Troll estate sales. I bought one last year for $10. It's a spare, as I have a half dozen, including one with an integrated mouse stick, a narrow version without a keypad, and the monster honkin' version meant to be used with the weirdo PC-based 3270 client. I think it weighs 10 pounds.

economics.
why does it exist.

Yes but no.

They could have left support for old drivers. They're dropping support for the encrypted drivers they used to support.

For your comparison, the thing about encrypted overlays on file systems is that the encrypted overlay works independently. People will move simply by virtue of using a natively-encrypted file system is easier and more convenient than an overlay system. But nothing precludes the use of an overlay if people want to do it themselves.

In this case there is no more support. It's a migration at gunpoint: "migrate or lose your data".

For lots of users it's a whole lot of nothing. Lots of people have already moved over years ago. For old archives and legacy systems, it's brutal. Re-encrypt the old archives, re-encrypt the old systems, or lose them.

What does this have to do with "disposable computers?" For context, I'm still using a slim iMac to run some old Firewire audio gear. It works fine.

The windows equivalent would be Microsoft telling people to stop using some janky encryption overlay on top of FAT32, and switch to native NTFS encryption.

github burn /dev/cdrom0 https://github.com/Octocontrab...

I can go over to my friend's house for free. Our neighbors come over to our patio for free, too. Sometimes we make pies. If you want to get really technical, though:

Nominal cost for a nice pie on the patio:
Tub of raspberries on sale (in season) at Costco: $6
Sugar, flour, salt: I'd estimate $1, but I'll be generous and say $2
Coffee - 2lbs bag from Costco usually costs around $16 and makes about 15 big pots of coffee, so $1
So that's, rounding up, $10 to entertain about 8 people, or about $1.25 a person. I'd say that's doable for most people, it just takes some time.

curious.
it is my ignorance.
what other businesses do this

There are still low-volume subs that are worthwhile, and good communities that use it. I've got an account, and interact with mostly friends in a few subs, most are in the low hundred users, but a few like /r/cooking and /r/photography are higher traffic.

I understand requiring accounts for the interface, anonymous use is unfortunately abused.

That said, the day they kill off old reddit or subvert my ad blockers is the day I stop going back. The endless scroll design and ad-powered updates are unbearable for me.

This is great fodder for lawsuits around competition / anticompetitive business practices, and consumer protection lawsuits.

On their face, individual agreements that lock in prices as a voluntary agreement are enforceable. However, an awful lot of laws kick in when they are more than an individual contract and from the story they're hitting 16 of the biggest ones, and therefore a lot of the market.

Depending on the market such as the country or the state, there are potentially enormous penalties that can be applied. For some laws, the fines can be 2x the gains. If these account for 40% of the company's revenue, the massive fines would mean 80% of their revenue for as long as the profiteering was on the books. In the short term while they grind through the courts they'll look like a windfall, in the long term when court rulings come down they'll look like bankruptcy, as potentially years of revenue get charged to massive fines.

Engineering car safety is notoriously hard. Almost every design choice is a compromise of one thing or another

Crumple zones make cars a lot safer without adding significant weight and reducing fuel economy. It means, though, that even minor collisions can total a vehicle, or cost multiple thousands of dollars to fix.

The most dangerous accident for a car is a rollover. One of the reasons is the roof can cave in and hit your head, injuring or killing you. One way to fix this is to reinforce the roof, which adds weight high on the chassis, and makes rollover accidents more likely, increasing the likelihood of other injuries from rollovers.

Lastly, you have legal pressures complicating everything. If you go ahead and reinforce the roof, you'll be sued for increasing the likelihood of rollovers. If you reduce reinforcement and the roof caves in, you'll be sued for that.

It still is, for successful companies, and when it's not, you go work for Sony or Dreamworks :)

This is the underlying problem. The CEOs don't trust their own company. When the studio was churning out hits in the 1990s, the should have thrown everything they had at the studio team. Instead they cut the budgets and strangled wages, so half the people went to work for Dreamworks and Sony. Same thing happened with Pixar. Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, etc...) wanted to direct a live-action movie. Disney eventually nixed the project, so he left for a few years.

If you trust the people working for you, you pay them well and fund their projects. If you don't trust them, you keep buying other companies hoping to fill in the creative void.

This is factory zero, a low volume plant that makes a few electric trucks and SUVs. Even with the layoffs, it has around 2,500 employees, which is a lot compared to some other plants. The Orion general assembly plant only has a thousand, as does Bowling Green.

Did it on my home LAN. It's not too hard on a Synology router. The only thing allowed through is a sprinkler controller's web interface facing inwards. The Synology also has a halfway decent IDS that looks for weird outgoing traffic.