Clearly, lifetime plans only mean the company's lifetime; even then with bankruptcy and restructuring the company may live on while the lifetime plans die...

I suspect, given they have been doing this for years, they are smart enough to weed out those trying to game the system; and if you drop enough money not really care because their system is working, i.e. getting you to spend lots of money at their restaurant. Case in point. I had a friend complain that some customers were gaming the loyalty system to get extra rewards points. When I asked him how much did that cost him per year, and he said a few hundred dollars; and how much has their spend gone up since they started that? Several hundred thousand to a million or more. So you're spending a dollar to get several thousand or more revenue, right? Don't thinking of them as gaming the system, be glad you developed a system that gets them to open their wallet further. That $1 investment is probably the cheapest way to get the returns you're getting. They're happy and you are hauling money to the bank.

Per TFA,, the restaurant has been keeping notes on guests to better cater to them since pencil and paper days; this is just an expansion of that process. This is a higher end restaurant whose clientele is likely to expect personalized service, just as when they shop at a boutique that caters to their tastes; and the boutique no doubt keeps a notebook on their high value clients as well to better serve them and keep them happy and opening their wallet.. We are at the point where if you don't want people looking you up, stay off of social media under your real name.

I'm not sure that is always true; for example the easy way would be to wait for others to get food and then join in, but they are not very likely to share unless they get something the value in return. So, you participate in the hunting to survive or else you die. The same hold true for us today, the desire for specialization and differentiation drives some to chose harder tasks to create more value for tehir services and thus enrich themselves. If th easy way was always followed in coding everyone wold be using Chromium and FOSS rather than following their own or expending resources buying FOSS alternatives.

Which explains vibe coding.

While that would be the easiest solution, well defined agreed upon standards that are properly documented should allow developers to determine how they implement them. If they want to add extensions, plugins, etc. that's fine but at least implement the standards properly so the base level of functionality is consistent. Then again, that's the problem with any standard; they typically are a least common denominator that a committee can agree on and then everyone goes off and does their own thing to try to differentiate themselves. Me, I'm just trying to keep a website working for Mac and PC users running Safari, Chrome or Edge. Luckily, it's limited to clients so at least the user base is small and businesses so they are unlikely to be using some other browser.

Yea, I use an ad blocker and /. whines about it at times. To bad they got rid of the karma setup that let you block ads if you wanted to.

IANAL, but as I understand it a person who unknowingly purchase a counterfeit game isn't guilty of a crime; although the seller is if they know or should know it's counterfeit. The purchaser can, however, lose the item such as Nintendo did in this case; although what they did was, IMHO, a bit excessive. A better solution would be to be able to block individual games or serial numbers. I do not know how the Switch checks for legitimate serial numbers; but I suspect it is a phone home setup, based on TFA, and then enforcing it at the back end should be workable based on cartridge and device serial numbers so the legitimate user can still play it. but pirated copies won't work. You could still lend a cartridge since only 1 device would be using it at a time.

Interesting. What would really be nice, however, as TFA points out, would be if browsers actually behaved the same so no matter which browser a users has the pages display the same.

Who needs Firefox anymore?

Prime Day deals used to be much better than what you got the rest of the year, now you often get the same, better or close to Prime day pricing throughout the year. s a result, people no longer see it as some special shopping opportunity and thus no FOMO.

This. For all the Webster's Dictionary Warriors on /., I'd bet Amazon simply wants them to help out and still get paid; and that they can slip out for calls tells me they are on teh clock. It probably is not a bad idea to get corporate to understand what the front line does; a number of companies do that to help corporate appreciate what the line workers do.

I guess it depends on the rules to decide what is cheating. If the rules simply require delivering a product by a certain time, is using AI cheating any more than using a library to perform tasks instead of coding it yourself, or not coding in machine language? I get the concern that all of a sudden the skills developed over time are suddenly threatened by a tool that means someone without that expereince can compete effectively with you, but technology has done that to occupations forever.

If HHS can pull that off and make taxpayer funded science available via open or very low cost source, they won't have to cancel subscriptions, the pubs will die a natural death. It is ridiculous that gov't funded research isn't freely available. I get peer reviewers like an honorarium, but I'd propose adding to research grants a stipulation that for every X dollars of grant money the grantee needs to provide Y of peer reviews.

His is an odd quote considering Henry Ford based his company on selling cars to the masses and having workers who could afford a Ford. If AI is truly that good, why does a company need a CEO? It'll react to real time data indicating changes in teh market and make decisions long before a CEO and board can, and hallucination assures many of those will be as head scratching a with a human CEO.

First off, I'm not convinced the general movie goer population cares one way or the other about ads, and if they really do they can come later. That's capitalism at work, providing choices while keeping prices lower. You can come 30 minutes later and not see any ads or previews, and others can come earlier if they want. Both sides win and get the benefit of the viewing experience they prefer and lower prices. No one is forced to watch the ads, and if a theater thought an ad free experience was economically viable they will no doubt offer it; my money is most people, given the choice of ad free at a premium or being able to decide when to come and pay less will chose the later. Unless enough chose the former, the theater will go out of business and capitalism worked.