They all continue to work just fine as a thermostat

They do not continue to work "just fine". The product you bought was called a Nest Learning Thermostat. The remote control function by app was always a critical part of the product, and the reason you paid $300 for a Nest instead of $10 for a mercury switch t.stat.

An API change is an arbitrarily unnecessary change specially designed to create incompatibility to use as an excuse.
As noted: the functions of a thermostat have not changed. And if in fact an API change had been necessary would ordinarily
be introduced end to end for any thermostats regardless of model number - Google controls the software at both ends, so
they are fully capable of ensuring all thermostats they ever made would have a compatible interface.

This is the standard usage pattern where a manufacturer changes the Functions of the "Smart" product after sale so that you have to start paying more for the smart function.

In this case; the $300 Nest lasting 5 years before Google turns it off amounts to an equivalent of a $60 per year sub.

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

a non-functioning traffic light is always supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop

Supposed to. But I can guarantee this is not the case, As I have seen actual power outages.

And try getting onto a major thoroughfare from a side road that normally has occasional traffic light protection.
But literally 99% of the people on the main road in massive numbers just ignore the downed lights at the intersections entirely.

And at the main junction where Major roads intersect Is complete and utter chaos for the half hour before a police officer gets there to deploy portable stop signs and manually direct anyone to stop.

Think the current ownership even knows about ThinkGeek?

ThinkGeek is more like a historical footnote, and the counterexample to show geek gifts have not been a viable demographic.
And I'm not sure where the article is going with that. The Oregon trail is iconic among old people who were never geeks for nostalgic purposes as a famous game played when kids. Game Enjoyer and Nostalgic gamer are true demographics though, and these demographics are Not related to geekdom; any more than gift for Movie enjoyer puts one in a geek demographic.

Firefox merch and to an extent Github merch are not even gifts for geeks anymore, as these products are simple common items for general audiences and more widely used by non-Geeks than by geeks, but hey. The $55 Github magic ball has a geek theme without much appeal. It's just maginally geeky at most.

Considering ThinkGeekp ended up shutting down their online store, and their product line was absorbed by Gamestop. One of those retailers who caters to pretty much the opposite of geeks; Pop culture clientele and physical media-loving Gaming enthusiasts.

They know the things they are taught, but can not deal with new issues.

Not exactly a new issue. Power outages are a common problem.
Humans typically handle them worse than the teslas.. By treating the powered off light as a green light.

AI is a tool of the devil! This is nothing but state sponsored witchcraft.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

If ending support violates an "implied warranty for fitness" the seller or manufacturer could owe you a refund depending on what legal jurisdiction you are in.
So far We don't see any lawsuits against the manufacturers doing this that have done this, And they keep getting more and more brazen.

However, in most cases they do this on units they have already stopped sales for, and the products come with express warranties that have expired.

The warranties have "expired" as far as they are concerned a certain number of years after the purchase. Even when they stop updates for security bugs: security bugs they are patching which are defects originally present in the product at the time of sale; only hidden.

There are also stealth subscriptions.

Example: Google arbitrarily bricking Nest thermostats 1st and 2nd Gen to encourage purchase of Updated version (while the old devices still do go online in order to upload your data; they are artificially rendered useless). . That new hardware cost is a disguised subscription.

IoT hardware vendors have been doing this for quite a while -- often by discontinuing updates to Fix security defects their product was shipped with.
Or pushing out a deliberately customer-hostile update to lock features the product had been sold with.

Yuep. The TLDR for existing US case law is basically that anything publicly available on the open web

Yes and Google probably benefits from this precedent more than any other company.. They're running a frickin search engine. They hardly ever Ask or Get proper permission for scraping anything. Companies who publish News in particular could have massive claims against sites like google News for pulling their articles and displaying it on Google's site. Not only unauthorized scraping, but appropriation.

If this precedent gets overturned, then I can file a big Lawsuit against Google for scraping my web server without specific permission, And then move the case to turn the case into a $2 Trillion class action.

Opening of this is a treasure trove for the AI engines to feed on.

I doubt if the ACM will simply permit that one. They will likely have Open Access limited so have to register for a free open access account.
The verbiage implies you will be able to read ACM Journals, Proceedings, and Magazines.

It does not clearly state that you will be allowed full access to download PDF/text in an unlimited manner.

Meanwhile their website already has a discussion about Free vs Premium features. Also "Bulk citation export" and "PDF downloads" are listed as Premium features. I read that as they can still have any per-user usage restriction as they feel necessary that would also interfere with large-scale AI scraping.

See:

Basic features
Reading all ACM journals, proceedings and magazines
Search
Exporting citations

Sign in or upgrade to access Premium features, including:

Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
AI-generated article summaries
Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
Advanced search
Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received
Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads

I don't see anything in the text of GPLv2 that says the seller is responsible for ensuring the buyer can exercise/fulfill those rights.

That would be a warranty. The seller opts to give a promise directly to the buyer that the buyer that they get the code
and can do the things that the GPL terms stated they are allowed to do.

The GPL does the opposite. It disclaims all warranties, unless the distributor provides you one in fact.
Including a copy of binaries based on GPL code does not automatically warrant that they follow the GPL.
Even giving the customer a copy of the GPL license does not provide a warranty of compliance or ability to comply with the GPL.

The GPL while disclaiming And not requiring any software devs to offer warranties; Also discusses situations where you could receive
GPL'd code, but not be allowed to distribute that code at all. That's kind of the opposite of a warranty: the text of the license describes situations where you can't distribute the software.

In any case your act of forking the code doesn't create a legal duty to you upon anyone else that didn't have one before.

Even if the upstream author's misconduct unknowingly causes your fork to become a copyright infringement; the GPL disclaims warranties.

There simply is not enough verbiage in the GPL to secure rights to the End Users against whatever wishes the authors of the original GPL software has in mind.
For example: If I write a program completely from scratch -- It is completely within my rights to publish that code as GPL, But also negotiate terms with various hardware vendors to my financial advantage, and provide a copy of the software with Alternate distribution terms which afford profits only to me.

That is one of the reasons; I believe it would make sense for the court to throw out the case; reaching the conclusion that Only the author of the Infringed work has any standing under GPL to enforce the license terms. What you the end user see as a "Violation" of your user rights - Is an exclusive right the author created that code still has a right to exploit. The GPL never forced them to dismiss that right and grant that right to the consumers of their code.