>"Annoying but actually reasonable"

It is absolutely reasonable in concept. But it might not be in practice. I have zero problem with paying for my actual EV mileage in some tax. My State decided it was going to collect it annually during registration renewal. Also reasonable. But they either charge an "average" mileage of ALL EV drivers (however they determine that), or force me to put an always-on tracking device in my car. And neither is reasonable. And my vehicle manual actually says that such devices should not be used/left in the OBD port.

My State already requires annual inspections. AND THE ODOMETER READING IS COLLECTED at each inspection and entered into a State Police system by the inspector for every vehicle. So they ALREADY KNOW my mileage. Their "average" is an order of magnitude more than I drive.

I Emailed and asked why I am going to be unfairly taxed for way, way, way more mileage than I drive when the data is right there, already being collected by the State. And I refuse to be tracked with a spyware device that sends location and behavior data. The response was "well, we don't have access to that data, it is on a different State system". OMG.

So a concept can be fair and reasonable in many ways, and then be totally unreasonable depending on how it is implemented.

>"EV's are still horrifically cheaper to run than an ICE vehicle by very large margins"

That depends on the gas price, electricity price, and efficiency of the vehicle. ICE will usually lose by a lot. But there are plenty of places where that gap is not "horrific", if the ICE vehicle is very efficient, gas prices are low, and electricity is not.

The summary omits that this is an OPTION, and won't replace other options. I have ZERO devices with 6Ghz (and I doubt I am alone), so it would make no sense to offer only 2.4/6.

What I don't understand is why it can't offer a triple-band hotspot (apparently not an option). Or just a 6Ghz or 5Ghz only option. So you will be forced to choose between 2.4/5 or 2.4/6. But since it is mostly personal use, I guess that is fine.

I do wish there was a power setting also shown and that they chose a low-power mode by default so these devices won't potentially interfere with congested WiFi infrastructure around them. As a personal device probably just giving access to your laptop or tablet right next to it, it should work fine with a low power output.

I can agree with you on this point, as long as you are not trying to defend piracy as some kind of noble "sharing". But I have to say, judging by the rest of your post, “Sharing of info” is doing a lot of work here. This story is not about someone handing a friend a USB stick with some MP3s. It’s about a guy running a commercial IPTV service, charging 50€ for 3 months or 100€ for 6 months, reselling pay-TV he never paid to license in the first place, and a bunch of hotels/cafés using that to undercut competitors who do pay for legal subscriptions. Calling that “sharing” is like calling a pirate cable company “your generous neighbor.” The tech that makes copying easy doesn’t magically turn commercial theft of service into a noble act of information freedom. A thief is a thief, and there is nothing more ignoble than a thief who commits his crimes in the name of a worthy cause.

Sure, we can and should argue about business models -- subscriptions vs. ads vs. public funding, Creative Commons, whatever. But this particular setup already is a compensation system: broadcasters pay for rights, hotels and bars pay for commercial subscriptions, and the revenue chain keeps the content being produced. The IPTV reseller in this story isn’t experimenting with a better system; he’s just inserting himself into the existing one as an unpaid middleman and pocketing the money. That’s not “rethinking compensation,” it’s “I keep the cash and somebody else eats the loss.”

Again, nobody outlawed “sharing.” I don't think that word means what you think it means --get a dictionary (your choice!) and look up sharing. Then look up "piracy" in the same dictionary. Not even close, right? Greece passed a law that explicitly targets pirate IPTV networks and end users who knowingly buy access to illegal pay-TV streams, with fines between 750€ and 5,000€ (higher for commercial users, doubled for repeat offenders). That’s not “grandma got sued for emailing a recipe,” it’s “hotels and cafés running their business on stolen feeds while their competitors pay full freight.” Calling enforcement there a “waste of lives” is melodramatic. If you decide to run your business on obviously dodgy 100€-for-6-months “all the premium channels you want” boxes, the legal mess is not an accident; it’s baked into the choice.

