I recall wondering when the pendulum would finally shift back from the siege mentality and we could get on with living.

It never did.

9/11 was so ingrained into the American psyche. Moreso than even Pearl Harbor.

The promise for what might have been compared to what we are has never been more stark.

Except that many large enterprises have seen this movie before with Broadcom buying things like CA. They already know the product development vanishes and support gets thin while prices quickly escalate. Then shelfware is bundled into an "all or nothing" deal so they'll keep bleeding you until you get every scrap of their shit out of your stack with them hoping you take the bait.

We've almost got every last scrap of their products peeled out of our business. Never again.

That's really the only use I have for my one echo device. I consume their prime music content and pipe it out to a small amplifier for stereo speakers and a small subwoofer in my garage so I have music to listen to when I'm being a gear head. I guess if I HAD to, I could use a raspberry pi or something like that to do the same, but this just works and I'm lazy.

Comparing the Starship prototype to a battle tested workhorse that's been in production a lot longer isn't particularly useful. When Starship proves that it is a safe platform for humans, great. Until then, why not use it to launch cargo/satellites if the economics are sound?

Per this, studies are inconclusive, but the most important part Even if streetlights have no effect on crime, they make people feel safe.

Let me try this again [fnord] paranoia [fnord].

Oh god! I forgot elections are coming which means every zealot will do their best to alienate everyone from their side.

You might have heard directives that people should pull over only in well lit areas, or women and the like should stick to well lit areas, etc.

And as people are simply everywhere, that means the entire globe will be lit eventually, your erudite suggestions notwithstanding.

or paranoia, take your pick, but if it is a question of stargazing or crime, crime will win out. Always.

It's unfortunate. The Orange Pi 5 Plus on paper is nice. When I bought all the bits for about US$300, that got me 8 fairly fast RK3588 ARM cores, 16GB RAM, dual 2.5GB ethernet, decent video, decent npu (for then), native nvme, 256GB emmc storage, 1TB nvme ssd and a small case with active cooling. It would be a LOT more expensive to roll that together today, but it's working ok as a headless home media server. I suspect it would also be fine for a desktop device for many people (no gaming, but it plays 4k video just fine and is perfectly acceptable for consuming web content).

http://www.orangepi.org/html/h...

A great opportunity missed by those folks.

It'll be interesting to see if it gets more enthusiastic support from Qualcomm than we saw from the various Chinese arm variants that took YEARS to get anything more than the basics working without a lot of mystery kernel blobs on an older kernel. It'll also need to arrive at a sane price point.

I've had an Orange Pi 5 plus for almost 3 years and it only JUST now works without a lot of hand holding on current Debian/Ubuntu and I think the npu is still not quite there yet.

Like spending that same money to build vocational schools for the skilled trades that are in short supply. I know...not as cool and exciting, but I think we need 10,000 more welders a lot more than we need 10,000 more tech bros.

It'll be interesting to see what the overall impact is on the cost of Blizzard titles.

$1199 for the iphone 18 Pro. After the initial flurry of people who will just buy anything new from Apple, I'll be curious to see how these sell at that price point. I'm guessing the plain Jane iPhone 18 will come later on.

Given the price point of these TV's I suspect 4G or 5G service is going to be prohibitively expensive to enable. I suppose if they thought the total lifetime revenue they'd be able to earn by snagging your data exceeded the cost to gather it, they'd do it.

Personally, I just don't allow TV's to talk to my local network at all. If for some reason I felt the need to do so, they'd be on a separate vlan with no access to a gateway to the outside world.

Google and Amazon are already doing the same thing along with your mobile providers so it's an arms race to limit the phoning home only to services that you want to enable. I doubt the government plans to intervene at all as some of that profit from trafficking your data trickles down to politicians.

Blackhole most (all?) of the ads and trackers so the browser and your network doesn't spend any significant resources on those requests. I have pihole in front of everything on my home network and it makes a noticeable difference in the perceived performance of browsing and also allows me to easily have a throttle (or not) for content I don't want my young kids to consume.

https://pi-hole.net/

It's easy to setup and even a dated raspberry pi has more than enough oomph to do the work within a very small power envelope.

Roku does suck. Personally, I just use it as a front-end to play my home media on the various TV's in the house (using Jellyfin as the back-end) along with occasional content from Amazon Prime. I've deleted all the junk channels they try to foist on customers. Yes, the hardware does kinda suck, but it's just "good enough" to excrete a 4k hdmi signal, pass through the audio to my receiver where needed, and the interface is "good enough" for my family to use it. I've also neutered most of the "phone home" traffic with Pihole. Before that, they were easily the chattiest devices on the network, whether they were being used or not.

I have zero interest in consuming AI generated content or advertisements of any sort.

If Fox breaks it any further, I'll just go back to rolling my own endpoints out of raspberry pi or similar devices. I stopped doing that a few years ago as it was just less hassle to pick up the cheap roku boxes, but that worked fine too....it was just a bit more work.