Why did this Mr. Torres (Democrat from NY -- That part is important) leave this out? Is it because the film industry is all democrat and the tech industry is libertarian? Can't be.

Or maybe because it isn't needed? Movies and music are available in a format you own.

For music - they're basically all DRM free so you buy it you own it. You can also buy it on CD, vinyl, cassette tape or other formats.

For movies, well, you can still buy DVDs and Blu-Rays, and you buy those you own them.

For videogames, other than GoG, that doesn't exist. You buy PC games with the courtesy from Valve/Steam, Epic, Microsoft, Sony, etc. If they say you aren't allowed to play the game anymore, they can block you from playing it.

But with my CDs, purchased music, DVDs and Blu-Rays, no one can prevent me from watching it.

Especially anything long form. And they know it and they could care less about the quality of it. What they're upset about is that if their platform becomes completely full of AI slop they won't be able to monetize the posts by selling them as training data.

No, I'm sure there's plenty of people who do read long form posts - usually the ones who write long form posts.

You have to remember there are a number of people who spend their time on LinkedIn - recruiters, C-suite folks, etc. It's why the long form ports are usually some self-flagellation along the lines of "why doesn't anyone want to work anymore?" or "how to screw over your employees".

Either ram upgrades are still easy to accomplish -OR- 'dodgy hardware resellers' will no longer be able to continue installing bad ram. You cannot have both.

RAM upgrades on a RPi are REALLY hard. You need to have certain hardware and skills to do it. The people who can do it, can also make a killing "upgrading" RAM by using cheap low-quality RAM and selling the new Pi as a more expensive one. The price difference is about $260 from RPi 5 with 1GB to one with 16GB. ($45 for 1GB, $305 for 16GB). If you come across a supply of cheap 16GB units for say, $100 each, you can make a healthy profit selling RPis for $305 that you paid only $145 for. That's $160 in profit and if you have all the equipment to do so, likely takes well under 15 minutes each to do.

The people will the skills to do this easily are also the ones who can acquire everything cheaply - China, for example, would have all the necessary equipment to make it.

You can also get "no warranty" RPis officially - they're the "industrial" model and are not for retail sale. (Many pieces of hardware use RPis internally for their controllers because it saves having to deal with SoC manufacturers and such to design the hardware when it's readily available). That's usually how those factories can get a ready supply of RPis for cheap - an industrial RPi 5 1GB would likely be under $40 or so in quantity.

And now you're counterfeiting Pis.

The FSF is right to criticize RPi for this, because it goes against their principles, but the FSF also has to realize that counterfeit hardware is a real thing, and an RPi with swapped memory not officially made by RPi is a counterfeit. It's one of the annoyances of real life - counterfeits are a real thing and countermeasures to that usually end up taking rights away. I mean, I'm sure all the pro Right to Repair folks would be glad if their names were put on counterfeit stuff, right? Perhaps someone selling cheap batteries with the iFixit logo. The FSF is harder to counter since their products are purely software, but I'm sure they've been burned before when they buy a product only to realize that the new revision was incompatible.

I agree that it's a shame the S and X were discontinued. Especially the S is so symbolic and the only competitor in the limousine class. It was the one I was considering buying, but I'm a BMW driver and I don't get the all-touchscreen approach, even if it's the current market trend.

But economically, it does make sense to discontinue a product that is maybe 1-2% of your sales but blocks an entire factory. Though converting that to robots is part of what I mean with the "why robots?" comment.

I consider the Plaid models an attempt to revive the S and X, and it didn't work, or worked only for a short time. So from a business perspective, the choice was to either rework those models completely (replace the older tech, improve the manufacturing process to save costs) or just discontinue them. Given the market moving towards cheaper EVs in general, it was probably the right decision. It is a shame, though.

Don't think of ETS as some victim because they're a not-for-profit. Like the College Board they own the market on standardized tests. Heck a quarter of their business comes from administering College Board tests. Basically every student in the world will have to encounter something from either company just as a matter of course, especially if they wish to enter a western college or university. And the tests aren't cheap.

They're companies that basically rake in tons of money they have to spend because they need to bring the profit to zero. They can spend that money on top grade security if they wanted to because they're not hurting for cash. College Board owns a bunch of luxury hotels because they've got nothing else to spend money on. ETS compensates their C suite very well just to spend money.

They would have no trouble buying high end security systems and subscriptions and everything and still not make a dent in their executive compensation.

If the optics weren't so bad for them, they likely could pay for a new ballroom in short order.

The jump jets aren't under manual control from what we could see. So that risk might be much lower than you think.

