I believe it's not just a stunt, even if it doesn't imply what a lot of people seem to believe. (OTOH, I don't really know enough to *assert* that it's not just a stunt. I just see no reason to believe that, and decent reasons to doubt it.)

No, the worst part about ads is that they exist at all in a form that intentionally disrupts your attention.

That fundamental issue is then exacerbated by the current societal tolerance for lies, and you get intrusive advertisements that are deeply misleading.

So, why are you tolerating current advertising at all when there are tools that effectively eliminate it?

The assumption is that using your phone / infotainment system to search for, possibly purchase, and play a new release is an attention-demanding task that takes substantial time. The consensus above is that Spotify's UI, in particular, is poor, and thus requires extra interaction, and thus attention off the road, exacerbating the problem. We know that attending to a phone, even briefly, is mutually exclusive to attending to the road. That alone is an explanatory mechanism for the increase in fatalities.

But then we augment that supposition by the additional effects that new music is also a distraction, albeit much lower grade than operating a phone. It might be a lesser effect, but listening to a song or three is also expected to span longer time than interacting with a phone, so might have substantial cumulative impact.

An additional effect that I have not seen mentioned above is the expectation that the demographic listening to top releases is likely to skew younger, and thus contains drivers with less experience than the population. Less experienced drivers are at far greater risk of accidents of any sort, and are more sensitive to distraction.

And, as a parent of teenagers, the solution is clear to me: do not frelling use your phone when driving, period.

I'm sure that technically they said something like "The man may be a shoplifter", and thus were correct in that sense. But using a system that does that at that error rate is NOT reasonable. This is like the automated driving systems that require a human driver to take over within 2 seconds. NOT a good idea.

How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

But digital games are cheaper.

Such a huge part of the appeal of digital games has been that older games go on sale for dirt cheap. Everyone wins across the board here - older games sell a lot more copies than they used to because digital prices can go lower than physical can while still turning a profit.

Price increases on games rarely go over well, and game prices creep up much slower than most other products doing. Most games struggle to make a profit as is, so we're not going to see a drop in base prices, but it probably delays further price increases a bit.

We've already seen pretty direct evidence of physical impacting prices with Nintendo's Switch 2 releases. The A tier games went up in price across the board this gen, but the B tier games only went up for physical copies.

Well, yes. But they didn't actually know that that was what the design implied.

Tests have shown a lot of AI actions that weren't expected ahead of time, but in retrospect should have been obvious.

This requires that you believe they're being honest, with no backing evidence. I can see possible evidence of consistency, but that's a much weaker claim.

If they were lies, then I agree with down-ranking them.
If they were just opinions, then I only agree with avoiding them.

OTOH, I don't use X/Twitter. Slashdot is as close as I come to social media.

I think I heard this story last year, or perhaps a few years ago. I've no reason to think it was the same plant, though.

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

We're also discovering unceasingly dim objects that are closer. They just don't get the same news coverage. But I'm more interested in wandering planets and planetoids (and even Oort belt objects).

Perhaps the answer is that the "Big Bang" wasn't the first, and these black holes are left over from a prior "universe". In that case, though, why are they so close together.

Yeah, my question is "What isn't prior art?". The summary sure doesn't list anything.

OTOH, it does indicate the direction he wants to push things. He wants these integrated into the lives of people whether they, themselves, use them or not.