because there is no disc to "authenticate your ownership" to the Xbox, so it will attempt to reach some remote server to look at your "account".

You can play it offline. But only on one console. Xbox has the concept of "home console" or "primary console". You can download a game to it and as long as the console checks in every so often (once a year or so) the license will be valid on it.

All other consoles you log into must be online to validate the license.

So it's not truly offline play but you could play the campaign offline as it doesn't need to do a license check on your primary console. Note that this only works to keep that console offline - you put it online and it'll refresh the licenses you have so if it got transferred it'll stop working. Or after a year, which ever happens first.

That way you you don't have to deal either with the sun beating down on you while you try to sleep at 4am or with your poor children getting run over in the dark on their way to school.

In the summer, the sun still rises around 4:30AM with daylight saving time. I don't see how 3:30AM or 4:30AM makes much of a difference. And it sets at 10PM or 11PM. Either way it doesn't make much of a difference. Or to put it, "the juice isn't worth the squeeze". Because you just get that daylight for another couple of weeks and then it's back to darkness or daylight again. And I'm close to the US border.

And then we get close to winter and the sun doesn't rise until 9AM so your kids are still going to school in the dark. And then starts setting right when they get dismissed. It's not unusual for it to be light when they leave school, then darkness when they get off the bus 40 minutes later.

The US states that did do it were more mid-latitude states where it's not a bad idea. But in Canada, it's likely to not make much of a difference because in the summer it's been out for hours at 6AM (daylight time) and in the winter it's still dark when you drop the kids off at school (standard time) or head into work.

Anyhow, if there needs to be a transition to standard time, going from daylight to standard time is generally much easier than the other way around. Just stop screwing with the clocks.

I don't care if the clocks auto-set. Not being sure about the current time (did this clock change?) is way more damaging than having to adjust clocks. There used to be clocks you can call to get the current time, but those died out decades ago. Now you're just not sure. Even public clocks aren't always right - there are plenty of clocks I run into still using the old daylight saving time schedule, decades after Dubya changed it. They're off for a couple of weeks until they change. And no, you can't check on the internet because most of them just use the current system time.

Especially since you know the AI tools are going to be enshittified in short order. That ChatGPT query is free today, tomorrow once you're hooked and can't live without it, it's going to be a dollar query. 50 cents if you can wait for it to be answered during "off peak" hours.

Because that's the business model that's likely to win out. Get kids hooked on AI then get to bill everyone $50/month to use it because they've gotten so reliant on it that they can't live without it.

The whole AI causing shortages is to ensure that you don't get a chance to run local models yourself without paying for the privilege.

The bigger problem is that OpenAI didn't actually log what the agents did so we only know this because the victims spoke up. It wasn't just Hugging Face, but various oldschool wikis in Germany, The University of Toronto and others who were accessed.

I don't know how they sandboxed the AIs but it didn't seem to do a good job if it iddn't log what sites it was using and Hugging Face was the one who detected the hack.

I saw part of the testimony. This all comes down to human over-aggressivenessâ"not even mistakes.

The detective used Flock to look for all Dodge Durangos within a radius of the accident. They located her at her apartment. So far, so good. But her car is a different color than what eyewitnesses said. Other details did not match up with eyewitness accounts. There was NO damage to her vehicle, but they arrested her anyway. The detective doubled down and the police continued there prosecution of her.

I'm no fan of Flock, but in this case it's simply bad police.

And the same detective could've queried the DMV and asked for all Dodge Durango vehicles registered in the state. They have that access by default. Sure, they would get a lot of hits, but then they could narrow it down, by partial plate, color, age, etc.

And likely she never would've even been a suspect.

No, Flock may not be completely guilty, but it's not innocent either because just passing by should never be a reason to be arrested. The only way for Flock to win is if its camera captured the accident because it happened to be right in front of it.

It's poor policing, but it's Flock-enabled poor policing.

If you're going to slop and still picked C over Rust in 2026... Ouch.

MW Propagation is a lot of fun. You can get stations that are thousands of miles away. Too bad younger generations haven't bothered to experience it.

It's a huge PITA for AM stations. Many AM stations actually have licenses that say they can broadcast from sunrise to sunset and must shut down for the night. Others have "reduced power operations" where they must reduce their transmit power overnight.

