As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

Look, I know "nuclear device" is correctly generic, so that RTGs and things like them, legitimately count. But let's be serious: right around the very same time this real stuff happened, some really great fake stuff happened too: the movie Goldfinger.

And once you've watched Goldfinger, "nuclear device" is just a euphemism for a bomb. So don't go calling RTGs "nuclear devices," please.

it is pretty clear trump would pardon or vacate any fine against a right winger org.

The president does not yet have pardoning power over civil judgements. Maybe a constitutional amendment to do that is coming, but we haven't had a vote on it yet.

Some good has come from promoting more user speech online, but also a lot of bullying, harassment, echo chambers, doxxing, stochastic terrorism, and so on.

You make it sound as dangerous as a 1775 soap box that people like Sam Adams would stand upon and shout from, or a pamphlet-printing-press that someone like Thomas Paine might use, where in both cases the goal was often to rowse the rabble into protest and action.

But is the internet really that dangerous?

"The platforms" are, at best, a percent of the internet.

Sign up for a linode, put up any sort of website you can imagine on it, and explain why you would choose for the algorithms you write or install, to work the way that you fear.

It doesn't have to be as bad as you say, unless you want it. That's essential freedom.

This would result in suppression of anti Trump opinion

It will result in suppression of all anti- power/wealth opinion, i.e. all criticism of government or big-pocketed business.

This change is sponsored by litigious motherfuckers. Trump is only the instance-du-jour, a few percent of the overall threat, though very much a shining example of it.

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

NO! This is an outrage! [slams table]

Our religious war should be about reader's choice vs writer's choice!

Ok, but which of those things came with the new law? A lot of what you're describing (I suspect all of it) was already in place. What changed for non-banned users?

Oh, so they're doing it the same way I take "good" photographs: by taking a fuckton of mostly-shitty photographs and trawling through them for the rare few which actually look decent.

Vaporware. If this feature doesn't make it into the Open Source driver so that I can know where my computer is, then I'm not going to buy any Nvidia hardware!

If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant

It was good enough for us!