> Desktop CPUs are very different: If you can get 10% more performance while doubling power draw, people will just buy bigger coolers and bigger power supplies to go along with the CPU.
No they won't. OEMs will do that to put the 10% higher number on the box ('OC edition!'), but undervolting / powerlimiting has become increasingly popular. Taking a 2-5% haircut on clock frequency lets you reduce power draw by 20-50% for a 1-3% haircut in performance. Suddenly your CPU and GPU are whisper quiet on aircooling.
> Absolutely-- but if you have to exempt like 99% of your population from a law then its probably not too popular a concept (compare income tax, which a lot more people are actually fine with paying).
What? That is completely wrong.
If you gave the populace the option of massively lowering their income tax by slightly upping taxes on anyone with assets exceeding.. say.. $15 million, and massively taxing anyone with assets exceeding $100 million, do you think they'll cheer for the status quo or for lowered income taxes?
I think people will cheer for anything, given consistent positive reporting in mass media.
And media is typically not controlled by people owning <$15M.
If you wrap things nicely in populist rethoric and act in the best interests of media owners (i.e. the rich) then detrimental (for the median voter) changes to tax code are trivial to push through. Just compare the 2017 TCJA act, or the current lunacy-in-progress (essentially replacing progressive tax rates with regressive tariffs).
Sure, it would be easy to make people cheer for additional significant taxes for 1-percenters, but that does not really matter because its not gonna happen.
A huge number of people see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and oppose taxes on the ultrawealthy because they think they might one day be ultrawealthy themselves.
The temporarily embarrassed millionaire meme is a punchline to a joke (look at those stupid greedy people they don't know how stupid they are).
Inheritance taxes don't sit well for many reasons that are actually interesting to discuss
+ People's desire to support friends, families and personal interests is a core reason for an individual to work beyond individual self sufficiency. This makes it very easy to empathize with the millionaire impacted by gift / inheritance taxes that may never be applied to you.
+ Taxes have already been paid on this money - double dipping is very easy to cast as unfair.
+ Clumsy implementations of these types of taxes create situations where small family owned farms and businesses need to be liquidated to cover taxes causing more pain and disruption for families.
+ The constant slippery slope of taxes initially targeted at 'the rich' but over time effecting more and more people due to combinations of inflation and revenue seeking.
+ The simple fact that if the US just seized all the wealth of 800+ billionaires today - it would only be worth 6.2 trillion dollars [1], which doesn't even cover the 6.8 trillion dollars the government spent in 2024. So what do we do next year?
Do we need more revenue? Are we getting the revenue the right way (aka is everyone paying their fair share)? Maybe... But there is certainly a spending problem too.
> People's desire to support friends, families and personal interests is a core reason for an individual to work beyond individual self sufficiency.
The fact that the income being taxed is "beyond individual self sufficiency," actually makes it easier to justify taxing. This isn't someone's food budget--it's the extra on top after one's life is fully funded.
> Taxes have already been paid on this money - double dipping is very easy to cast as unfair.
This argument has never made sense. Money gets taxed over and over. It's not like a dollar bill gets taxed once and then you mark it with a pen so it never gets taxed again. Money typically gets taxed when it changes hands: Your company pays you money, it gets taxed. You buy something from a store, that money gets taxed. The store owner issues a dividend to shareholders, it gets taxed. The shareholders get bank interest from that money, it gets taxed. There's nothing unusual about taxing a dollar over and over.
> Clumsy implementations of these types of taxes create situations where small family owned farms and businesses need to be liquidated to cover taxes causing more pain and disruption for families.
This is a sentimental-sounding trope that doesn't really happen in practice. In the USA, inheritance income under $13M doesn't even get taxed at all. This is well outside of the scope of "small farms and businesses." Inheritance, in fact, tends to benefit recipients tax-wise: An heir is allowed to adjust the cost basis of an inherited asset to its market value on the day of the previous owner's death, so that all the previous owner's unrealized capital gains never get taxed. Sitting on $1M of capital gains from your meme stock that you don't want to pay taxes on? Just leave it to your kid in your will--those gains won't be taxed!
The other commenter addressed your other two issues.
