protimewaster

Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.

> What happens when those servers go offline?

Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?

> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?

The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).

I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.

For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.

My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.

The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.

Games at a certain point in their life are cheaper on console. At least, physically. I remember being shocked at this years ago, because I expected PC to be cheapest. But, a few years back, I went through and looked up a bunch of AAA games that were about 6 months old, and a lot of them were cheaper to buy physical, on console, from Amazon or another retailer. Cheaper than they'd ever been available for on PC, according to IsThereAnyDeal.

I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.

Doesn't Steam do that too? For a long time, offline mode in Steam didn't work for many people, and, when it did, it wasn't reliable for being offline for long periods of time. Is that all sorted?

> It’s a very thin and a political line between being a gatekeeper and a very successful company.

Honestly, I'm fine with just placing extra requirements on very successful companies.

I don't understand why anyone who sees how the world works would expect us to end up with a utopia where people work less.

The trend has almost always been to work the same, or more, hours as new technologies come out, and you'll be expected to get more done using the new technologies. Why would AI be any different?

But, yeah, the people who no longer have jobs will be working less, that's true.

Isn't a solar panel going to be a poor heatsink, though? It's flat, and thus has relatively small surface area compared to its size.

You're ignoring the fact that timing has a lot to do with a short position. There was a long period where shorting Enron would've ruined you, and a short period when it'd make you rich.

Companies that are 80, 100, 200 years old or more have trouble with founders dying.

One of the disadvantages of relying on the founder is that founders die. If I'm trying to keep a fund going for the next 100 years, investing in a company that relies exclusively on a person who will be dead within 100 years seems problematic.

I don't even remember what it is I have learned about Creative Labs in the past, but I went into this pretty sure that Creative Labs was going to fuck it up somehow.

I'm expecting most everything to go this route eventually. Charging a subscription fee and having ads seems to be a money maker, so most services will get here eventually.

This is also one of the reasons I don't like the direction the video games market has gone. Most games (at least on PC) require Steam or EGS or similar service to access them. At some point, I'm expecting those to transition to a subscription model and/or become very heavy with ads, and then you'll need to deal with ads or subscription fees just to keep accessing stuff you already bought.

If someone comes in and points out a bunch of valid similarities, are you going to start being nice, or are you just going to call that person's ideas stupid too?

I can think of a couple of possible explanations.

One is that they don't really want to sell a lifetime subscription, but it'll look bad if they discontinue the option. This way, they effectively don't sell them anymore, but there aren't people all screaming "They've discontinued lifetime subscriptions. How long until they take away the ones they sold before?!"

Another possible explanation is that it's just a ruse to sell more subscriptions. They probably sold a ton of subscriptions last time a price increase was announced. So, if they need a cash infusion, just announce another price increase. Then, when it turns out nobody buys at $750, decrease the price later on to return to normal.

> Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.

Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.

One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.

I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!

I imagine it'll be a while before Amazon wants to build another phone, after what a spectacular failure the Fire Phone was.

I'm guessing they'll try again at some point, though.

What's the data in the FsTx folder? Is it just some magic data that Windows looks for?

The Pixel devices are a good option as well.

I think it's one of the last remnants of "don't be evil" at Google -- the Pixel devices are quite friendly toward alternative installs, much more so than most manufacturers.

And, now that Motorola and Graphene OS have announced a partnership, future Motorola devices may be a good option as well.

There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.

It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.

My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.

I still think it's weird that Valve is viewed as so friendly to gamers when they're probably more responsible for taking away game ownership on PC than any other one company.

Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.

Another user pointed out that there are actually two sets of rules. There's a general one that doesn't have the exemptions, and a tablet and phone specific one that does.

It's not clear to me which takes precedence, though, as it sounds like the wording of the phone and tablet-specific rules leaves open the possibility that it can be made more strict by other sets of rules.

Based on other comments, there are apparently two separate sets of rules. One of them has exceptions and supplies specifically to phones and tablets, and one of them doesn't have any exceptions and applies more generally.

I also wonder how this is impacted by time. If I have a device that's at 75% capacity at 200 cycles, but it's 7 years old, does that fail to meet these requirements?

Because my experience has been that the cycle count doesn't matter that much as the battery gets old. Old batteries just lose capacity.

It does, but, in the previous HN discussion, there was a link to the what was reportedly the adopted version of the bill, and those exemptions were gone from the text.

The previous discussion of the bill on HN noted that the newest version of the bill is the one without the exemption. Is that incorrect?

Didn't they remove many of the exemptions in the final, adopted bill?

Last time this was discussed, it was stated that the text exempting based on cycle counts was removed from the final, adopted version. Is that incorrect?

Doesn't the article address some of that in the next paragraph, which includes a link to a study from 2013?

> That sample of blind children is small, but the pattern holds across more than 70 years of evidence: not a single congenitally blind person with schizophrenia has ever been reported. The protection seems to be specific to cortical blindness, which is caused by damage to the brain’s visual cortex.

I believe that also addresses the discrepancy between the 2014 study you linked and the article. That 2014 study you linked is noting that it does happen with other kinds of blindness. I haven't been through the whole 2014 study (or the 2013 one, for that matter), but it does say

> As the case-reports presented in this section show, only congenital/early cortical blindness—the type of blindness that occurs when bilateral lesions of the occipital cortex deprive the individual from vision (Cummings and Trimble, 2002, p. 110)—seems to confer protective effects.

Isn't that saying the same thing the article does. What am I missing?