The problem is that the movies that would take advantage of that level of equipment would be extremely costly to make. Difficult to recoup that if you only have a relatively small number of locations in which to screen them. You'd also only have the capacity to screen a relatively small number of movies per year. That's not very attractive to an audience that demands variety and choice. If only a few movies are being made each year, the infrastructure that supports them (studios, distribution) is probably not viable.

This isn't new - cinemas used to be massive and they tried all sorts of technology fixes (widescreen, multichannel audio, 3D, smells, etc) to drag people back from their TVs. It didn't work. The multiplex turned things round for a while by increasing the likelihood that someone wanting to go to a cinema would find something they wanted to watch, but there's now more choice at home (assuming you can navigate it) and you don't have to smell other people's food or hear their conversations or try to see the screen through the glow from their constant texting.

Unfortunately, it's the poor experience that made the economics work so it's unlikely there's a better experience to be had.

Unless you pay extra to assign a specific seat, Ryanair only allows you to check-in for your flight between 24 and 2 hours prior to departure.

As they treat each leg of the journey as a separate single booking, you already are pretty much obliged to have Internet access in your destination during those specific hours if you actually plan to fly back.

One of the frequently-admired features of Unix is the fact that a lot of the basic utilities are filters - they take text on stdin and produce transformed text on stdout that can be fed to another filter in the chain.

C is a really terrible language to use for text-processing, even more so once you move beyond ASCII. How it ever survived for writing such programs is actually quite hard to imagine. In fact, I can't really think of a use for which it is particularly suited - it doesn't give you the real control you need to write system code (it only works for writing operating systems because of known compiler behaviour and the ability to inline machine code) and it barely qualifies as a high-level language. It continues to exist because it's the ubiquitous least common denominator - everything has a C compiler.

The problem we have today is that we're essentially trying to use procedural languages to describe programs that don't proceed with a traditional control flow - the familiar ideas of scope and lifetime that came from languages like Algol don't really apply and are hard to describe when there are asynchronous threads that may or may not also be running in parallel. I don't think Rust is actually helping us with the description, it's simply making the problem more clearly manifest.

We're in the "something must be done" phase but have yet, I fear, to identify a "something" that moves us sufficiently far forward to be worth the upheaval.

Back in the days when people left their houses to see movies, they purchased a "ticket" that gave them the right to view the picture once.

You're still buying a ticket, though the number of viewings is undefined.

The vast majority of Bluesky users are using that app, however. Whereas Bluesky is decentralizable (up to some point) very little seems to be decentralized in practice.

The biggest issue, I would have thought, is that the main feature of the decentralization mechanism is that everybody in principle gets to see everything: the user identity exists to authenticate the origin of posts only. It's ultimately up to the app what posts the user gets to see. I'm not sure whether under a strict interpretation of the law Bluesky would be permitted to accept the word of a federated app that its users were of an appropriate age and would take responsibility for only selecting appropriate content for display because in principle the operator of the federated app could be an 11 year old.

You'd struggle to find one. Being in the US without the appropriate permission is a civil, not a criminal matter. I'm not even sure most Americans understand that. I doubt you can encapsulate the ambiguity of that in a single word. I rather suspect the word you'd prefer to use would deny the basic legal reality.

What "illiberal" men have been saying most recently is that the reason women (and minorities) are under-represented in, for example, IT is that it's just that they're naturally less adept and that "DEI" is undermining this natural superiority for political/societal reasons. When it comes to men being under-represented, suddenly there's a problem with "society's depictions" of men and men are demanding affirmative action for their uniquely manly problems.

Throughout most of time, men have had the advantage of physical power and have shaped a world in which power was the ultimate determinant. That world no longer exists - physical power is largely irrelevant and the structure of modern societies discourages the use of physical power for personal advantage. That's the thing the MAGA crowd object to - the fact they can't use their force to override societal norms any longer. It's the reason the MAGA government is using illegal detentions and deportations and sackings: to demonstrate that power once more has the right to overturn the law and the democratic consensus.

However, that's not a problem for men in general, only the ones who've been brought up (by mothers as well as fathers) to believe in their innate superiority and to expect the indulgence of their whims. This isn't some major crisis - there's yet to be even a single female US president - it's simply the old tradition of daughters being little more than trading commodities working its way out of the system and erasing all the traditional male excuses in the process. It's hardly surprising that after 100,000 years of not having to make the intellectual effort men might be a bit rusty. But it's hardly the end of masculinity as we know it if men have to put in a bit of effort for a change.

For some people, the prospect of them never visiting again would be a bonus.

It's worth also pointing out that one of the authors is a former executive director of the Adam Smith Institute and another works at the Centre for Policy Studies, both of which are conservative "think tanks" and might therefore be somewhat biased towards the form of "free market" that externalises the awkward costs of simple-minded policies for others to pick up.

It's not a sad cruelty, it's simply reality. What would be sad cruelty would be life-extending creatures for your own personal pleasure.

I live in a country where there is (allegedly) significantly more competition, but the ISP's customer "service" team are so heavily incentivised to prevent cancellations they'll simply transfer you to a random extension or put you on indefinite hold if you try.

I'm presently awaiting a response to a legal letter sent by recorded post since all other forms of contact have been ignored.

It doesn't seem to matter how the industry is structured, they always seem to find a way of keeping you in their claws.

It's interesting you think it should. It just shows how deeply ingrained is the notion that manufactured products are inherently disposable and that while the manufacturer retains their proprietorial rights in the product, the "owner" is left with the liabilities. Take a step back and consider how dystopian this may look to other eyes.

And if the FCC has accepted the basic principle that it's the customer's phone, I see no practical difference in reality between 60 days and 0 days in terms of the phone payments being maintained. However, the existence of any locking period where the customer has to apply for the lock to be removed rather than it being removed automatically is in itself an obstacle to competition.

I can see that's true for broadcasters, but you can run a portable FM receiver on a couple of AA batteries for weeks, not something you can achieve with your average DAB receiver. If you factor in the total costs for the audience as well, is there really a saving overall?

we all know what a game console is

For these purposes, it's clearly a computer-based device on which you can run commercially-created software that potentially offers licensing revenue from which Apple can abstract a cut. As opposed to a computer-based device on which you can run your own, or free software with no financial benefit to Apple.

And "retro" is clearly an abbreviation for retrogressive.

As you say, obvious to everyone.