The US estate tax specifically got basically bigger exemptions every time it was touched (even adjusting for inflation), and returns have been falling precipitously for basically the last 25 years. If you own less than $13M at death, it does not affect you at all right now.
> The simple fact that if the US just seized all the wealth of 800+ billionaires today - it would only be worth 6.2 trillion dollars
Sure-- but I think this is a bit of a strawman. To me, and a lot of people that argue in favor of wealth/estate taxation, the purpose is not to substitute income taxes (like what Trump wants to achieve with tariffs)-- the goal is to get wealth inequality back under control, not to balance the government budget with those tax returns.
Another perspective on wealth distribution is that the top 1% own a third of the country. In my opinion, if you have enough wealth (and liquid enough wealth) to outright buy an average home at sticker price, then you are part of the problem;
I absolutely don't want to compete with people like that on the housing market, and I don't want them to extract excessive rents from people like me (i.e. not-1%ers) either, but thats exactly what happens right now.
> But there is certainly a spending problem too.
I don't really agree with this. I think (expected) government responsibilities have grown tremendously over the last century (mainly for good reason).
I'm confident in saying the the American-favored approach to healthcare ("everyone takes care of it on their own, and negotiates/pays for it by himself") has completely failed for IMO very clear reasons (demand for healthcare is inelastic and only government can force pricing transparency, prevent collusion and a generally fair provider-market in the first place-- obviously).
I'm also confident that shifting back more pension responsibilities onto citizens themselves is also a bad idea, because it creates extremely bad potential outcomes in case of an economic crash. Government providing a survivable social security baseline is just a very clearly good idea to me.
Those two points (healthcare + social security) account for the vast majority of government budget, I think they are basically a good idea, and cutting costs with foreign aid, research funding, environmental regulation/enforcement etc. has IMO neither the potential to save significantly in the first place, nor is it beneficial to do so by itself (I'd even go so far and call the whole doge initiative a thinly veiled propaganda department for the current administration).
Every sport hits this sort of threshold where they ban optimization. Swimming did it with 'sharkskin' suits and long distance running with Nike's Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes.
Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.
Which is so silly. I would love to watch a sport where all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs and all the equipment is engineered to the very limits of nature. We draw oddly arbitrary lines what is and isn’t ok in sports.
The line isn't purely arbitrary, it's a reflection of the reality of what most people expect from sports: we want them to be a contest of human skill on the part of the athlete, not just the amount of money someone is willing to spend on the team. We also want underdogs to have a chance, which is very hard without some sort of limits.
You could probably accomplish something similar by strictly capping spending per team to force people to do real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but the result would be a very different sport that would appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller) audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.
I don't know enough to know, but my guess would be no. I was thinking of the swimsuit bans—my understanding is that the banned swimsuits are extremely expensive and wear out extremely quickly.
> we want them to be a contest of human skill on the part of the athlete, not just the amount of money someone is willing to spend on the team
This is simply not reflected very well in how professional sports are structured. If this were really a priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing the influence of performance enhancing drugs.
Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting children, but we're already buying and selling humans. How good of an influence was this to begin with?
Can you say more about the impact of private ownership? I don’t watch sports at all, so this is news to me — what are the negative effects? Is it just you get teams with massive funding and others with none?
Yea, and to be fair the leagues try to compensate for this with varying degrees of success by regulating how much you can spend, subsidizing poorer teams, etc.
But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.
(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)
It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.
If I’m understanding correctly, not only do you get teams with massive resources, but also teams treated kind of like clowns to entertain their owner? That really is a crazy situation, lol.
It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:
- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise
- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning
Part of the problem is that it trickles down and affects sport at lower levels. I was an age group swimmer (ages 10-18) when those suits came out. I can't remember exactly but it at least 10x'd the minimal equipment budget for the season. The suits were not only much more expensive but they wore out after a small number of races.
Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff. (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)
In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.
But it wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be a good sport to participate. It would just be blood entertainment for the viewers.
Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable, then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for entertainment of the audience.
Customization of equipment should always be fine unless it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.
Professional sports are all about entertaining the fans. If they can live a gladiator's life and ask "are you not entertained" and want to die in the lions den, then might as well let them.
Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue to have the traditional rules to keep things "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just go full tilt.
If it's really about entertainment, then it has no appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling. Professional sports are interesting because there's something fundamental, something challenging where someone's skill can shine.
