Umm, I never said I was offering a solution here. I'm just identifying a problem. And the problem is a lot bigger than "Trump". He's just the latest one in the line-up.

It's pretty clear we've had a long string of shady deals and the public being kept in the dark on what our government is really doing.

Only reason you can try to pretend the whole problem is the Republican Party is the fact they've been in a power a lot. I'm old enough, though, to remember how awful things were under the Carter administration with the "stagflation" and his turning our relations w/Iran from a close alliance to a geopolitical crisis. I also remember how, despite his ability to relate to the people and make people feel good, Ronald Reagan also pulled some corrupt B.S. Perhaps most insultingly? He did all of it while quoting very Libertarian key points and principles. Clearly a case of "do as I say, not as I do" when you look at the Iran Contra scandal or his non-working "trickle down economics" he's known for taking from his advisors and running with, despite it just being a failed experiment. President Clinton was fingered for shady campaign funding/financing methods, from the start, followed by firing all 7 members of the White House travel office and replacing them with friends and associates. Plenty of reasons to question Joe Biden's ability as President when he got a shot at it -- including millions of dollars from foreign countries funneled into his family's own bank accounts, and admission that he improperly removed a number of classified documents and tried to keep them at home. (No charges ever filed for "mishandling" those though, which probably tipped off Trump that he could get away with the same!)

I didn't even bother to mention Bush, Sr. or Jr. here but clearly, they had personal agendas too.

It's all a steaming pile in Washington DC ... and it just keeps getting worse, the more the leaders figure out they can get away with.

I don't totally agree with that Starlink assessment though. They're far from "maxed out" on potential customers. Where I work, alone, we have 50+ remote docks and warehouses in random parts of the country. All of them need Internet access desperately but most are only serviced by an LTE cellular connection because they're in too rural an area for other options.

Starlink would be ideal for them, and we've used it in a couple of locations already. The main objection seems to be the complexity of the setup. (EG. We can program up a hotspot and SIM card easily enough and ship it someplace. Tell some dock worker to plug the thing into power and attach a network cable between it and a patch panel on a wall, and done. Can't expect them to properly install a Starlink antenna and the whole bit.)

Starlink just needs a free installation offer as part of buying it, with some kind of minimum contract required, and a lot more people would bite.

The crazy part? US taxpayers are propping up ALL the things! NASA didn't just stop receiving any government funds because Space-X exists. You get to foot the bill for both now!

The Republican Party hasn't been about small government for quite a while now! (Individuals who identify as Republican, by contrast, often still are.)

That's the real disconnect.... NEITHER party is about anything but getting more power or control for themselves and playing favorites with private sector businesses they have personal reasons to favor.

It's not strictly Communism because we still support the idea of the private sector. Anyone can start their own small business and not expect government to swoop in and claim ownership of it. But it's definitely "Corporatism".

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

Ok... you have me questioning the details now, but the AI overview I just checked says:

"Yes, Apple's M-series chips integrate the RAM directly onto the processor package. Because the memory is built-in as "Unified Memory," it cannot be upgraded or replaced after your Mac or iPad is purchased."

Yep... back as far as 2006, several execs were indicted for price-fixing RAM:

https://www.justice.gov/archiv...

There was a class action lawsuit in 2018 over the same issue.

I assume Apple, at least, feels they've taken steps to control RAM availability with their transition to the M series ARM processors, because they integrate the memory and the video memory into the CPU itself?

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

I've been driving EVs since I first got a used Tesla S (2014 P85D). I have a 2020 Chevy Bolt EV I use as my daily driver right now. I recently rented a 2025 Toyota Camry Hybrid, which seems to be in high demand and very highly rated/recommended out there.

My experience was ... disappointing. Now granted, it delivered on the fuel economy part. I drove it several hundred miles over a few days' time and when I went to refuel it before the rental return, it only needed 6 gallons of gas to fill it back up. But the whole driving experience felt like a big step back from any EV I'd driven. You had the constant sensation of a gas engine turning on and off at various times, and a constant reminder the battery pack in the vehicle was tiny and only a part of a more complicated system. (You could put the car in "EV mode" to make it drive only on battery, but it would only allow it at very low speeds, like driving around parking lots.) Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise. (Better interior than I'm used to seeing w/Toyota though.)

