Oh I hate the Rufus-suggested questions on product reviews so much.

"Is the item easy to use and reliable?"

OpenAI has a piece to the puzzle but Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon etc have the apps so it makes sense partner. But lack of business pull is what makes ChatGPT good. Amazon made Alexa into a joke because it was driven solely by Amazon's business interests. Right now I pay OpenAI directly and it connects me straight to answers without having to go into the mess the Web has become (unless I want to check by clicking the links it gives as source), and I hope this remains an option.

On top of Covid, I am glad to see the decrease in drug overdoses:

Drug overdoses, one of the leading causes of injury deaths among adults, fell 26% in 2024 from 2023, marking its largest percentage decline since the drop began in 2022. Rates of drug overdose deaths declined for all age groups, with the largest falls in younger age groups. According to CDC data, deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl showed the largest decrease.

I don't remember reading anything that would have prompted me to expect that.

So don't read it, stay in your ignorance.

Is it though?

In any case my point was simply that there already are government programs that support people long-term. How to do it is not unknown.

Which is called disability and also exists.

In any case, nobody is starving to death so that is a de factor guaranteed minimum income.

What annoys me is I take all the time to do all those kinds of settings and they get wiped out at the next forced upgrade anyways!

Maybe you can tell me how to never, ever see anything about Samsung Bixby on my phone again.

"Some," sure. But the trend (slope) in the graph in the article is favoring only 1 technology, that is BEV:

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/...

I could kind of see somebody who flies for business a lot getting one. It's a big price premium over a phone plus a tablet, but maintaining multiple devices (e.g. charging them) and having your stuff spread out over them is still kind of a pita, and whipping the 'tablet' out of your pocket would be handy.

Are you talking about the books that they bought as sources, or the previous approach of downloading a huge torrent including works in copyright?

Is that really so common to not even have the game on it to avoid the big initial download? I googled the game mentioned above and they did do that, but didn't make it sounds like a regular practice, and people were angry.

Granted you aren't saving much more than some bandwidth if you still have to log on to a server to play.

Offering a box is in no way anti-consumer vs having download only.

How does that work? You distribute encrypted and keep the decrypt key super-safe until go time?

Not quite the "invention" of TV, but my boomer Dad was just writing about this for some reason... he lived in an upper-middle class household but remembers when they got their first TV, about $4000 in today's money. And color TV was not widespread until he was in college.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

So that's how young TV is. Analog transmission stopped in 2009, 3 years after google bought youtube, and on-demand viewing started to dominate within 5 or 10 years. So the effective lifetime of "TV" per se was 'only' about 60 years. Boomers and X are the only 2 generations that remember nothing else from their childhood.

Nowadays on-demand viewing dominates and that is a very different thing.