And others are lucky to have the full license that lets them go 24/7 at full power. The regulatory bodies have to consider propagation when dealing with AM radio licenses. When an AM radio station goes off the air it presents more headaches because the other stations nearby might have to juggle their power settings.

But AM radio being in the HF radio band means you only need a few stations to cover an entire country. In an emergency, you cannot tell how many transmitters you have available so the AM network means you still have a way to communicate even if stations so down. And some AM stations do not operate at full power as full power operation is reserved for emergencies.

In a scenario where a major city is impacted, nearby AM radio stations can often have coverage into that major city despite being far away (and thus not experience the issues) making it the ideal communications medium.

Plus, it also means the EV makers can't cheap out on radio shielding. ICE vehicles have huge issues as well with EMI causing radio issues, but they have had years to shield the radio from interference caused by the engine. ("Alternator whine" is a common one). The only reason EVs want to ditch AM radio is because their electronics interfere with AM reception and they want to save the $5 of metal to shield components.

Gone With The Wind made all that money with $6 tickets, adjusted for inflation. Average ticket prices in 2019 were $9. And there were a third as many people in the US at that time.

Not really. When GWTW came out, movies were basically the only entertainment option out there as we would recognize it. TV was still experimental and radio was the only thing you would do at home. Beyond that you have books and hobbies.

Spending a Saturday at the movie theatre (the "nickelodeon" because it was 5 cents for entry) was a popular pastime - you'd get a few cartoons, a newsreel, then a couple of movies. This was popular as it was a way to catch up on the news and watch the latest movies that came into town.

Gone With The Wind was extremely popular because it was a good movie for the time so it would often be a feature that showed week after week because people kept demanding it.

You also have to realize the "new movies" were whatever pulp Hollywood came out with because they knew they were just going for the nickle movies.

These days, we have far more entertainment options so getting a dollar at the movie is actually much harder. After all, you can watch a movie in the privacy of your own home nowadays, something you couldn't with GWTW. If you wanted to see it again, you had to pay for another viewing.

EDK is the EFI Developer Kit. There was one released by Intel which wasn't open-source, but there have been several EDKs that are open-source. But they are for developing UEFI applications that run in the UEFI environment. You don't use the EDK as a replacement for UEFI.

LIbreBoot/CoreBoot and now GNU Boot are a BIOS/UEFI replacement. And they're actually all derived from from CoreBoot (which started as LinuxBoot). It basically is a BIOS/UEFI replacement that booted into Linux and served as the boot environment.

CoreBoot evolved from it but it has binary blobs, which is why the GNU folks created LibreBoot. Not surprisingly the compatibility list of LibreBoot is far smaller than CoreBoot, and CoreBoot is pretty small already. Remember this has to initialize the hardware the provide the tables so the OS can perform certain operations like sleep and suspend by telling the OS what registers it needs to access.

LibreBoot has a sordid history because earlier this year or last year, the developer of CoreBoot got fed up with LibreBoot being years out of date, so the CoreBoot dev basically pushed an updated version of LibreBoot (minus the binary blobs). Apparently the LibreBoot dev didn't like that, which is why it's GNU Boot. It was a pretty messy thing because the CoreBoot devs wanted to update what was a completely outdated fork.

Riot isn't identifying a Ryzen by staring at TCP packets. Vanguard runs on the PC, where it can collect hardware information or request TPM attestation and send the result to Riot. CPUID identifies a processor model, not an individual chip; a CPU-bound firmware TPM is a more plausible explanation for a ban following a used CPU.

TPM wouldn't work because you'd have to transplant it from one motherboard to another. The CPUID instruction gives a lot of information (including serial number) if you ask it the right way. It's how the CPU-Z application gets all that information - there's tons of information available via CPUID on a modern processor depending on what you load EAX/EBX can call it.

How will you get the ROM once everything is "digital"?

Hack the PS5.

There's a new jailbreak on PS5 that handles basically up to firmware 15.5. Use it to get access to the PS5 filesystem and grab your files from there.

I'm sure there will be other ways that probably involve simulating the PS5 and downloading the files directly.

I'm not worried about the idea of personalized pricing. It just doesn't seem feasible. Implementation hurdles are abundant, the likelihood of complaints in-store is very high, and for not that much benefit.

Personalized pricing in store will be a nightmare for Walmart. Think of several situations that are extremely common. Like what if two people are looking at an item? When I shop at Walmart, there are inevitably other people around and they're looking at the same stuff I'm looking at. The price tag can only show one price - so whose price is it going to show?