I'm kind of confused w/Honda. Their "EV strategy" seemed to me like it was basically about trying to sell that Prologue which was really a GM designed car getting rebranded as a Honda product + hand-waving that they'd do cooler stuff soon.

Truthfully? I think one of the big challenges with EVs across the board is trying to mask the high cost of the battery pack, motors and other electronics involved. You can "do it right" by not caring and slapping a high price tag on it. Then you get an EV that still maintains people's expectations for "fit and finish", a nice interior, and really good handling. The BMW i4 eDrive 40 is a great example here, or even the Porsche Taycan EV. But most people just want a cheap car that's reliable, avoids the need for gas fill-ups and oil changes, while still handling well and feeling like corners weren't cut on the build quality, interior and exterior. That doesn't really seem to be doable, yet? Tesla sure doesn't. They just design vehicles that few people think look great on the outside. but "wow" them with all the infotainment / computer capabilities on the inside. Keep the interior really bare-bones but put that big touch-screen front and center to distract them. Spend enough on the seats so they're really comfortable, but use a real basic "skateboard" suspension and frame across the whole product line. It goes fast enough in a straight line so they'll ignore other handling issues.

Don't get me wrong. I like Tesla vehicles. I'm just being real about what one is and isn't. I don't think an established brand like Honda is comfortable making all those compromises, and they're just not seeing a profit margin in converting what they build now into a full EV?

Amazon I.T. .... your ridiculous middle management and their obsession over metrics make stories like these pathetic, yet not unexpected at all.

I.T. is going down a spiral where management treats you like a "digital janitor". I'm old enough to remember this being a fairly respected career path. People in most offices had a combination of fear and awe of the "I.T. guys" because ultimately, there was a realization the entire business relied on the technology to survive. If the server or network went down, everything ground to a halt. You simply didn't treat the team poorly who held the keys to the kingdom.

It's a very different atmosphere today. Now, everyone's worried about how to cut costs and achieve the maximum return. I.T. may be critically important to a business's success, but nobody cares. There's the constant suggestion that AI is about to replace half of them anyway, and the trick is to wring every bit of productivity out of the existing staff until they quit. Then you just replace them and repeat.

If you're reading this and thinking, "It's not like that at all where I work!", congratulations! You're part of a diminishing bit of sanity out there. The last place I worked like that, though? The owner passed away and the company was sold, and it's no longer an exception to the rule.

The idea someone needs to micro manage their "knowledge workers" to the extent they keep tabs on how many feet their mouse has rolled each day? Well, that's plain insulting they'd even think it's sensible!

They never really talk about any of them except for the educational discount, to my knowledge? But for as long as I can remember, Apple also offered military discounts:

https://www.apple.com/shop/bro...

They also run government employee discounts, typically by way of special online stores you have to shop in. For example, Washington DC government workers can go here: https://dchr.dc.gov/page/apple...

I'd agree, except it really depends what you want to do in life. Where AI really does more damage than good is in the Fine Arts. So far, AI has "empowered" the stealing of original creative work by cartoonists, painters and paid photographers, to regurgitate it into "mash-ups" it pretends it came up with organically in response to requests to "draw me a ". It's, similarly, encouraged producing musical jingles and pieces that devalue real, human musicians as part of the process. (If you're a small business looking for a catchy jingle or theme to put in all your radio commercials today? Chances are you opt to save a little money by AI generating something up via a service like Suno, instead of hiring a professional musicians who writes them. That results in AI "synth singers" that all start to sound alike as you hear enough of the content, and to at least some extent? Music that sounds generic and canned, too, due to a limited number of drum riffs and fills, guitar licks and other details the AI uses repeatedly when instructed to play in specific genres.

Even if you believe this is just part of the transition of AI into something far better than it is today? You're just cheering on a world where it will become a special treat to pay premiums for a "real, human-crafted work", while the masses only consume AI art. That doesn't bode well for society in the future, if you ask me.