Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.

In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:

The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.

There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:

Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.

If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).

However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.