By what standard?

Compared to Charles Dickens? no, of course not...
Compared to your average community college student? absolutely yes

Agree... More importantly, it's a secret list, maintained by the government, regulating who a private company can (or in this case cannot) do business with.

Let's say that I hypothetically wanted to build a pair of airports, open to the general public (i.e. non-FBO). My planes would only go between those two airports (i.e. passengers would not get into the general passenger stream). Even in that simple case, the government is still going to show up at my door with a mandatory team of people to grope my customers AND a secret list of people I CAN NEVER do business with. A secret list of people that are somehow deemed "too dangerous to fly", but not "too dangerous to prosecute for any crime?" There's just something un-american about the entire concept, and nobody has dared to revisit this nonsense since 2001.

Woof! Slashvertising! Woof!

how can C&D not know any of this? It's not secret, and super-basic info any BMW dealer or owner would be able to tell you, and AFAIK nothing has changed in like 4 or so years (i.e. the last 3 i-drive generations).

In the USA drive-recorder has been $100/permanent when ordered with the vehicle. $150/permanent when purchased after-the-fact. OR $x / month if the user CHOOSES this option.

Subscription services (e.g. traffic camera data, navigation map updates, data connectivity, etc.) are monthly.... and have always been... I remember the option to subscribe to cellular + data connectivity, concierge services, etc. annually in my BMW's well over a decade ago. No different than paying an ISP or paying someone to compile MythTV EPG data monthly, etc.

IMHO, the whole "heated seat subscription" thing (which currently isn't even a thing in the USA) is a total non-story AS LONG AS you still have the option to just purchase it outright when buying the car. Nobody is forcing you to "subscribe to drive recorder" or "subscribe to heated seating" etc. You can just pay for them up front when ordering the car the exact same way you always have been able to. The only thing that is changing is that manufacturing / production logistics have made installation of heating elements in EVERY car cheaper than stocking multiple seat SKU's, esp. when you include the revenue recovered from converting some percentage of customers after-the-fact. So BMW will let you retrofit an option you did not actually pay for on the original build-sheet after-the-fact via software update (again, either monthly or outright). The alternative is that they find some way to permanently destroy the heating elements in seats where the option was not ordered (e.g. the same way your CPU manufacturer laser-cuts parts of the chip in cheaper SKU's, even if it's not defective). Because fuck all product differentiation and just "give everyone the more expensive thing for free" is simply never a good business model.

Oh no! "I centralized my de-centralized currency and now it's all gone"

Stop the drama.... they aren't "blocking you" they are just not providing the pre-compiled binaries via their auto-update mechanism past the end of the support period for people running an EOL OS. Unless you have an ink-on-paper active paid support contract from Google for this product, they don't "owe" anyone dick.

That's almost certainly not true, given that all of the supporting libraries for an EOL OS also are not likely being updated. if you think there isn't a special test case, workaround, an #ifdef WIN7, etc. etc, somewhere in the giant stack of chromium + all of its dependencies, I have a bridge to sell you.

EITHER WAY, even if it ran perfectly fine today, ensuring that future versions continue "running fine" before pushing them out via an auto-update requires continued integration testing on those unsupported OS's. Because the alternative headline a few months from now is "google broke Win7/Win8 installs of chrome by pushing an untested build -or- worse!" IMHO, google is within their rights to say "this EOL OS now has x% marketshare, and x is now too small to bother paying for engineering time to continue supporting that platform"

Running "unsupported" software IS obnoxious because the maintenance burden is now on YOU instead of the software/OS developers. Last time I checked, you can always compile your own fork of chromium on any OS you want to fool around with on your own time. "Nah, I wanted google to keep doing it for me indefinitely," is an unrealistic position in this discussion, IMHO.

Why, EXACTLY, is it abuse? Be precise. I pay Netflix for "4 simultaneous 4k streams," I should actually be able to use 4 simultaneous 4k streams. No more, no less. Who gives a shit if it's me, my mistress in her hotel room, my bestie Russian pen-pal, any my neighbor's goldfish? IMHO, that's none of Netflix's business if they insist on segmenting plans based on "number + quality of streams"

The only "abuse" is slogging through the inevitable people in these threads equating a "sale not made to my neighbor's goldfish" with "theft"

Maybe at some point in history... but once they have destroyed all competition they will just tell you to go pound sand like every other monopoly. What are you going to do? Shop elsewhere? Remember when amazon started banning residential addresses for violations of their ambiguous free-returns policy a few years back? AFAIK they have since stopped this practice, but the same exact question came up then. What do you do if amazon bans you and then refuses to accept an appeal, review the case, or even let a human to talk to you. You can go back to brick-and-mortar and other online retailers, but what happens when those no longer exist or are otherwise inferior options due to amazon steamrolling the entire market with frightening inevitability?

