If we're going to go with life imitating art, my first thought was "What, was this guy tried in a Cardassian court?"

The sad reality is though, the fictional depiction of courts that establish guilt and have trials just for show was inspired by that sort of thing happening in the real world, long before it ever became a trope in fiction.

That reminds me, I have a free trial of Apple Music I need to cancel soon.

Honestly, I think the "churn between streaming services" approach only works if you're single. The second you've got anyone else living in your household, now it's a discussion over whether or not everyone else is done watching whatever else they were interested in. My solution to this is whatever exclusive content we're not subscribed to gets acquired through the high seas, dumped on the NAS, and can be watched through Kodi.

Netflix used to have a much bigger library. Now, it's basically the same deal as the rest of 'em - a few exclusives* and a bunch of crap no one's ever heard of.

* and they're all crime dramas, or shows written by writers who only know how to write crime dramas. I'm serious.

The real money seems to be in selling crap to people who are trying to get into the influencing gig. I just saw those dumb Meta glasses prominently placed right in the middle of the walkway the last time I was at the local Target. Now it makes sense.

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Go back to when Homer wrote The Odyssey and convince him to release it under the GPL license.

To be fair though, the auto industry was just trying to roll with the political tides. That was never going to end well when one political party thinks EVs are the second coming of Jesus, the other has a raging hate boner for them, and the American public keeps flip-flopping between the two of them every 4 years for every election cycle since Obama.

I just wish they would start selling the damn thing already so people can hurry up and not buy it.

Flash storage has gone up in cost due to AI mania, so at this point it probably would just make more sense to sell USB hardware dongles that are just license keys. Most games are also shipped with numerous bugs and missing features these days too, since it is just assumed they can push out an update later, so you probably don't want to be playing v1.0 anyway.

Plus, the real reason they want to kill physical media is because eliminating used game sales is also part of their goal.

IIRC, he had a Nissan, then a Toyota, and now I think another Nissan. Nissans being unreliable I can understand, but I was kind of surprised when the Toyota started giving him grief.

Screens have been mandatory to comply with the law requiring a back-up camera, so it's a huge waste if they don't also make it available for infotainment functionality as well. My previous vehicle (a '19 Nissan Versa) was like that - it had this ginormous screen in the dash that displayed either the back-up camera feed or the radio and was completely useless otherwise.

I'd never been able to find a phone mount that I was satisfied with, either. They all get in the way or are too janky and drop your phone (or the whole damn thing falls off) when going over speed bumps and potholes. The car I have now (a Chevy Bolt) has CarPlay, and after having it I'd never want to go back to fiddling with my phone while driving.

For gaming, that ship sailed when most games started requiring server-side infrastructure. Even if you do own the physical disc, a lot of good it'll do you if the servers have been shut down.

It's still not my favorite, but I think they've fixed most of the issues where it was telling people to drive into lakes.

Have you seen what new pickup trucks are selling for these days? Missing the $30k price point really isn't the dealbreaker. What is, for the typical truck buying demographic, is the fact that it doesn't run on gas.

Hell, my retired father owns a pickup truck. He rarely hauls anything in the bed, literally never uses it for towing. I told him his is the perfect use case for getting one that's electric next time he wants something new, since he's been having no end of mechanical problems with his last few trucks. Nope, he's sticking with ICE. There are just some people who are too stuck in their ways to ever own an EV.

If you have carrier-financed phone and don't pay your wireless bill, they can blacklist your IMEI.

It isn't just iOS/Android devices, online product activation has made its way into all sorts of things.

Awhile back Bird decided to discontinue their connected services for some of the retail e-scooters they'd sold. If you didn't have your scooter charged up when the command was sent to leave it in a permanently unlocked state, you now own a brick.