Yes, this is understood...however, that's an indictment against the category. Games are optional entertainment products, so the problem is that *any* legislation of entertainment products can come under the guise of "it's optional, you can just not-buy it". Agreed; it's not food or medicine, so the industry benefits from a lower level of necessity in that respect.

However, "it's optional" doesn't mean it's not worth regulating. Gambling is "optional", yet slot machines have such strict regulatory compliance requirements to meet, that they commonly exceed the level of scrutiny given to voting machines and MRI hardware. The gun-to-head argument would stipulate that since casinos are way easier to avoid than hospitals or banks, slot machines don't need regulation.

When video games started running into areas that consumer protection laws typically cover, we started needing to assess the appropriate level of regulation. For decades, games were one-time, permanent purchases - people with Nintendo cartridges and Playstation games on disc can play them today, 20-40 years after release, and neither Nintendo nor Sony have a practical means of saying "...you can't play that anymore". Over time, games got tied to accounts, and there were some consumer benefits - no more scratched discs or lost media or shelf space issues, plus additional content and bug fixes after release.

These were great, until they weren't. Those accused of cheating saw account bans, which meant they couldn't play *other, paid-for games* anymore, irrespective of whether the accusations were true. Companies would take money for games, but then shut down the servers needed to play them saying "it costs us too much", but then would sue fans who said, "...we'll take it from here, then". Of course, there was the whole "surprise mechanics" thing, where games were literally-gambling and they tried to argue that it wasn't.

So yes, there's no gun-to-head requirement for people to sign up for these services. Stadia proved that. However, the problem is when such systems are implemented as a requirement, for artificial means. If GTA6 was "Stadia Exclusive", it's not like GTA6 can't run on consoles or PCs, it's purely a predatory business model for a game that inherently doesn't require it. It's "pay us the same amount as before, but we can claw your access to the game back, but you can't claw your money back, because this benefits us". Now sure, purely rational human beings would refuse to buy it until they released it with traditional distribution mechanisms, but 'vote with your wallet' is exceedingly difficult to make work at scale.

Even if you want to argue this is acceptable for video games, it's a short hop to business software, where such a model has harmed many small businesses with things like Quickbooks pulling this crap and forcing businesses to go from $300 every few years to $2500 annually. "It's optional!! they can print out 20 years of financial data and use paper and a pencil!!11" - how far does that argument go, exactly? that's the problem with the gun-to-head argument - if *only* unavoidable needs receive regulation, then everything that is "optional" becomes a potential means of exploitation. There needs to be a balance, of course, but somehow I don't think that video game publishers are unreasonably impacted because the government tells them "you have to remove DRM from your products if you're not selling them anymore, and you can't sue your customers for fixing things in your products if they paid for it, either".

...if I need to connect it to an account, and/or it needs internet access to function, then it's a guarantee that 1.) the conversations will be stored in Amazon's meat grinder, 2.) the user won't be able to delete them (just make them invisible for themselves), and 3.) it's going to turn into a subscription fee. ...if, however, I can download the transcripts over a USB cable into software that installs on my computer and works despite an application firewall that block outbound internet connectivity, then maybe it might be interesting. However, *nobody* makes hardware/software like that anymore, especially Amazon.

Sorry Ami, but I'm gonna have to give a bit of a counter here.

Starfleet Academy was referenced in TNG and DS9 as a prestigious institution, only accepting the best. Wesley Crusher and Nog were both shown as really needing to be at the top of their game in order to be accepted into the academy. In Academy...pretty much everything was "find yourself and who you feel you really are, and the team will work around that".

Meanwhile, the setup for the story was that Holly Hunter left Starfleet because she was upset about a particular mother and son (Caleb) she separated when she was a judge, so she left, and now Starfleet needs Her In Particular to be a professor at Starfleet Academy (really, a whole universe full of people and we need one person who wasn't a teacher and resigned?), and she goes to find Caleb In Particular to join Starfleet because he's good at everything, in exchange for helping him find his mother...except that the "find my mother" plot thread is barely there, and not even Caleb seems to care for most of the season.

