I could kind of see somebody who flies for business a lot getting one. It's a big price premium over a phone plus a tablet, but maintaining multiple devices (e.g. charging them) and having your stuff spread out over them is still kind of a pita, and whipping the 'tablet' out of your pocket would be handy.

Are you talking about the books that they bought as sources, or the previous approach of downloading a huge torrent including works in copyright?

Is that really so common to not even have the game on it to avoid the big initial download? I googled the game mentioned above and they did do that, but didn't make it sounds like a regular practice, and people were angry.

Granted you aren't saving much more than some bandwidth if you still have to log on to a server to play.

Offering a box is in no way anti-consumer vs having download only.

How does that work? You distribute encrypted and keep the decrypt key super-safe until go time?

Not quite the "invention" of TV, but my boomer Dad was just writing about this for some reason... he lived in an upper-middle class household but remembers when they got their first TV, about $4000 in today's money. And color TV was not widespread until he was in college.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

So that's how young TV is. Analog transmission stopped in 2009, 3 years after google bought youtube, and on-demand viewing started to dominate within 5 or 10 years. So the effective lifetime of "TV" per se was 'only' about 60 years. Boomers and X are the only 2 generations that remember nothing else from their childhood.

Nowadays on-demand viewing dominates and that is a very different thing.

I hope fusion could produce energy more efficiently because it doesn't need to be so reliable or fault tolerant or tightly regulated because will inherently shut down if it starts to crack up.

But the equipment and techniques and materials for fusion are so exotic today - still beyond know engineering capabilities in fact - it is discouraging as to it ever providing cheap energy.

Well anyways we can argue meme or not meme. But objectively, this incident shows that this administration will publish unlabeled false/modified information to further its political ends. This is a 100% clear example of that. So that must be the presumption with the Trump administration.

I don't think they did it to win the case. It's political. They did it to create propaganda for the consumption of their supporters, touting their heroic actions to protect religion against a 'far left agitator' (who just happens to appear very dark-skinned and ugly and unstable):

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/statu...

But you didn't mention the important point of energy conservation / efficiency:

https://www.researchgate.net/f...

This graph could be more up-to-date (2016) but it already shows the EU having rising per capita on a falling amount of energy per capita, and steeply declining energy consumption per $1K of GDP.

No kind of energy generation is going to beat not having to generate it at all.

Perhaps they also have decreasing industrial output in energy-intensive products, but the rising GDP per capita and declining energy consumption per GDP show that even if that is true they are more than replacing it with more productive enterprises.

US is 2.5x of Canada. What surprises me more is the UK was almost right there with the US, and the EU as a whole wasn't all that low. Japan is probably the lowest of nations you would actually trust to keep statistics on it.

Excerpted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's just building up a narrative with one series of studies ("sitting has a surprising link to poor brain health!") and then tearing it down ("except active sitting!") all just to get back where you started (you get worse at thinking if you never do it).

It happens all the time, somebody does some eyecatching behavioral study and it makes the rounds as the next new fascinating thing that 'science' has discovered, and then subsequent studies fail to replicate or find it was only true for a certain subpopulation that's kind of obvious, etc.

You're mis-reading it. It's not saying the US has the lead in self-driving, it's saying Waymo has the lead in the US - and by implication not so much in the rest of the world. As it states:

As U.S. competition has lagged, Waymoâ(TM)s planned 2026 expansions could lock in rider demand and loyalty in the U.S....

The Alphabet company faces its most formidable competition from Baidu-owned Apollo Go and WeRide in Asia, but Amazonâ(TM)s Zoox and Elon Muskâ(TM)s Tesla, along with startups like May Mobility and Nuro, are aiming to compete with Waymo in North America.

I remember when DARPA's Policy Analysis Market (a.k.a. 'terrorism futures market') was being prototyped, eliciting insider information was touted as a potential benefit. Effectively, a way to bribe conspirators to leak their intentions, just like the Maduro example given in the summary. But, PAM was widely regarded as a scandal. Not only was it cancelled, but heads rolled at DARPA.

I am really surprised they settled, because it seems like any of hundreds of millions of other people could follow the exact same path to a payout.

As a kid I would always see these headlines about the astronomical amounts of TV consumed by the average American

In 1984, 84.9 million American households (98 percent of them) had television sets. They kept them in use 7 hours and 8 minutes a day, making television-watching far and away the most popular leisure-time activity ever.

https://www.csmonitor.com/1985...

Americans are watching an average of almost seven hours of television a day, according to the Nielsen Report on Television 1989 released today.

https://www.latimes.com/archiv...

I suppose getting personalized feedback on your content has made social media into an even better mousetrap, but this is hardly a new issue. And it still isn't fentanyl.