According to Apple, wireless headphones like the AirPods do support spacial audio. No idea where the author got the information they wouldn't.
Apart from that, I get how an audio engineer would think that way, but for me, and I suppose most music listeners, what's important is that the sound is great. And personally I really like spacial audio.
The WMD story was amplified by the media, there was no real investigative reporting done to find out the validity of the government's WMD claims and as a consequence the media helped the US raise an army that under wrongful pretexts started a war in the middle east.
Regarding your first question: there's only one edition that let's you turn off telemetry completely: Windows 10 Enterprise. You can set it to "Security" which means nothing but the following information is sent: "Information that’s required to help keep Windows, Windows Server, and System Center secure, including data about the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry component settings, the Malicious Software Removal Tool, and Windows Defender."
I can't remember the name, but a few years ago there was a website that did something similar. You could drag and add different elements and print it out afterwards. Must have been around 2006-2007, I used this quite often during my final year at college.
Some valid points there. The problem, for me at least and I guess many other people, is that the vast majority of my contacts uses WhatsApp.
I know this probably will never happen, but what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use. Back in the late 90s there were plenty of internet messengers such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, and IIRC it wasn't long before universal clients were developed.
If you have a server available, have some time and don't mind fiddling with some config files, you could install a Matrix homeserver.
Matrix is a relatively new open source message protocol that offers various bridges to connect to other chat/messenger services: https://matrix.org/bridges/
I ended up getting a Microsoft mail account because it was the only way (for us) to respond to customers who used MS's email. So email isn't immune from walling off of gardens either.
It was a couple years ago now, SPF and DMARC (but not DKIM iirc) were sorted. At the time MS used a third party who you could pay to get "vetted", I got a response that the problem was our server host's had another IP (not the one our emails were sent from) that had once had spam sent from it. So the facts we were responding to customer emails, that our domain had ~12 years of good behaviour, and our email servers IP being clean weren't enough. Even "whitelisting" the domain from the Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com end didn't work.
I'm still smarting, we still sometimes have problems (from a different host now) but just resend via an outlook.com address and it's fine.
So, no never had our domain marked as spam on any dbl that I've checked (but only done that sporadically).
We also had a blip with Gmail around the same time (but not the exact same time), but I reported it as a false positive and it was fixed in a few days; no problems since.
We were/are sending so few emails (<1 day average) that it's not worth me spending a couple of days trying to see through the murk of MS to fix it. We're probably not losing any revenue, just have to treat MS sent emails differently to everyone else's.
Chicken and the egg. If you're sufficiently close to people to convince them to use SMS/Signal/Matrix/whatever with you, then sure, you'll be fine. But what if you're not? What if it's either "install WhatsApp and join our group chat" or nothing?
I don't. Everybody got a phone number, sms and email. So if we don't share a tool, I fall back to that, to face to face, accept a delay or be left out of the loop.
The secret is to focus on quality, not quantity, and realize a lot of FOMO is involved.
If the quantity is zero, the quality doesn't matter - if the alternative to joining the group is to be left out of the loop, there is practically no choice.
For example, if they write - in the group - that the next meeting is 3 PM next Wednesday at so-and-so, unless you happen to run into them at that specific time your chances of knowing this are slim.
> what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use
There is (was?) plenty of said messengers; Trillian, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium to name a few, plus XMPP transports that could be used from any Jabber client. I've no idea though whether they're still around and play nice with modern walled gardens that require registration by phone no.
I used Franz a while back but dropped it because if performance issues. Since it uses the web version of the apps it supports, the performance was just abysmal (most notably on Discord). It's a neat idea that doesn't work very well in practice unfortunately.