As the show gets going, Starfleet Academy (the institution) takes place on a ship that can just land and be a building, depending on what's necessary...and they go on a bunch of super dangerous missions that really require seasoned officers to do, but they have a bunch of cadets doing stuff they clearly shouldn't be doing...for, some reason. And they go out in space to do it instead of doing it all on the holodeck where it's far safer for...some reason. And, somehow, they're almost never in class in this college, except for one episode where we watch them be in debate class. Okay, fine, but...no engineering classes? No tactical training? No indication that they're actually learning to do the things we've seen Starfleet officers doing in the field?

Most of the show centered around the interpersonal drama, and I'll even grant some leniency here because it was pitched as having a "Dawson's Creek / Harry Potter" sort of coming-of-age focus. uhm...okay, fine...but quite a number of episodes had so much of that sort of focus, that it barely needed to be "Star Trek" to do it. They brought in the 'war college' to create some allusion to the Harry Potter houses, but do we spend a meaningful amount of time with sympathetic characters in The War College? No, we don't. Do we have any meaningful thought put behind the possibility that perhaps there's a need for a military-focused part of Starfleet in a universe that has physics-defying pirates (the last episode requiring an impossible feat of travel and resource acquisition), the way that Enterprise had the MACO's or the Elite Force games had the Hazard Team? ...no, they should join Starfleet Academy instead, where we learn nothing because Caleb already knows everything, everywhere, ever! And SAM only needed to realize that she's wonderful and perfect and had nothing to learn at all, so of course she's a perfect candidate for an institution of higher learning!

Finally, at least for my personal opinion, I found absolutely every single character insufferable for one reason or another. Holly Hunter is a captain-slash-professor who tells her leadership to get bent, and is shocked when the cadets have authority issues? I forget her name, but the Jem Hadar lady was generally annoying and useless, and somehow I got the feeling that half the cadets could have taken her in hand-to-hand combat. Caleb was "the key to everything", Genesis was every popular girl trope simultaneously, Ja'den was the living embodiment of 'not-Klingon'. The writers were clearly going for 'child-like' with SAM, but ended up at 'child-ish' instead. Tig Notaro was Tig Notaro playing Tig Notaro. You get the point.

Please note that I got through my whole list of exceptions without complaining one bit about "wokeness" or "politics in Star Trek" or anything related to it.

This is a false equivalence. At some level, I agreed to the ToS for my phone, so the tracking on my phone is at least somewhat consensual (not enough, IMO, but there was SOMETHING).

I can use GrapheneOS or /e/OS or some other system that greatly-reduces the tracking, or I can leave my phone at home if I'm going to do something for which I don't want a third party to have a record. I can, to a certain extent, assess the amount of data that is acquired, either by using software to assess what my phone records, or looking through my account data (certainly Google and Apple don't show everything, but they show at least some things).

I didn't accept a EULA for Flock. I cannot query the data Flock has on me, or who made a query for that data, or the metadata that they have aggregated and for which they provide access.

If you can't see the difference between the two scenarios, I don't know what to tell you.

Yes, right now we're running into the problem where municipalities are turning "we don't have Flock" into a selling point because Flock became the Kleenex of ALPRs...but Axon is also getting at least some recognition in the space as well. It's not the cure, certainly, but I do think that the bipartisan, organized backlash against ALPRs is causing at least some tension as to whether the backlash will persist if the line item is still on the government ledgers.

Agreed; it is pretty nice to see those wearing MAGA hats and those wearing Planned Parenthood T-shirts sitting next to each other at city council meetings on the matter.

Given the fact that the most famous and most popular Blizzard games WERE CODED PRIMARILY BY BOOMERS (and some GenX; admittedly Mike Morhaime was early GenX)...the answer is "a good number of gamers, probably".

The oldest millennials were in college when World of Warcraft came out; it was boomers and GenX who made Diablo, Diablo II, Warcraft, and Starcraft.

