Heh. And now I want to read Sinister Barrier again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - "Swift death awaits the first cow that leads a revolt against milking"

Now they need to start making minilabs again. And they need to get active to strike down environmental laws in some states that make minilabs impossible to operate. One of the reasons I love film is that when you have the negative, you literally have in your hands a fragment of energy that touched the subject and was captured in the emulsion. For people who believe in such things, there is thus a direct spiritual link between a physical photograph and its original subject.

Since it's explicitly using a different size of LCD and an "iPhone processor" - no it won't be just a repackaged old-gen Macbook Air, it is its own thing. Expect it to be iCloud-centric. But if it runs regular MacOS I think an 8GB/128GB config is more than enough for many many many many many people - myself included. That's certainly all I need on the road.

Tolerance for this sort of thing does vary widely, even within the US. I guess it might be more normalized here though. We have nothing, for instance, resembling Law 25 in QC, or even PIPEDA (weak sauce though it is).

Can people not understand the concept of an example? Thereâ(TM)s no place in the USA that represents the entire country. Thatâ(TM)s how diversity works. Iâ(TM)ve also encountered these scanners in NYC, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland (OR), and probably elsewhere. Pick one of those cities and call it representative of America, if you like. Itâ(TM)s beside the point.

It depends where you are, and where you go out. If you are in Utah for instance you're much more likely to encounter them because all establishments that serve alcohol are required to check ID at the door (or at least, they were). Bouncer apps make this easier.

It's not uncommon to encounter 21+ restaurants that have a bouncer with a smart device at the door, scanning barcodes on drivers' licenses to try and weed out fakes. It's not something you'd see at, say, Applebee's though.

I know a few people who do all this stuff and more. So let me fix that for you: "I take a perverse pride in jumping through lots of hoops to avoid a few overt tracking methods, but any occupant of a first-world country who doesn't do all their business in gold and harvested human organs has a huge tracking footprint that can't be avoided, so it's all really just to make me feel better. I know that any government actor who wants to find out about me can do so with minimal effort, so really this is just an exercise in public masochism."

"Magic Leap? Those guys still exist?"

Has to be said: those of us alive to read this are the descendants of those who _did_ survive.

This is a common problem and does not just affect Windows - my Intel MacBook Air did the same thing. As did the MacBook Pro (work issued) that preceded it. Particularly fun when you get through security at the airport, grab a snack for the flight, sit down and wait for takeoff - then pull out your computer to get on WiFi and do some work/check in with coworkers to find the thing blazing hot, fans running madly, and battery down to 15%.

Realistically, even platforms that have physical media don't _really_ have physical media. Basically every AAA title has a day zero patch download of "all the stuff we fixed after we sent the supposedly gold master to be duplicated onto disks". And - dim memories of when I was last in the console world, which was PS3 era - most games lock you out of functionality you paid for (like online gameplay) unless you've updated to the latest. So really, these days, physical disks are just a token saying "I have a license for this game... for now". Yes, they are a token you can give to your cousin's ex-roommate and thereby transfer the license, but they're really not far removed from download-only games still.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is "it's a known, fixed configuration you can target longterm" - which is an advantage to devs, not to users.

As a simple audio device, it only connects an audio stream and no control or data streams. It also doesn't need to perform checks like "does the host want me to send it my list of contacts?"

You're right, of course, but manufacturers are doing their damnedest to make everything dependent on the infotainment system - as you said "everything on the canbus" - what you omitted was "and won't turn on unless you're paying the monthly subscription".