Exactly like vinyl!

This is why when when CDs originally came out, the industry kept saying “soon CDs will be super cheap since they’re so much cheaper than manufacturing tapes!” (which really DO need to be dubbed linearly, even though they can be done at like 10x speed in digital high-speed dubbers) before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.

This is also why they kept trying to make laserdisc (and RCA’s CED) be a thing, since they were cheaper to mass manufacture by stamping than prerecorded video tape’s slow dubbing process. It was thought that prerecorded video tapes were always going to be too expensive (originally they were like $100 a tape, hence the rise of video rental stores)

Usually it’s because they have a distribution deal with a local TV station in that country where the deal prohibits them from distributing it themselves. The local station wants you to watch it on their own streaming service. That would also explain why it’s mostly English-speaking countries since nowhere else would carry an English-centric news show like this.

I just googled “YouTube region block checker” and there were a bunch of results, I used the first one https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/

Pressed discs (like movies) are physically… pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.

Pressed discs have a completely different manufacturing method

It’s available in my non-US country. Probably there’s some local deal wherever you are (edit: using a restrictions checker app, the link is only blocked in Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, and Iceland, and available everywhere else)

They also go out of their way to put up whole episodes for non-US viewers (these are not available in the US) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCRySbsLKiA

Every car I’ve driven with keyless ignition (which seems to be the standard now) refuses to lock if it detects the key inside the car, even if you try to do it manually by pressing the lock button, so hopefully this is a solved problem now.

I’ve honestly never heard of self-locking cars doors, that’s a crazy idea.

Not just “US fuckers”. These countries have also announced plans to bring AC units: Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Germany, Japan, Greece, Denmark and Australia

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until whatever VR app has a plug in for every thing you’d want to do on your phone

Isn’t that the big difference with Apple’s visionOS vs the other VR headsets? It’s basically iPadOS, where you can run multiple apps at the same time and move windows around, without anything needing to know what else is going on, and everything uses the standard window and widgets toolkits. Unlike the Meta Quest, which is basically SteamOS where you’re switching between Unity games that take over the whole device and they all have to re-invent the world with slightly different controls and everything.

“A couple of days” seems like the worst of both worlds - it needs to be charged often, but not on a fixed schedule, so you have to keep tabs on the battery and plan ahead.

Personally I just have a charger on my night stand and charge it every night alongside my phone. It’s an easy routine and I don’t want to sleep with a watch on anyway (smart or not) since when I do I eventually get a rash on my wrist.

For those who want to do sleep tracking, they need to speed up charging so that the “charging while I take a shower” works for those of us who take shorter showers

My experience is that the tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwaters are the places with the cheapest plans, and places like Germany and Canada have the worst ones.

RCS was designed to be implemented by the carriers, but all the carriers tried it, failed to gain any traction, and dropped support again, so now the only server is the Google one which is used automatically by the Google messaging app (which, to their credit, does support encryption, through a proprietary extension which they are now allowing Apple to use as well)

A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and “fixed it” by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.

The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU action to reign in a US company

FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).

The data is unavailable to Apple.

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.

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Microsoft’s thing takes a screenshot of everything on your screen and saves and indexes it. Opened up your password manager and revealed a password? Saved. Opened a porn site in a private tab in any browser aside from Edge? Saved. Opened up a private encrypted chat to try to get away from your abusive partner/parents? Saved and indexed. Logged into a portal at work showing HIPAA information? Saved and indexed.

Apple’s thing is basically a better search feature of all the data you already have saved, that apps have already opted-in to sharing. It runs on device, and Apple has promised they do not send the data back to train the models. They also have some generic ChatGPT-like tool to help rewrite your documents, but that’s 100% opt-in so nobody really cares about it, it’s easy to just not use.

Tim Cook even famously responded to a right-wing troll during a shareholder meeting asking Apple to commit to only doing profitable things and dropping stuff like making their production climate neutral with "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.” “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” and somehow he’s still around

edit: it really pissed them off too haha https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2014/02/28/tim-cook-to-apple-investors-drop-dead/