It's more about the type of leasing. Something like a corporate or educational IT lease happens without these sorts of features because the customer has particular preferences about opex vs. capex or depreciation or whatever; but that do actually have money. Apple already does that(not sure if directly or through distributors like CDW and SHI, or both).

Building some sort of MDM system that allows you to lock people out of certain apps in order to encourage them to pay up something this week is a different flavor of leasing; normally used on customers who are at the "deciding which bills go un or underpaid this time" level. Apple has, historically, not dabbled in this area.

To an extent they probably do; and may even be correct to do so; but what would concern me is the shift to hard technical enforcement when, in practice, Apple already does a fairly massive volume of contract-based leasing and other payment over time mechanisms. Fleet hardware sales, the financial structure of all the "free" with 2 year contract iphones that go out, etc.

If you are building all sorts of locks in, including ones for hassling the user rather than just keeping stuff from falling off a truck and getting parted out, there's a strong reason to suspect that you are looking to tap, um very subprime, credit risks who you'd never lease something with just a contract; or that (since the 'App managed features' seems to be aimed at 3rd party financiers/resellers) that you are dipping your toes into the really nasty, high-touch, "block tiktok until they scrape up a payment for a portion of a debt that would be hard to collect normally' end of the market. Same as the really really, unpleasant used car places that install remote immobilizers because they know that there are times when your need for your car will seem more urgent than your other bills.

It's absolutely not the the case that there's no money there; some outfits are quite successful at soaking the poor; but it's hard not to provoke questions about either what margins you are thinking about accepting in the future or how saturated the market is among the customers you'd really prefer by preparing to dive in to that end.

So they're taking all your data, selling it, and making you pay for the privilege? Must be a nice business if you have zero scruples.

Why do you need OnStar? Who would want to steal a GM car? All the GM brands are at the very bottom of Consumer Reports reliability index for 2026.

OnStar uses cellular service to connect, so if you have an emergency, either both OnStar and your cell phone work, or neither work. So there's no advantage to using OnStar rather than just dialing 911. 911 services are allowed access to your phone's GPS location regardless of settings.

It just seems like a pork package to sell along with the clear coat. Not to mention the theft of your data without compensation, whether you subscribe or not. You have to physically disable the modem to avoid that.

Tesla is awful due to the lack of physical controls where they would really make sense. It is an actively driver-hostile car. Other than the powertrain, which is amazing, the car is completely obnoxious. The door handles in particular are a huge problem and have been banned in China. Why would you intentionally make door handles that are super awkward to open rather than just pull? Why would you make someone dig through a menu to adjust the mirrors, or adjust the A/C vents and other controls? Trying to shift with the right stalk? Awkward and horrible. I think they thought it was sexy to just have a screen and nothing else, but in reality it just absolutely sucks. Before you say, "but have you owned one?" Yes, yes I have. It's my wife's current daily driver. And I avoid driving it like the plague.

I figured if I read the comments on this post, I'd find all the incels and rednecks whining about Fark. The truth is, it hasn't really changed much, other than the fact that the people running the site grew up, and the site grew up with them and shed that frat-boy mentality.

They also had to get rid of adult content due to Google becoming the morality police of the internet when it comes to sites that they will allow ads to be run against. They are in turn pressured by various right wing lobby groups in the United States, who also pressure credit card payment systems not to support adult content. Blame the religious right for that. A legacy of our puritan origins. (Fark tried moving all the Boobies links to foobies.com, and that experiment ultimately did not work.) They have to police comment photos as well for that reason.

Fark is still a terrific link aggregator with funny headlines, and no AI or algorithms to filter it. The traffic has fallen off a good amount from its peak years, but it's still very lively.

I also find it funny that people here are complaining that fark is 'woke' or whatever, when I see plenty of borderline socialist ideology on display in posts every day on Slashdot. If you are complaining about that, why are you here? Yea, Fark is certainly anti-fascist, and I'm great with that.

I'd say Slashdot is in a much more degraded state than Fark. The original sense of community on Slashdot is long gone, though it still provides a useful aggregation of privacy and security focused tech news, which I appreciate. The comment sections here are far nastier on average. Fark is still fairly civil other than a few trolls here and there, and it's easy to block them.

What are we going to use to handwave all the 'officer involved shootings' now that the claim that you feared for your life in the face of an imminent threat is no longer plausible? We can't really put these to work until we've decided on suitable legal cover!

I learned from here on Slashdot the two best tools to deal with Win11 at the moment you get the first windows setup screen. Used the shell trick to create a local-account-only, then installed O&O Shutup10+++ and Winhance. I used those two tools to remove every single piece of telemetry, junk software, spam, spyware, AI and forced updates from the OS. All of this before ever connecting it to the internet. (I loaded those two pieces of software from a thumbdrive.) The result is a super clean install that just does what I want. This is an older Microsoft Surface so it needed to be clean to run well with limited RAM. It's my throwaway lightweight laptop for international travel. No personal information on it. This register article is also handy.

On my main machine I'm still happily running Win10. My browsing habits are pretty boring and I run Ublock Origin, AdblockPlus etc. in Firefox to keep anything unruly out. I used to run noscript but pretty much no sites work with JS disabled these days.

The radiation pressure that prevents the inflow of mass to a black hole has no effect on another black hole.

I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Copy protection on the original sleeping beauty is long expired.
Copy protection on the Disney version is good for years yet.

In the original versions, the scene i quoted? There is no scene like that in the original version. But it is beat for beat straight from the Disney version. If you want to tell a sleeping beauty story, you absolutely can, the original source material not copy protected, you can faithfully tell that story, including the unconscious rape of the princess to impregnate her so that she finally wakes up at child birth... or you can create more family friendly version all your own with whatever you like. But you can't simply lift a bunch of scenes that only exist in the copy protected Disney version and call it your own original interpretation by changing a few details.

The chatgpt story is a ripoff of the Disney version though.

The scene I quoted with the three "magical gaurdians" bestowing three gifts at a celebration crashed by the sorcerous who places the curse -- that is not from the original source material, its not novel either, its a scene ripped straight from the Disney version. And its not an isolated issue with the AI version.

There is no question that Disney doesn't "own" sleeping beauty, but they do own their telling of it. This was an obvious ripoff of that particular telling in several places.

If a child handed in the Moonlit Princess the teacher would give them a lecture about plagiarism. Because its not remotely original enough. It is so clearly taking so many things straight from Disney's version. Sure the names are changed, and the words "aren't the same", but its far too derivative of that particular version to credibly claim its an original telling of the sleeping beauty story.