Yeesh. The source is TorrentFreak, not some mainstream media outlet. TorrentFreak has spent years criticizing heavy-handed anti-piracy campaigns and is hardly a house organ of the copyright maximalists. If even TorrentFreak describes this as an IPTV piracy reselling network and talk plainly about “illegal streams” and “commercial exploitation,” maybe the problem isn’t media bias against “sharing,” it’s that this really is just bog-standard commercial piracy.

Well, look around you. In this thread we literally have: Slashdot summarizing, TorrentFreak reporting (from a pretty pirate-sympathetic angle), and people in the comments arguing about priorities and proportionality. What more do you want? This is exactly what a functioning public debate looks like. You can absolutely criticize copyright law, argue for decriminalizing non-commercial copying, or push for new compensation models. But using “information wants to be free” as a blanket excuse for a commercial IPTV gray-market — especially one used by businesses to gain unfair competition over law-abiding rivals -- just erases the actual victims and pretends there’s no tradeoff at all.

"Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research."

It was based on solving a maths equation.

(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.

There is no way to enforce age limits unless you require identification for a login or it is something built into the devices, themselves, that signal it is a minor and in lockdown mode. And since the latter seems to not be happening, the trend is to try and "age-wall login" more and more sites. And that requires ID. And that strips both adults and children of privacy.

I think the parents should be setting the age limits for what minors access, with recommendations made available by various sites and organizations.

This is supposed to be for NON-emergency calls. Not comparable to 911.

The onus should be on the parents and their agents to control and restrict any internet-connected devices that children have access to. Children should not have unrestricted access to the Internet, unless directly supervised by an adult. The end.

There aren't just "some" sites that are a problem. There are millions of them. Trying to control all sites and strip adults of their privacy is not an acceptable way to deal with the problem. A whitelist restrict is needed. It needs to be made socially unacceptable and shocking that a minor has full access to the Internet on any device, or to call/text/media to/from a stranger.

They need to put this energy into helping to make better/newer/easier lock-down tools for devices parents want to give to minors and leave everyone else alone.

No. It can't be properly expressive without understanding the story that it's reading. Punctuation is just not enough, it doesn't capture many different shades of meaning. E.g., an ironic statement should be read in a different tone than a factual statement, even with exactly the same punctuation. (That's one example out of MANY. Consider, e.g., the scene in "Alice in Wonderland" where she's talking about jumping off the top of the house.)

>"Man I was with you right up until this corny line. It costs a shit ton to develop and maintain all of these player clients."

The player clients exist regardless of what network it is used on. It doesn't change with viewing "outside" your own network to some other server. Money is fungible, of course. But there is nothing about your rent payment to enable "remote" use of a different server that costs any development money for a Plex client. They might host an entry in a reflector, but that, again, requires essentially no new development on maintenance- it is already present so you can reach your own server with the "free" plan.

Well, I *do* want an "AI PC", but not anything currently on the market. I want one that will understand books in HTML format and read them to me in a reasonably expressive tone. I'd also like it to be able to pause and then answer questions about what was going on earlier if I missed a point.
OTOH, I'd also want it to be strictly segregated from most of what I do.

That's the way the internet works on land these days, over any distance. Your multiple carriers all turn out to depend on the same infrastructure.

a government or anyone may decide they need a reserve of something in case it later becomes unaccessible when needed. When can a government *need* BTC? Needing oil or food or water or weapons or gold is understandable, those are real things and it is possible to run out of these items and be in a position where access is limited.

If one "needs" crypto currency they may either purchase it in the market freely or just start their own, even Trump has done this on multiple occasions.

Note, it says "a reserve", not a speculative asset to gamble on its price.

You do realize that what you're describing is all of about ten lines of Javascript with the right libraries (audioTrackList property, subtitle library, currentTime property), right?

I don't think you understand the process of science. That is the appropriate reaction to any initial claim. An initial observation needs to be repeated by others, and the data that justified the initial claim should be reanalyzed by others to see if they agree with the interpretation. Then arguments ensue. Eventually people "pretty much" come to an agreement.

Sometimes the arguments last for decades.