And also diver's watches, so there is no excuse for smart watches not having a replaceable battery either. People understand perfectly well that they need to have the gasket properly replaced if they want to maintain water resistance. Not that anyone would warranty a smart watch by the time the battery needs replacing.

It's almost impossible to anonymize search data. Google can do it internally and simply avoid processing it in a way that could reveal identities, to comply with GDPR, but other companies will not be so limited. In theory GDPR applies to them too, but the danger is that we end up in a Facebook like situation with shadow profiles on people who have never used their services.

Allow me to answer. Ahem.

Is your paycheck larger?

No, that's Biden's fault.

Did you pay less taxes?

Did you her Kamala's laugh?

are grocery costs lower?

That's Barack HUSSEIN Obama's fault.

Are your utility costs lower?

Her emails and Benghazi made them high.

Did the price of gasoline or diesel decrease?

Yes but Biden did it Trump made money because he's smart

Did you pay less in health insurance?

Bill Clinton got impeached!! Trump's still draining the swamp.

If you needed insurance or healthcare were you able to obtain it?

Get your government hands off my medicare!

What if Obama did the exact same thing?

BOTH SIDES

I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

I dunno. The twenty-bucks-plus-copying-time spent on something you value and care about - which may be MUCH more expensive or even simply unavailable a few years hence - sounds like the very definition of an appreciating asset.

In the scenario described in TFS, the customer "actually gets owned" and "actually gets taken"...

After all, owning customers is the entire goal of corporations.

That's probably a little closer to being true than it once was; but any electronic device which contains electrolytic capacitors should be powered up every once in a while to keep the dielectrics formed and the oxide layers intact.

That's especially true of digital devices whose input voltage can't be raised slowly by using a Variac; theres's an (admittedly small) risk of damage or data corruption, as the different voltage rails may reach their spec'd voltages at different times.

Ours doesn't like being picked up either, although he is slowly coming around to it. Something traumatic happened to him, and I wonder if it involved being picked up.

EV batteries can be made that way

They are. EV batteries are almost always assemblies of pretty standard cells, just like any other modern battery. The Tesla Model S and X use 18650s. That's the AA of the lithium ion world and is the same thing that's in those oh-so-proprietary power tool batteries, some laptops, battery banks, etc.

There's a burgeoning market of battery refurbishers who crack open old batteries and replace bad cells. Or you can just order a third party replacement, just like you can buy aftermarket brakes, tires, windshield wipers, whatever.

... expect the solution to be no more movies "sales," just rentals with a fixed time limit, either "until [date master license expires/is up for renewal]" or "some number of weeks/years".

Another solution will be to shift to a "library access" model, which is already common. At least that will be understandable by the general public: Most people know that brick-and-mortar public libraries retire old books to make way for newer ones.

As for existing complaints, the best hope consumers have is that some law firm will successfully argue that the fine print is too buried to create an enforceable contract, then reach a settlement that gives consumers some partial credit depending on how long they had access to their purchase, with vanishingly-low credit if the purchase was more than a few years ago.

When it comes to AI, I expect there will be many years between any credible, widely-recognized claim of sentience and the time when more than a few countries recognize "human rights" for them, if it happens at all.

Having sentience is not required for most people to say "this person/entity deserves human rights," and such rights are routinely granted to non-sentient individuals or entities:

We rightfully give legal human rights to people with medical conditions that render them not self-aware and not intelligent in any meaningful way (e.g. newborns with severe anencephaly, who may only have a brain stem and may only live a few minutes), because they part of a larger class (people) who by definition are supposed to have human rights.

We give limited "person rights" to corporations and other legal entities, but they only exist as legal fiction.

We do not give "basic human rights" to primates, dogs, dolphins, octopuses, and other animals even though there are examples of each that are arguably smarter and more self-aware than a typical 4 year old child. Even in the USA, dogs - "Man's best friend" - are routinely killed (albeit humanely) in some animal shelters for no reason other than the shelter they are in is too full.

In some countries and periods of history, we don't even give "basic human rights" to all healthy adults (e.g. repressed political minorities, children, the ill, the elderly, slaves, women, etc.).

In short, being sentient doesn't mean you get legally-protected human rights, and you (rightfully) may get legally-protected human rights even if you, as an individual, are not self-aware and show no signs of being intelligent.

The game GPL is playing

There, you nailed it. And that game convinces people, the OP in particular, that something with fewer restrictions is "not free." Not "not as good" but specifically "not free."

This is precisely the same game that let Engels and Lenin convince everyone that a social system based on general anarchy plus a wee bit of democracy where absolutely required that was supposed to come about naturally ACTUALLY required authoritarianism and violent revolution because.

The OP claimed that the BSD license is "not free" and the GPL is.

Having freedom does not mean you can do anything you want.

Yes, it does. It's clearly impossible for everyone to be that free, so reality forces compromises, not redefinition. Not permitting something is not "more free."

You can explain a lot of things, in isolation, with classical physics. That doesn't mean that's how it works. The GP's comment is insightful: WTF is a "quantum material" if it's not literally everything?