The second problem is shoppers in general. There are people who take time to shop - they can take an hour or more shopping for groceries and stuff. You're going to have to remember what price you shown someone so when they check out you use the "right" price. Also, if you've done grocery shopping, you inevitably run into people who complain about every price as it's rung up. Imagine the fun to be had if the price changes and they're constantly checking to make sure the register shows the correct price.

And if you're going to do dynamic pricing, people are going to snap photos of the price tag and make sure they're being charged what the tag says. It's going to clog up the checkout lines because people are going to verify every price rings in properly. This just makes the lines way longer and way slower, and likely having to have more cashiers on checkout will negate any extra profits to be made if checking out takes way longer as everyone argues prices.

And yes, people will argue about things like 10 cents or less.

Taction probably is a troll, but ever since Apple sued Samsung for round corners design patent infringement, I figure that made Apple a patent troll too, and every patent fight they lose is karma. I'm on Taction's side for that reason alone.

And let the ignorance of the rounded corners patent show.

The rounded corners patent was a design patent. The Taction patent is a utility patent. If you don't know the difference, well, a utility patent is on something the thing does. A design patent is on something it looks like.

They are patents in that everything is AND - you must have something AND something AND something AND something ... If you lack one of those things, you are much more likely to win a patent lawsuit.

With that in mind, the Apple patent is simple - rounded corners, a tray with icons and a app selector that scrolls left and right. Samsung had that to a T. They literally copied the UI. Why didn't Apple go after Google? Because Google didn't. They had rounded corners, an app drawer at the bottom, BUT, not an app selector - because Android had widgets you could put up.on the screen. They had a separate app drawer that showed all the apps. Those two differences meant "rounded corners" patent wasn't valid on Android in general.

It's just like how the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit was much more than hot coffee and once you understand that, the lawsuit made much more sense. (McDonald's purposely sold overly hot coffee to save money on coffee grounds as it let them extract more coffee from them. They were told time and time again it was too hot to serve but they persisted. When it happened, the victim asked for a mere $30,000 for medical bills. But that was rejected, despite the fact that McDonald's paid out medical expenses for previous occurrences. And while she won millions, it was reduced on appeal to under a million dollars).

It's much more than rounded corners. It's literally Samsung redesigning the UI to match the iPhone in functionality. When Samsung lost, they basically added widgets to the screen which was enough to work around the patent. Eventually they decided to make TouchWiz their own.

Lots of keyboards ditched more useful keys to fit a copilot key,

Actually, the key the Copilot key took over was the Context Menu button on most keyboards. If you pushed it, you got the equivalent of the right-click menu. Unlike the Windows key, it likely never got much use, so it remained a mostly useless key.

It's so useless many keyboards chose to omit the context key or put other keys there. Some replaced it with another Windows key, others used custom function keys.

Their reasoning sounds plausible only if read from a "business weasel" perspective. If there's a market for RPis with more lower quality RAM, nobody is "undercutting" RPF; they're selling the products they want to, at the price they want to, and choosing not to offer big/slow/cheap OEM RAM configurations. And even if someone could undercut them on the exact same components - So what??? RPF may be a non-profit, but I am not!

The problem isn't resellers undercutting RPi. It's someone buying a 1GB RPi, doing the mod with 8GB of poor quality RAM, then selling it as an 8GB RPi at a modest discount.

The problem is that you buy the board and because the RAM is bad, you perform a return and find out it was a counterfeit RPi board that doesn't work for you.

Despite the AI issue, you can find RAM. Often poor quality recycled RAM with errors are stupidly cheap (and used in many products as-is). The board can boot with bad RAM, but run stable it might not, and you'd be more likely to blame RPi than on the reseller you bought the dodgy unit from

The fact that RPi took this long to do it would mean they're actually seeing a bunch of returns with the RAM swapped out.

It could also be that people are buying the 8GB units, swapping them with 1GB units and selling them as fake 8GB units, like those $20 "1TB" USB sticks you can find easily on Amazon.

Changing the RAM on an RPi isn't a trivial procedure - I believe it's PoP RAM so it's not something a hobbyist would easily do without a lot of specialized equipment and experience in being able to separate PoP RAM from the base CPU and reballing and such. So hobbyist wise, they aren't likely to be ones affected since few would have the expertise or equipment. But those trying to sell counterfeits do.