I don't see this as performative bullshit, and I'm not sure anyone with a lick of sense would.

Let's say I'm a public official. I want to take bribes but I'll go to jail for that. Instead, I can mint myself a cryptocoin and people who want to bribe me can buy them, effectively giving me money in exchange for nothing. I mean that's exactly what Trump did, and there's no reason to think others won't try it if it goes unchallenged.

Whether or not it will be *effectual* as a law will come down to how it's enforced.
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> They already run a large web store and they could have done this anytime but it's clear they have not.

I mean, they have but whatever. The part you're not considering is the immediacy of buying at a physical location.

Browsing online has a different set of tools the merchant can use to FOMO you into buying it. If you see something online you can easily come back to it hours or days later and reconsider; if you're there in the store you're probably not very likely to come back tomorrow. If you're going to buy something at the store you're most likely going to buy it during that visit, which makes you more vulnerable to surge pricing.

> They'd be caught very quickly if they did this in a retail store.

And the consequences would be... what, exactly?

Personally I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop; sign up for WalMart Customer Plus for $19.99/mo and skip the surge pricing!
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And yet when Sony removed Linux support for the PS3, a change that affects 'virtually zero of their customers,' Slashdot was calling for lawsuits.

My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

This doesn't pass the 'would you say the same thing if it wasn't your baby' test.

There have already been improvements. The practice was banned outright, by everyone, 30 years ago.

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Why would that be *critical* information?

Would the problem be worse or lessened if it was from the US? Britain? France? Japan? It is more or less a disaster if it's military weapons waste or civilian power waste?

Or are you just upset you don't get to point fingers?
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> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
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You're right, they could have made that choice. However, they would have priced themselves out of the market, as while they would have gained a small uptick in 'I want a cool Linux computer' sales, they would have faced a massive loss in 'I want a game console' and 'I want a Blu-Ray player' sales, which were the two primary drivers of PS3 sales.

Console price is king. There's a reason Sony's entire console launch presentation for the original PlayStation at E3 in 1995 was, and I quote, '$299.'

You can find it on YouTube, if you're interested.

Unless the watch can initiate chest compressions and AED functions, simply calling emergency services when you lose your pulse isn't going to accomplish anything.

And then they pulled the Linux support when they realized how many people were buying PS2s for Linux, and not buying games, thus costing Sony money under the 'razors and blades' paradigm.

So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

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Then if oil is flowing so freely, why am I paying 4.50$/gal for gasoline?

There are methods to add noise patterns to audio that are imperceptible to humans but cause AI to go apeshit, such as misidentifying rock music as classical or transcribing speech as something completely different from what is said.

I wonder what the practicalities might be to deploy this form of attack in an area around you when having a conversation you with to keep private. Probably would not be inaudible when played through a speaker (unlike data implanted in audio recordings) but maybe masked? Listen to some music on your phone's loudspeaker at a modest volume and broadcast invisible noise that fills any eavesdropping AI's buffer with junk or even malicious payloads.
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There was a plan to put a solar farm + batteries on that site but they were scrapped for reasons I'm sure you could guess.

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