Jealous much? Tesla is doing quite ok, especially compared to some other car companies who are closing down factories and firing workers by the thousands.

Is it spectacle? Yeah, it is. It also is a one-of-a-kind car. It's clearly a supercar aimed at the filthy rich who buy stuff they don't really need because it's cool or because they want to brag about it. Fine as well. Last I checked, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bugatti weren't exactly close to bancruptcy.

Do you know what all of those also have? Models that didn't sell as well as they had hoped. It's part of the business.

What I'm slightly more worried about is the whole humanoid robot stuff. Can't see a use case for that and it's been a money sink for decades. No idea why Tesla got involved with that.

Are gamers really interested in achievements? I almost never see anyone discuss video game achievements. To me, achievements are mostly distracting and cringe, with their pop-up notifications and poor attempts at being witty. A transparent attempt to force engagement and replay value.

There are people in my friend group who are completely into achievements. If they don't get the "100% completed" achievement (got all the achievements) they feel like something is unfinished. They will gather friends around for multiplayer sessions to get multiplayer achievements. Some even go so far as to scan the list of achievements to see what they need to complete them before they start the game (or not, if they feel something might take a lot of time and/or effort - the The Stanley Parable one about waiting 10 years or something).

Others I've found play Xbox GamePass games in the most "optimal" pattern to get achievements the quickest with the fewest replays.

Then there are people like me who don't really care because there are achievements I know I'll never get, so it doesn't bother me because I don't have the time, skill or patience to bother.

Achievements were something baked into the Xbox360 from the start, it took Sony a few years before they implemented a similar system for hte PS3 (calling them trophies). I remember seeing a Red vs. Blue thing about the Xbox360 and new features and showing off the achievements.

So like Celcius and the superior Kelvin

Do it in freedom units. Fahrenheit and Rankines.

Is it worth it anyway? The purpose of Epic Store is to check what games they're giving away every Thursday, collect your copy and never bother to play it. Your don't even need a client for this.

Well, if you can save $100 off a game, why not? If you can get the new Epic Games Store launcher to give you GTA 6 for free, rather than paying what, $100 for it off Steam, wouldn't you use the EGS version?

By the same measure, if you can get Vbucks for free it would be well worth it for people as well.

404 media had been showing how weird the glitches are. Good job. And like everyone already said, who even cares how fast it starts. Are we even talking about feature parity? Does it have a smaller memory footprint? Does it tax the system less when games are running?

But is it glitchy enough to be useful? I mean, how long until we can use this launcher to get free games? That's what people really want to know - how long until a glitch makes everything in the store is free so you can buy every game for $0?

Or for some people, to get vbucks for free.

Surely there's plenty of vulnerabilities we can use to exploit this.

I've already run up the Jolly Roger again, sigh, streaming was good whilst it lasted but sadly it was never going to last that long.

I don't even bother with that. There's just so much content out there that there's no need. Streaming only content? Doesn't exist in my world - and there's still way too much content available legally for me to ever watch.

There's just so much competition for your attention that there's always something I can do, between books I haven't read, TV shows I haven't watched (OTA, anyone?), games I haven't played (both video and board), etc. A whole class of content not being available to me is just a relief that I'm not burdened with having to devote hours to. Hell, my YouTube Watch Later playlist could use some trimming as well.

(And content like Star Trek? Well, CBS puts them out on physical media which I prefer, so I do legitimately acquire those). Sure I do want to watch a ton of content available on say, AppleTV like Silo and Severance and such, but I don't think about it too much because there's just so much other content around for me to consume it doesn't bother me that I'm not seeing it.

This is the one I have my eyes on, though I'd spend money if someone had packaged that with nice hardware for a complete set that I don't need to spend three days to set up.

Without buying into the conspiracy theory, but this is why I dislike these short lifetimes. It makes my otherwise 100% autonomous website dependent on an external party. I think I'll go back to also offer the site on unencrypted http instead of making an https redirect.

yeah the Space Age technology of some screws and an O-ring were lost technology to the wearables space for the past 15 years... along with replaceable batteries that that allowed.

Just because it has a replaceable battery doesn't mean it's user replaceable.

Watches and such you often had to take to a watch repair shop to change the battery because they could make sure the O-ring didn't degrade as well as ensure it still retained waterproofness by making sure it stayed clean and likely lubricated. Heck, if you read the warranty they often voided the waterproofness guarantee once you pop open the lid and it was the company that replaced the battery who provided the guarantee if it stops working.

Sure, it's easy to do, but often you automatically lose the IPxx protections once you open the lid. Everyone accepted that because that's why you paid the watch repair company to replace the battery for you.