> If it's really about entertainment, then it has no appeal. Then you end up with professional wrestling.
Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch. Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.
Only among certain kinds of people. But a European PM doesn't go watch professional wrestling, but if his country is doing well enough in association football and there's nothing incredibly important going on he will go to the match.
This is because winning in this game is seen as an achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement-- after all, there are many world records that nobody cares about.
Did you miss the part where I said other levels of sports could still be available for the more stringent rules? If you don’t like the rules of a professional league, don’t watch.
You’re arguing that others should not be allowed because you don’t like it.
I suspect you've never known anyone who participates in the elite levels of popular sports. They are very rarely having fun.
All the major sports alter their rules every year to increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks, NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL challenges and reviews, etc.
There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident opinions if that's the case.
I've actually even played sports against ex-elite players in the sports they were once among the best in the world in, although it was pretty obvious I had no chance. I've also played other sports with friends who were professional ice hockey players and professional association football players. I think what characterizes them is that they once at a time really hated losing, and you can question whether that is 'having fun' but I do think they were having fun at one point too.
But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least risk injury.
I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive though. They certainly are in tennis.
all the athletes are on cutting edge, dangerously experimental PEDs
The problem here is of course that you probably won't get the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes who feel they have literally no other option in life.
I wouldn't mind custom _diets_ (of normal food) and custom fabricated swim gear... provided the teams all had access to the same training tools before hand.
Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.
> We draw oddly arbitrary lines what is and isn’t ok in sports.
Are you suggesting the rules of sports are a natural property of the universe? It’s all completely arbitrary. That’s kind of the point: we watch people perform these arbitrary tasks and then we celebrate.
There's also a huge list of rules about things you're not allowed to do to make your car faster. F1 is quite far from simply building the fastest car, it's building the fastest car that adheres to this long list of 'arbitrary' rules and regulations.
This stopped being true a long time ago, as the best, fastest machines we could make were very deadly in an accident. If you know about F1, you know that Ayrton Senna, at the moment probably the best driver in the field, died on track. But people forget that he wasn't the only driver that died on that track that weekend: Roland Razemberger died in qualifying the day before! And one could argue that by then, they've already made significant changes to regulations to make the cars safer: Go see what happened when one of the old ground effect cars decided to lift off.
F1's regulations are very strict and completely artificial, just not quite so strict as to allow only 1 car. This is both for safety and cost control. In Schumacher's days, why did ferrari dominate so much? Because they have a private circuit, a much larger budget than anyone, and the racers flew back to the factory to spend long day after long day of testing right next to where the parts where being manufactured. We'd not have a full grid if anyone had to compete with budgets like that
I mean, the "arbitrary" lines are what makes a sport what it is. The reason that you can't pick up the ball and run with it in football (soccer) isn't because they arbitrarily banned this "optimization" after some brilliant coach invented it.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now
The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow
Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and try. The best don't win neccesarily, just who handles the drugs the best
Why would you ask someone reading HN that question? That's like asking a 'roided up athlete if they wanted to rewrite grep in Rust. Ask the athlete if they'd be willing to take PEDs if it would be allowed.
If workers want to work without PPE, then let them. Just ensure that they sign releases acknowledging that the PPE was made available to them and they chose of their own volition to not use it, and that by doing so they release everyone from any liability about what happens to them from not using the PPE.
And whats to stop the industry from only hiring those people and firing everyone who wants protection under the guise of 'They aren't as productive" and going back to 19th century working conditions where people die on the regular to save pennies?
If everyone else is using PPE, but you choose not to wear PPE, there's no empathy to be given. You may think the need for PPE is a hoax, but that's not anyone else's problem if there's a direct repercussion for your actions.
The problem was not offered as your sibling comment as a forced decision. Some people choose to juice, others do not. That same logic applied to if you want to do it, here's the waiver to acknowledge it was your decision. I can feel sorry for someone's family for being related to a dunce, but no empathy is required on my part for the dunce.
okay, so one guy can choose to do it, and have his career burn bright but for a smaller amount of time than the ones that don't juice and extend their careers and life after playing. The ones that juice, will just get little asterisks next to their names in whatever records are kept. But you keep thinking your noggin is the end all be all.
