MAVEN and the rovers are part of a group of people that are dedicated to look after them. Simply sending them commands and working with them can take an entire boardroom full of people days. There may not be people dedicated to MAVEN specifically but MAVEN is none the less a consumer of NASA resources. This isn't just a case of people, but also a case of tying up space telescope time. It's not like you can just communicate with MAVEN using an antenna on your roof.

Not quite. There's no reason to believe the new thing won't compete either. Legacy users have auto-migrated to X.

It's not an argument that is relevant. The "you can still do X" isn't a defence when antitrust is about forcing developers to do Y, especially when X is demonstrably free of any potential customers or market share.

Sideloading hasn't ever been a proper defence for them.

What's it sound like to you?

Don't pretend people landing on private airstrips are filling out ESTAs.

I posed publicly on my social media page that Charlie Kirk got what he deserved and that I was upset Thomas Crooks missed. Now I don't need to make up excuses for not wanting to go to the USA when my employer asks me to, I simply won't be let in.

This is the first I've heard of that. By all accounts they are based in the Cayman Islands and a subsidiary of a Chinese owner Kunlun Tech. Also is it really a browser anymore? The Chinese parent calls the entire subsidiary an "Overseas information distribution and metaverse platform". I wish I was kidding. https://www.kunlun.com/en/#

That is completely false in 2025. There definitely is bad engagement these days. There's a reason they pulled the advert rather than let it run its course. I don't think anyone here reading this has a sudden urge to go get a BigMac. Simply having a name doesn't make marketing in any way affective or positive.

The problem is it looks like AI slop. It would be a perfectly fine advert if it didn't look like uncanny valley rubbish.

It's more fundamental than that. The problem isn't that they generated AI slop and curated it, that's literally an aspect of creative processes. The real problem is that the final result still looks like AI slop.

Well Netflix makes crappy shows on purpose and by policy directly dictated by the CEO that their movies should be a "second screen" able to be understood by people who aren't watching or paying attention. So I'd go with the scumball. It's an unknown that may be better than the known alternative. No the devil we know will fuck this up.

So you're not going to get any new A/V purchases? The reason DisplayPort is virtually non-existent is that it lacks a chunk of livingroom specific features. E.g. eARC, CEC-Passthrough, those are all things you need in your TV to communicate correctly with receivers, speakers, and bluray players (If you're a physical media kinda gal) There's no Displayport alternative. In fact without HDMI it's not possible to route Dolby TrueHD, Atmos, or DTS:X to a receiver as the alternate audio connections don't have the bandwidth for it which would limit your sound options, and that's before you consider the point of ARC in the first place, without it you're back to a million cables between your pieces of equipment and reaching for the remote to change audio and video channels independently.

Displayport is superior for anything video related. But there's a reason it borderline doesn't exist in the A/V world.

I'm not sure what you think Europe is, but it is in no way illegal to have a closed spec over here. Never has been. Hell I remind you the Germans were instrumental in the development of MP3. Look how well the open source community did with that spec, a default Linux install didn't ship with an MP3 decoder for 2 decades.

This is a licensing issue, nothing more nothing less. Europe isn't a magical place where everything is forced to be open source. It's a magical place where cheese tastes good.

This has literally nothing to do with piracy or DRM which literally did not change in the slightest between the 2.0 and 2.1 spec, but ... sure whatever you say.