This was my immediate take, as well. Free Apple TV+ for a couple of days, and all you have to do is give Apple enough identifiers to set up for mining your online habits to sell to anyone who'll pay for it.

It will be amusing to see what happens should the various oil companies refuse to sell product to the various governments of New York; I wonder how many days' supply of gasoline and diesel NYC maintains to operate its vehicles. Watching the entire state of New York trying to crash convert to electric power for everything would be quite the spectacle. And if they extend their blockade to the businesses and residents as well, the state will grind to a halt even faster.

Unfortunately, over the years, the authority of the government has changed from only having the powers explicitly granted in the Constitution to "If the Constitution doesn't explicitly say we can't, we're allowed to, and if we can somehow weasel-word the prohibition so that it doesn't describe exactly what we're doing in nit-picky detail, it's not really prohibiting it".

Iâ(TM)m very grateful for this explanation. Iâ(TM)m one of those Juicebox users who has a 100amp panel and a concern about overload, so I adjusted the charge level down. Now Iâ(TM)m unsure that my setting will be preserved come next week or if Iâ(TM)ll ever be able to change it if I get an electrical upgrade.

This looks like the same sort of setup that an IMAX dome theatre, like the Fleet Space Theatre in San Diego, but with the row seating replaced by a more bistro-style arrangement, resulting in a capacity at least an order of magnitude smaller, with a corresponding increase in price to enable them to make a profit on the arrangement. Watching the video felt to me as if someone who had been to one of the IMAX dome theatres thought "Why can't we do this for sports?", but had to wait until there was sufficient network bandwitch to transmit live camera footage. How much 'better' it will be is going to depend on what kind of licensing deal they'll have to cut to get transmission rights, but I don't see how widely-scattered four-person tables is going to be attractive enough at the prices they'll have to charge to make it a viable business model.

"People have no grasp of what they do. You broke into my house, stole my property, murdered my servants, and my PETS! And that is what grieves me the most! You killed my snake."

And in geography for millennia before that. Viz., Transylvania (beyond the woods), Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul on this side of the Alps).

For example, the Breville Joule Turbo sous vide cooker, which doesn't have on-device controls, and has to be used via the associated app; if Anova gets away with requiring a subscription to use their app, then a similar move by Breville would convert a product you own into a product controlled by Breville. Now, I can see (barely) Anova making the extended features (guides, notifications, recipes, etc.) that are accessed through the app a subscription-only feature, particularly if the content is being hosted on Anova's servers, but the basic functionality of controlling the linked device should remain free.

I wonder just what Disney would do if they were hit with a different legal "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel" extension and ruled that, as a legal person, Disney as a corporation was criminally guilty and was to be imprisoned, the imprisonment consisting of the entire corporation being placed into receivership and ceasing normal business operations for the term of the sentence, with the receiver paying out all obligations of the company (i.e., salaries), selling off assets as needed to cover unpaid obligations. As it stands now, corporations essentially get a slap on the wrist for criminal violations; if they were faced with the prospect of being shut down for the penitential term for a crime they were convicted of, the impact should make them a great deal more leery about casually ignoring the law. It would never happen, of course, but it's fun to dream.

It would be poetic justice if the judge first dismissed Disney's petition with prejudice, and second declared that all arbitration clauses in Disney user agreements were null and void, and that Disney was enjoined from including arbitration clauses in future agreements for a term not less than seventy-five years. Basically, a "You proved that you're not capable of using arbitration clauses in the manner for which they were intended, so you don't get to use them any more" decision. Sadly, I don't think the current legal system, individually or collectively, has the testicular fortitude to slap Disney down as hard as they need to be.

And this, kids, is what happens when you hire for ideology conformity first, and competence second.

(Project 2025 aims to ensure the Federal government follows this hiring methodology. The Pendleton Act, which it seeks to ignore if not overturn, is there for a reason.)

...and this, boys and girls, is why we can't have nice things.

^This^

I stopped going when I recognized that it had been turned into a media-centric event where, instead of being for the fans, it was the con marketing the attendees to the media companies as a captive audience that was paying for the privilege of being marketed to. When I found out that there were people who got in line on the Sunday before the convention for an event in Hall H on Saturday, I knew it had outgrown any semblance of what it was when I first attended in 1977, and seeing long-time vendors like Bud Plant giving up their space in the dealers' room told me that I wasn't the only one to see it. I miss what it was, but I don't miss what it became.

It will be interesting to determine whether it's capable of doing this when not connected to the TV to supply it with power. And if it turns out to have an internal battery to allow it to do so without an external power source, then I expect that there will be a market for appropriately-sized Faraday cages that the Fire TV device can be dropped into. I wonder if, unless there is _specific_ verbiage in the rarely-read ToS document that states that you agree that Amazon is allowed to do so, turning on your TV without any input from you to show you ads is likely to be interpretable as incurring unpermitted costs to the owner. The cost to power a TV for a few minutes is going to be negligible, as is the share of network bandwidth to transfer the ad, but incurring expenditures in your name without your permission is, I believe, a crime regardless of the amount. However, IANAL, and something like that would be part of a class-action suit against Amazon.