You mean like deport those that do jobs that nobody else wants so we're not trying to lower the ages restrictions for those jobs? Not sure why the hypothetical slope is even necessary. We're doing it to ourselves
No more than I'm willing to drive a race car 200+ mph (i.e. formula 1) nor step in a boxing ring and accumulate a bunch of micro-concussions. But I'll happily tune in for the many that would be willing to do it if the money was right.
Why in the world would this have any bearing on the conversation? What point are you trying to make?
Do you watch sports because of the chance of people dying from accidents and because you know they are risking themselves, or despite it?
If the former, I regret to inform you: you are a psycopath.
If the latter, then please go read some Nassim Taleb and refrain from opining on what is acceptable risks for others unless you yourself are willing to pay for the consequences.
They are available to all teams, financially affordable, do not make the ball dirty, and they lead to more spectacular catches. Why would they consider banning them?
Probably because the overwhelming majority of countries chlorinates their water to various degrees because they don't have the exceptional plumbing quality needed to otherwise guarantee potability.
Countries where the tap water is drinkable without chlorination have quality that exceeds bottled water, and it might even be sourced from the same aquifers.
Two of the most hilarious things I've seen are tips at self-serve kiosks, and tips where you carry the food to the person behind the counter. Tipping them for ringing up an item..
At a corner store I frequent, they recently changed POS systems, and the new ones show a tipping screen. The person there always quickly dismisses it; I think they haven't figured out how to disable it, and are a little embarrassed that the machine is asking you to tip for just ringing up your items.
(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
Sorry for the late reply, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you tip for delivery?
In my area, pizza delivery drivers (read: not DoorDashers, etc. I am not sure what they make since I refuse to use those services) make about $12 - $15/hour and get paid for mileage (usually between $0.50 - $0.62 per mile.) I'm not seeing a reason to tip them. They are making well above minimum wage in my State, unlike the restaurant servers/bartenders that only just barely crested $4/hour as of 2025. The latter is in a position to rely on tips, the former is far from it.
I ask because we don't seem to have an established "hard line" on when tipping is appropriate in the United States, and when it is not. This extremely fuzzy understanding is allowing companies like DoorDash, coffee shops, etc to under pay their staff by off-loading part of the cost to the customer, which makes your $7 latte cost $10, or whatever. It's steamy bullshit and needs to be shoveled into the bin.
If we had a hard line on when tipping is justified, we'd quickly see a change in the other direction. I've always felt that the hard line should be "if you are making less than minimum wage, then tipping is justified." That's it. No soft maybes, no washy-washy justifications.
That being the case, if a barista (avg $15/hour in the US) is not happy _without_ the tips, then they have two options: demand more from their employer, or find a different job that pays better. Either way, the employer is left to consider either raising wages to keep people satisfied, or doing the same just to keep people in the door and stay in business. The barista is, in essence, the face of the company. They do the work the customer sees, which makes them important to the sustainability of the company. Ergo, the company needs to put more resources in the barista's pocket to ensure quality work.
It sort of blows my mind why everyone else in the US does not think this way, but I have tried to dissect my own stance on tipping (from the standpoint of having spent nearly a decade working front-of-the-house in restaurants), and I'm really having trouble poking holes in my own logic. So, I'm always interested to hear other people's takes on why they tip the way they do.
Imagine it’s raining, or they come really fast. Even if not so, it is always expected to tip the person doing delivery. That’s just the custom, like tipping in restaurant or tipping the bartender is the custom.
This is the problem. You basically said "we do it like this because that's the way we've always done it," which is the weakest form of justification for anything.
Rain, snow, etc...do you tip the person who delivers your mail? They do it in an LLV (a rather treacherous vehicle with little to no climate control) or on foot, but nobody tips them. When the pizza delivery person applied for the job, they did so knowing they would have to deliver in bad weather, but somehow we reach the conclusion that the responsibility of making sure that driver is being paid adequately for their risk and efforts is shifted to the customer, rather than than their employer.
Now, I should clarify that despite my years of restaurant service where my $2.65/hour paycheck existed nominally for the sole purpose of covering taxes (hence, my "take home" pay coming directly from the customers to my pocket), that I am in the camp of abolishing tipping altogether. