Surely, if they're essentially taking the game away from people who paid for it, those people are entitled to a refund, right?

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

All true, but it should be added this isn't a recent thing.

Oh, the AI buzz is recent, but MS has had quality control problems in flagship software for decades. How many control panels are there? How many "kinda" work? How many versions are we going on with that kind of nonsense? And instead of fixing this, they focus on AI and...notepad...for some fucking reason.

A good point, but I still wonder; is this prevalent enough to warrant such legal action? Just how many people are "pirating" music today?

Movies make sense, but this is the Music Association.

I guess I find it odd that people are downloading full albums with enough frequency for this to be a large enough issue for the music association to still be barking in the courts about it.

To say nothing of VPNs.

I'll be honest, I'm kinda surprised this is still a thing. It's not 2001 anymore, Napster isn't really around anymore.

At some point all of these streaming services will realize they're behaving like the music industry of the early 2000s, with much the same consequences.

Not any time soon, mind you. They aren't that intelligent.

I'm honestly surprised anyone in the military ever allowed this in the first place. Not being able to repair tech in the field is an automatic NO from me.

Seems like an obvious liability.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

Wow, you trust the Trump administrations values so much you want to pass those along to kids?

That's certainly a choice.

Worth researching the history of vaccinations. The first polio vaccine, for instance, killed and maimed thousands of children, yet there was the government pressuring everyone to take it.

We eventually perfected it, yes, but all that means is we were experimenting on the public under the guise of "public health".