The problem here are monopolies more than anything else. Youtube IS the place for online video. Especially medium-length, episodic, non-news video (i.e. not tiktoks, not facebook updates for your fam, not tweets about current-events, etc.). If the platform were a federated set of smaller players, then there would still be innovation and competition for your individual business (e.g. providers catering to higher-earning creators, providers serving niche categories, etc.) Hell, if they had the option to pay for human support, that would already solve a lot of problems (i.e. the bots can still play bot wars with the automoderation while humans are able to purchase another humans time and judgement). But there is ZERO incentive to do anything whatsoever right now, because youtube at this scale simply doesn't have to compete with anyone else for eyeballs in this particular media space. Making the product any better is a waste of money once you have climbed the mountain over the bones of everyone else.

Well yeah? Renting is always more expensive than owning.

That being said, the value-proposition of "cloud" hosting has always been near-infinite on-demand scaling (e.g. christmas is coming and our new product just went viral, let's ramp up capacity 1,000X for the next month alone).... or... the grant check just cleared, fire up the ML instances for the next 6-months until the mid-term report for more funding is due, etc. It's a "pay for only what you eat" model.

The problem has (IMHO) become dumb-dumbs replacing predictable / fixed-capacity services with cloud providers and then getting locked into their API's along the way. E.g. Netflix's reliance on AWS has always baffled me. It's like voluntarily paying a-la-carte prices at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

That remains to be seen. AFAIK you have to use unsafe rust in order to write most interesting kernel / driver-level stuff, esp. when interfacing with previous code written in C, so the benefits people associate with the "safe" subset of the rust language won't necessarily materialize. Only time will tell how well this works in the real world.

IMHO increasing cognitive load by adding another entire language to the kernel (i.e. right now it's JUST C11) must have some HUGE payoff in order to be worth it (i.e. keep in mind that the places where Rust has been "succesful" to date are application-level software like web-browsers where the safe subset is sufficient.... whereas even C++ has been kept out of the kernel to keep things simple for developers). This is an interesting experiment, but the expectation for Rust's benefits are set very high, so I fear for fragmentation and loss of functionality if/when it does fail to meet that bar (e.g. certain modules written in rust today may never be re-written).

Right.... so only allow those crew reductions based on the flight paths where the automation is well-understood and actually works.

You are already drawing a safety margin *somewhere* based entirely on statistical probabilities. e.g. what's the probability BOTH pilots become incapacitated at the same time. THEN WHY NOT ALWAYS CREW WITH THREE PILOTS! WHY NOT FOUR! etc. etc. There's always a point of diminishing returns, and this is no different. You just have to be realistic in assessing the margin bought-back by automated systems (e.g. ability to remote pilot, autoland, etc.) vs. the risks inherent in removing redundancy in meat-based pilots.

The one around Newark International Airport a few years back turned out to be some dude who didn't want his boss tracking him and purchased an illegal jammer.

Which, to borrow your own terminology, is "neither here nor there" YOU are the one who chose to compare this to a credit card transaction for some reason and then declared everyone else was using "the wrong metric"

Correct. With your credit-card analogy, how do you know the person is spending valid money (instead of using a stolen/cloned card -or- just going to dispute the charges after you give them an item). Again, the authorization you get from the payment processor is NOT remotely analogous to confirmation on a blockchain in purpose or function.

You have to compare apples to apples and in the financial world a bitcoin transaction is far more like a bank transfer in finality + confirmation than a credit card transaction IOU from a payment processor. A bank transfer takes between many hours to many days to fully clear.

Sure, and nobody is going to sign title over to a property/car based on a credit card authorization. Soooooo it's almost like you chose completely the wrong thing to compare against before declaring everyone else had the "wrong metric"?

Sure it does... it elucidates how you picked an apple and then were confused about why it wasn't orange-flavored.

Disagree, you have the wrong metric. The credit-card to merchant confirmation isn't "settlement" so much as it is an "IOU later, maybe." The transaction can be unwound at any time UNILATERALLY by the credit-card company. The merchant doesn't actually have the money when the payment processor says "approved."

OP is correct, cryptocurrency transactions, due to their finality, are far more comparable to the process of funds going from the books of one bank to another bank, which is measured in hours to days (esp. when crossing banking systems or jurisdictions). In fact, I wired some money (one big bank to another big bank) from the EU to the USA last year, and while the transaction was visible within an hour or two in my account status, it took well over a week to actually clear (i.e. the point in time where you could actually withdraw that transferred amount in hundred dollar bills and set them on fire in front of the bank teller if you so desired).

Correct. You don't get to sign a contract explicitly waiving due diligence and then back out because you didn't get the opportunity for due diligence.