I'm not saying that Blizzard isn't still making popular games, but I *am* saying that the last decade has consisted of remasters and sequels from the studio, with the sole exception of Overwatch.

I don't exactly have a Blizzard org chart in front of me, so I can't create the pie chart of boomers/genx/millenial/genz employees at the studio, but I do think it's overly reductive to assume that a studio who's most iconic titles were made by boomers and early genx would somehow suffer if their staffing roster retained them.

"For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company,"

Yes Brandon, this is the thing that people generally like. When the speakers work, they sound very good.

"What we actually are is an audio operating system." ...And this is the part that has been somewhere between tolerable and the biggest liability. Yes, when it works, it's great, but it's been so focused on being "automagic" that when there's a problem, it's like a Bugatti hitting a speed bump.

If Sonos wanted to claw back some good will, all they had to do was to implement a "generic Bluetooth mode" and an aux jack. This way, it ensures people can still use the speaker (the most liked and most reliable part) irrespective of whether the software is good or bad. ...But, since they'd rather cram AI into it, they'll likely continue to bleed users and installers, who will implement Bluesound or WiiM instead and become the Oracle of multi-room audio - obscenely priced, running on an increasingly niche user base, and circling the drain for a while longer than most, but ultimately fail as more and more people consider the Sonos "operating system" radioactive.

No, but CSAM can be on a phone. So can a list of assassination targets, an app that detonates an explosive, stolen classified data, Stuxnet-like malware...there are PLENTY of actually-problematic things that could be on a phone. ...for the record, that doesn't mean that this person had any of those things on his phone (and I'm inclined to believe that he didn't), just that digital contraband exists and it CAN exist on a phone.

Probably not - it depends on the data that's been ingested.

Odds are pretty good that they've got decades of information regarding flight information. While it's obvious that there are more flights during the holidays, others surrounding regional events may have some value. There may be some custom coded Excel macros that have some value if they still worked; the business logic may still be useful even if the literal programming language isn't. The frequency of words used - or not used - by an airline within internal emails may be helpful. How frequently supervisors catered to customer requests vs. denying them, especially if the outcome is also known, can be helpful in optimizing recommendations for customer interactions.

Even without being super insidious, the useful data to an AI model isn't "did the business succeed", it's "who said what, and who did what, when".

*sigh*

Because Spirit Airlines failed at BEING AN AIRLINE. Google isn't trying to use the data to become an airline, they're adding it to the meat grinder with which to train Gemini.

Because you have the actively user-hostile version, as discussed. It is extremely sad that such tech is user-hostile, and it is equally sad that there aren't enough regulations in place to mandate that such options are opt-in-with-informed-consent, or able to be disabled in a way that retains as much functionality as possible while still respecting an opt-out, but since there is not, the options are either:

1. accept your system in the state in which it currently exists, complete with the ads or potential for them, or

2. disconnect and claw back as much functionality as you can.

You've accepted the first, and it's 100% your right to do so. However, since the situation we currently live in does not allow for both.

This is the insidious two-step.

Flock probably didn't *accuse* anyone. They probably "indicated to law enforcement that further investigation is recommended". Flock gets out of it because it was "simply a recommendation", the PD gets out of it because they were "following standard protocol".

If there were really justice in this world, they would both be facing a $100M lawsuit (paid from the pension fund in the case of the PD), unless they agreed who would accept responsibility as a matter of formal record, in which case, the responsible party pays $100M and the 'whoopsie' side got only $1M...and then let the relationship strain as a result. ...but this is why the two-step exists - it protects both.

Yes, do it. This is Slashdot, so I can meaningfully recommend what I did: buy a used Android phone like a Pixel 6a or something like that if you don't have one lying around. Then, load it up with iodeOS...there's an app stack that'll replace almost everything you requested.

CoMaps and Sygic GPS both provide these, the latter being $18/year and working completely offline.

Spotify still works; I also use either AntennaPod for podcasts or PowerAmp ($7 once) to play the music I loaded onto it.

...yeah, disconnecting the car makes this one impossible, no getting around it.

