There are three issues that the EU is concerned about when it comes to US big tech: the reliance of European citizens, companies and governments on US tech firms, and data collected in the process. The influence that those firms can exert over EU public opinion. And anti-competitive practises and the abuse of monopoly positions. The first 2 are the ones that the EU started to worry about a lot more since Trump’s second term, but they are mainly dealt with through policy. The 3rd issue has always been a priority, and that’s the one being dealt with through fines.

So, in MY perfect world, we'd be going back to cartridges, where the 'cartridge' is basically a 256GB NVMe drive, so the game cartridge could theoretically be patched on-media, load times would be far lower, and there wouldn't be nearly as much dependency on massive storage on the console itself.

The reason why it will never happen this way, is because NVMe drives, even at Sony-levels of purchase, would be a significant portion of the game itself. If Sony got 256GB drives at $30 a pop wholesale (about half of what a quick look showed a drive for at retail), and they simply forwarded the cost onto the consumer, ignoring markup *and* all the retooling required to write games to NVMe media at scale, pretty much every game would be $100 or more, just because of the media...and if Sony can get away with selling games for $100 a pop, then you KNOW that Microsoft is going to trip over themselves to do the same.

Perhaps GameStop could find a new role, in that they could sell blank Sony-blessed cartridges, and then sell a case with a license key, that allows Gamestop to write the game, at its current patch level (it'd take 5-10 minutes to write in-store), to the blank cartridge, maybe include a box with a manual and some cover art if they're feeling fancy, and the cost of the media is externalized onto the customer without the game itself costing more...but it'd have to be a system like that for such media to work.

The reason why optical media is still the one everyone points to is that it's the compromise that works - users have immutable copies of the game, and the discs cost about a dime each - a trivial amount for Sony to absorb. Even if we bring it up to $5 for the case, the amortized cost of the duplication equipment, and the transportation fee...it's still cheaper than Sony will ever get flash media on a per-unit basis.

Ultimately, the reason people want discs is not because people LIKE optical media specifically, but because a whole lot of us have had download-only or stream-only media become unusable due to some licensing drama that our subscription fees were supposed to pay for. Optical media is the compromise, not the technologically elegant solution.

I'll be the first to register www.IManAmRegalAGermanAmI.www.
Followed by www.OozyRatInASanitaryZoo.www.

And you only fly on Boeing 727-51 planes like DB Cooper that have a convenient ramp for you to jump off of?

Oh no, another metric / imperial mismatch like the $327 million Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco. This time they'll just poke out the eye of a geosynchronous satellite because they are 6.952 meters closer to it than they thought they were.

Just delete yourself, PDFile Trash Fred.

The reason Anthropic settled is to avoid setting a court precedent. That's the answer. "Pay some money, cost of doing business" while everyone's rights die.

People expect a driver to be just that: a driver, that provides whatever is needed to make full use of the device, and nothing else. Maybe MS ought to be a little bit more like Apple, set some strict policies, and police them.

The cost of mitigation isn't that large even. Way back when, I helped build a backup for a system holding critical data that had a far greater transaction volume than the typical cadastre ever will. The system was pretty basic and cheap to build and operate, basically a daily incremental backup written on immutable media, along with a printout of each transaction. This was before ransomware was even a thing, though hacking was already a concern and part of the reason the customer wanted this system (the printout was a regulatory requirement). These guys were serious, they even wrote procedures for restoring the system from this backup, and practiced those procedures.

I think people upvoting you misread your post, and I think that's perfectly fine lol.

The difference was almost entirely to FORCIBLY OBSOLETE a ton of perfectly serviceable machines merely because they came with TPM 1.2 or less from the manufacturer, or they had a CPU "not quite new enough," because OEMs were screaming "we need to force people to trash computers and spend money buying new hardware from us."

OEMs started salivating at Apple's "3 year old hardware? Fuck you, throw it in the trash and buy something new" sales model and demanded MS start doing the same thing.

If someone like MachineShedFred is getting a forced reboot in the middle of the day, it's because he's the Dumb Fucking Retard who's been pushing "delay" on the machine over and over and "sleeping" the machine during the mandatory reboot times rather than save his work and pick a sensible moment, and now he's run past the mandatory delay allowance. He's known this reboot was coming, he just chose to IGNORE it and be a whiny little bitch about it.

Most IT departments have no idea how to set up automatic updating properly so that it still gets the job done, but doesn't piss off the users that you can't really piss off...

Most Dumb Fucking Retard Users like MachineShedFred imagine that they are above the requirements that IT have been ordered to apply to everyone, or that they've found some magical "workaround" to the system. I have no sympathy for his bullshittery.

Elon Musk is an anagram for Leon Skum. He's a white-supremacist inbred Nazi Shitrat who masturbates every night to his fantasy of restoring the Apartheid regime that made his Disgusting Nazi Cuntrat Dad and Shitty Nazi Whorebag Momma "rich" from gem mining run using slave labor.

MAGA are all disgusting inhuman inbred trash who would happily hold the match to light that cross. They're Sick White-Supremacist Evil Sociopathic Inbred Shit, no exceptions.

MAGAtrash are all inbred crossburning Klan Shits. Every one of them will do nothing but gaslight and lie to you, because they're Subhuman Fucking Disgusting Sociopaths and dangers to humanity.