ISTR there's a classic sci-fi short story or maybe even book about this, but maybe I just imagined it. Where the artifacts of our fallen civilization are lost because they were fragile glass things, and there was something about ancestor cannibalism being to transfer nanites...

Anyone who wants to know can look right now and find out that yes, the Flock cameras are always watching. But since they don't belong to the government, that's legal. You might argue that it shouldn't be, that if they're just turning around and handing the data to the police on any request (that is, without a warrant) then they are effectively functioning as a part of the police department. And in that case I would agree, but so far courts have permitted that to continue.

Yeah, but again, so far if a private company is doing it and then giving the data to the cops, it's not government surveillance. An even worse example of such a partnership is that the US Postal Service hands all of the mailpiece scanning data to the FBI. The feds are logging 100% of our snail mail metadata, and tracking who is sending what (type of mail) to who. All backbones are monitored and a percentage of traffic can be sampled in realtime, Never forget QWest. Need I go on? The government is spying on us in every way, both directly and indirectly. Most people are fully head-up-ass about it so they don't have to think about it.

Also, when your Steam Machine is too long in the tooth to be credible for new AAA games, you can still use it to play other kinds of games, it will keep getting updates through the community even when Valve is done supporting it, you can blow away the OS on it and load something else without anyone trying to stop you, etc etc. You can also play far more games on it than you can play on any given console. It's just a far superior value unless you absolutely have to play some console exclusive.

You could point to lots of things and say they are the problem.

I'm going to go ahead and say one of the problems is lack of vertical integration. Everyone seems to want to let other corporations effectively be in charge of their business. Sony's big enough to have their own fabs, or at least take a major stake, but hasn't. And inb4 anyone says that isn't sensible, Sony themselves disagree and are starting to change this, so perhaps they have figured this out themselves. It's not just the simple direct immediate economic benefits, it's also provision of the benefits of longer-term stability.

Once upon a time, a game console was a special piece of relatively inexpensive purpose-built hardware. Relative to the cost, they had impressive graphics capabilities linked to their design being specifically for gaming, prioritizing single-process performance and graphics memory bandwidth for results which PCs struggled to match.

Today, home PCs have massive bandwidth, and a game console is just a cost reduced PC with a crippled OS and unified memory. So why would you want one over a real PC with a non-crippled OS if the same games are available on the PC? And most of them are. It's not all of them, but if you need a PC anyway (and many people still do) then is it really worth it to buy a whole other PC you can only play games on, and which you will basically just have to throw away when you're done because they are so locked down?

When lots of people have significant disposable income, sure. That's not now...

The problem is policing.

One approach to addressing police accessing information they shouldn't in the name of investigation of crimes is to require any information collection outside of a hot pursuit to require a warrant. If there is a legitimate investigation that should be easy, right?

That was a subtle Scotsman.

This is nonsense. If you have a decent GPU and just a whatever CPU then you can expect to be CPU limited. Just having current PCIE is not enough.

The mission is to get everyone on SSL, that's going to include people without a clue

By "unmarked" they mean it doesn't have a corporate logo. It'll have plates and shit. Who's required to have what markings on what vehicles varies from location to location, I'm not looking that up for this case, are you?

As far as the contract, it certainly gives them permission to access the campus in order to maintain the cameras, including removing foreign objects which obscure the view blah blah blah, why else would they have a contract? It'll also indemnify them from acts of god like lightning striking the pole while a student is using it to reenact a scene from a stripper movie. And no doubt it would also give them the right to seek some kind of redress from the school for covering the cameras, as they spent some money to put them in there and expect the data to flow, but they certainly don't need that kind of negative publicity.

Since they didn't just remove them, I would imagine that the school didn't have a contract that allowed them to require their removal for other than safety reasons.

Gallena de patio that gets bugs and scraps is richer than factory fed feed-only birds.

This is mostly a problem with all projector and some LED headlights. It isn't a big problem with dual-reflector headlights because they are much more diffuse, but since projectors just have a big lens they have hot spots. With LED headlights it depends on what kind of diffuser is between the LED element and your eye.

Back in 1960 you could already buy an F250 or F350.

Lifted vehicles can be a problem, but the most common problem for "lifted" pickups is someone has installed a leveling lift and not re-aimed their headlights, or have not done it correctly. Leveling lifts specifically lift the front of the vehicle only in order to make them sit more level when empty (or mostly empty.) Obviously this raises the headlights' aim. Usually you can just adjust it out, but you might have to shim the headlight or make other changes to fix the aim on some vehicles where there is not enough adjustment to fix it, and then you also have to care.

No, this is the exact reason why the ACA is a disaster. Insurance company profits are capped at a percentage of the cost of care, so they are motivated to drive up costs. But what about the uncovered treatments that the hospitals have to eat?