OwnTracks, possibly combined with Reitti on the server side if you're feeling a bit extra.

well, Sygic and Comaps both show distance to destination, and the last five cars I've owned have showed me miles-to-empty on the ICE side; I'd imagine the EV side will do the same, and from there it's just a subtraction problem. Sygic does have an EV mode; I don't know how that behaves, but it probably narrows the gap a bit.

Agreed...and that's why the systems are desirable to buyers...but since it's clear that these systems can and will be actively used to make money for the OEM, there's a trade to be made. The aforementioned setup isn't a drop-in replacement, but it checks off many of the things on your list.

That said my car has never shown ads, fuck BMW and I highly recommend no one ever buy their cars.

Yet. BMW has been the most aggressive at post-purchase monetization, but the others will follow.

Well, the thing is that having a frictionless ordering process that allows more sales-per-hour is good if the goal is to sell coffee, but the point of a Starbucks, originally, was to be a 'third place' that wasn't the home or the office, so paying $4 for a cup of coffee or $8 for a thousand-calorie caffeinated milkshake was entirely justifiable when the value proposition was "paying for a place to sit down with a cup of coffee for an hour". Shifting to a coffee pickup location means that the value proposition shifts, and paying half as much for a cup of coffee twice the size at 7-Eleven while I'm getting gas tends to win out on both cost and convenience - dissuading customers from sitting down and hanging out gives fewer reasons for people to *go to Starbucks*.

Likely, but for different reasons. I left T-Mobile about two years ago, after being a customer for over 20 years. They weren't less expensive than Verizon or AT&T anymore, and they pissed me off for other reasons...but having a retail channel means being able to make a few dollars off accessories with new phone sales, it means having a first-point-of-contact with a rep who, at least *used to* help address customer issues from tech support to billing discrepancies, and so forth. I could understand perhaps reducing the number of stores, but if they're going to give the same service level as an MVNO (buy a phone on Amazon, everything is an online transaction), they're going to have to compete on price way better than they currently are.

It's possible that T-Mobile is looking to be a more muted player in the field and quietly make more money by just being the network of the MVNO's, but I don't think they'll be able to compete with Verizon and their retail presence without having a retail presence, any more than they'll be able to compete with the MVNO's on price.

This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites...then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays...and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional...you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios...when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons...but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I'll accept the tradeoff.

So...Microsoft certainly didn't get the massive market share AOL had in the 90's, and they weren't too successful at getting the "walled garden" they were probably hoping for around that time...but they did just fine. Azure isn't *quite* AWS, but they're doing better than Google in IaaS revenue, and they spent most of the 00's and 2010's running the business world with desktop Windows and Windows Server - alongside Linux and not at super massive scale, granted, but they did just fine.

Where I think Apple's opportunity comes in is to replay the iPod playbook. There were a bunch of MP3 players before the iPod, and most of them had trouble once Napster fell. Apple ran the 2000's on the iPod not just because of the hardware, but because of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, making it possible to use both existing MP3 libraries and to create new ones, easily, legally, and virus-free.

I think that playbook can work here as well. I've got two computers with GPUs, one an RTX3060 and one an AMD 9060XT. Not flagships by any means, but enough to run local models well-enough. My Macbook issued to me by work has an M5 CPU, and it generates tokens within 20% as quickly as those cards, on battery. If Apple can conjure up some sort of AI App Store that serves up AI models and purpose-built apps for them, that run on Apple hardware with no subscription tied to them, and make the process smooth, seamless, and generally-useful, Apple can probably stand on OpenAI's shoulders and make a local AI laptop that's worth owning...and if they can do that, they can profit at the endpoint level without having to invest billions at the datacenter level like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing.

The Vision Pro, I think, would work well if they sold it as a business tool - diagram overlays, status windows, that sort of thing...but fashion accessories that obscure the face are VERY difficult to make work; people wear contact lenses because they prefer those to face-obscuring glasses that correct their vision. As a video game console or a work utility that's put on for a function and then turned off, there's a niche, but it's not going to be the sort of thing people just walk around wearing.