Maybe people were inspired by "Akeelah and the Bee" and so set up bees everywhere. Mind you I'm a bit surprised that Texas would be into spelling in such a big way.

It's not just cinephiles though, a bet a good percentage of the total is DRMophobes. I'll still be able to watch anything I want on anything I want long after some DRM scheme has expired or the content provider has turned off the servers or the "rights" were sold to someone else who disabled the originals that you paid good money for.

The Star Trek references are for the other thread further back.

Looks like the AI meltdown, in which AI no longer trains only on human-generated content but starts also training on AI-generated gibberish leading to more and more deviation of normalcy, has begun.

Just make sure you watch the German version, which is much funnier. It kinda loses something in the original.

"Bombe, mach dich Scharf! / Bin Scharf!".

True, I've been given all manner of free stuff when I point a MAS-49 at the shop staff.

Mine came by junk. Which by coincidence also describes what it was carrying.

Tennessee state motto, "Nothin' says lovin' like marryin' your cousin".

It'll help the green cheese ripen faster.

Yup. A flat $100 fine is just the cost of doing business to any big-enough company to be affected by this, if the penalty is you waggling your finger at them then the money should at least go to the employee being exploited.

You're not an early adopter, you're a gambler. You're gambling that the company that makes the device will still be around next month, that even if it's a big company the device itself will still be around next month, that it won't be discontinued, that they won't DRM the crap out of it, that all the features they promised but didn't ship in the 1.0 product will eventually appear, that ...

A certain amount of gambling is necessary, and I've had some luck on Kickstarter and similar, but also funded some complete lemons. Friend of mine who's a much more aggressive tech gambler than I am has lost much, much more to new products that failed.

An alternative is to adopt the rule "if you can't control it with HA (Home Assistant), don't buy it". That way no corporation can take control over your whatever away from you, and the data from your whatever never leaves your home.

Downside is that this doesn't work for non-techies, who won't even know HA exists let alone how to set it up.

Why?

It would be bad.

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?

Try to imagine all peaceful life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your house turning into a pile of used nappies.

Total lifestyle reversal.

Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip, don't go through the placenta.

There's someone running Mozilla? As in, doing this on purpose?

OTOH if you look at the given countries, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and New Zealand are islands surrounded by open open, Australia has an average population density of 0 people per square km, and that leaves Estonia and Finland, presumably all the metal drives the pollution away.