now with your wireless carrier.

One of my pervious jobs used RingCentral which is what I had in mind with my comment. They do have an iPhone and Android app that can send and receive texts and calls, but it’s all strictly through their app. I suppose you could do a forward to your number, but you’re going to need to have an existing number for that which kind of defeats this purpose.

You can manage call queues and the like on the backend in the browser to create something like this where it would send callers through a maze of menus to eventually be able to get to you.

Additionally, you could program a key press to you that wouldn’t be made known to callers such as pressing 7 to immediately be “transferred” to you (something you’d only tell trusted callers calling you) but that’s not stated in the call queue prompt.

I also imagine any business VoIP has a set minimum of numbers/users to sign up with them since they’re really for business, not personal use. But hey! Give it a shot and see or try one of their competitors.

Kind of an interesting thing to think about since you mentioned it.

The VoIP services they subscribe to usually help with this to some degree in identifying common patterns to cut down on some of the spam.

Beyond that, businesses implementing call queues & bot menus is what helps cut down on the rest of it.

It’s becoming more rare to actually get in contact with a human from many businesses nowadays. Businesses seem to want users to use a bot that will help the customer do whatever it is they’re doing as much as possible.

And the only way to get to said human is through a series of menus and questions, usually confirming they actually are a customer.

Long gone are the days of calling and getting a human to give your information to.

When you call something like Bank of America, they prove you are a customer because you give them your account number or they recognize that based on your caller ID and also have to still provide SSN or date of birth, so even if someone spoofs an actual customer’s number, they’re stuck in the menu and never reach a human.

One of the differences is that Osama bin Laden was not the leader of any recognized state in the world whereas Putin is.

Putting a literal bullseye on another country’s leader would be seen as an act of war.

Also, the US is not currently in (direct) war with Russia while the US was with Osama’s group.

It sounds like this is happening because your computer still has Chrome as the default browser. Assuming this is Windows: right-click one of the icons on the desktop, click Properties, then click Change and select Firefox.

This will now set Firefox as the default browser for your computer and these icons should now automatically open in Firefox as well as any new ones you create.

Creating an icon on the desktop is very similar in the process you would have done for Chrome too.

The problem here is that you can’t create icons that are exclusive to Chrome or Firefox, as far as I know, since Windows chooses, by default, one app that will open these by default.

Technically you could bypass this by right-clicking the desktop icon and then select “Open in” and then choose the other browser in case you need to open one in Chrome and the other in Firefox.

No, I’m saying that a business has something to gain in not showing customers the actual price because it can be a detriment to their profits if the customer has the full information at their disposal before making a purchase.

I’m not at all in favor of this, because this hurts me as a customer. I’m just saying this may be part of a reason for businesses to not show the actual price to the customer.

I think part of it (not a big part, but part) is that taxes differ so greatly in the US because of so many governments’ hands in the pots that it would discourage business in one town and have everyone flocking to a nearby town with less taxes.

As it is, you pay what you pay and don’t really realize the difference unless you take time to notice. I’ve only become aware of it because I realized how different my usual order at McDonald’s will differ when I’m in different cities.

In one city, my Big Mac meal will be $10.62 but in the next, it’ll be $9.35 because the taxes differ depending on where you are buying this with local city, county, and state.

If McDonald’s in Everytown, Maine showed their actual Big Mac meal price of $10.62 but the next city over in Somewhere, New Hampshire showed their Big Mac meal price at $9.35, more people would drive a little further to Somewhere for the obviously cheaper price with Everytown McDonald’s locations would suffer.

There would be no more internet access for anyone anymore if that were allowed.

Soooo many insecure networks out there ripe for the picking if you know what you’re doing and have the tools available. And the tools are often free, not costing any money. From there, those networks are the places people will go to commit their “piracy”.

And what exactly is piracy? If I purchase an album on iTunes but choose to download it on ThePirateBay, is that really piracy? Because I have done that when the music THAT I FUCKING PAID FOR is no longer available for me to download off of iTunes and Apple won’t give me a refund for said music purchase. People do it for games that include shitty DRM and don’t allow them to easily install on another device like Linux too.

It seems easier to find things for users. Probably part of dumbing things down.

My mom went through this last week with Libre Office. She said she couldn’t find anything because the ribbons from Word weren’t there. I found the option and enabled it and she said that was much better.

Whereas, I use Word 365 on a daily basis but I still know where things are from the classic menus.

But users want big pictures and less words, less menus.

So UI designers have done that.

You see that in the change between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in heavy ways. More buttons and less menus.

I fucking hate the dumbing down, especially on servers.

YouTube has a recommendation system already in place and it generally works for me except for music.

I don’t use it as my main source of music, but it’s convenient at some times like putting on music on my Apple TV while I work or if I am on my computer and don’t have my offline music library available. Or if I want to see the music video because I like the video that goes with the music. I used to use it to find new artists based on my existing taste, but whenever they broke the search/suggestions is when that all stopped for me and now I just use it for the same music or if I found a new artist and want to quickly check out their music.

There’s no reason for it to be this shitty. It seems intentional on their part. Maybe making money from paid spotlights under the guise of “recommendations”.

YouTube desperately needs to fix the recommendations for music. It’s either recommending me the same music I already listen to and is irrelevant to what I’m currently playing or something irrelevant to my taste and the video being watched. Think watching an Ice Cube video but having recommendations for Megadeth and Alice In Chains and Adele on the side. And if it’s not something I’ve already watched/listened to, it’s still something totally unrelated.

For the longest time, they kept recommending “Beck - Loser” to me on anything I would watch, regardless of genre. I’ve never listened to or searched for any of Beck’s music and I don’t know how that would be recommended to someone currently watching an Ice Cube music video…

And the live performances…I don’t ever watch or listen to live performances. Yet YouTube always recommends it to me. Even having a whole section dedicated to “Live Music”. Never asked for this, never searched for it…I don’t care for Live performances. I want studio only.

And what’s worse is that YouTube has a feature to tell it “Don’t recommend this video - because I watched it or don’t like it” or “don’t recommend this channel” EXCEPT for music! Why???

As far as the administration side goes, I think whitelisting is a pretty awesome feature on most routers. This gives you an extra layer of security on top of your password for your WiFi. Someone may get your code from someone else or you may have let a neighbor use it for a moment, but then what? Change the password and then have to update all your other devices?

Nah, just whitelist and you can remove devices as you wish any time you want.

It’s not foolproof as MAC spoofing is a thing, but it’s a cool layer to have.

You can also more safely create a QR code for getting on the WiFi with whitelisting enabled. So if someone happens to see it, they don’t necessarily get access just by scanning it. That’s just the first step. But this makes QR codes a little safer to have for joining the WiFi easily.

I think creating your own DNS server at home with a Raspberry Pi through PiHole is also another cool thing to do. Gives you the ability to block ads as well as many other things like known malware websites and even restricting adult sites easily if you have kids or just wanting to do it for yourself.

Combine that with a VPN server on that same Raspberry Pi so you can remote into your network from anywhere and also have the adblocking from the PiHole server at home. I did this for a while but disabled it because I wanted to ensure my home network was a little more secure before opening that up again. But it was a cool thing to have and use.

All that advertising makes me immediately avoid those kinds of products.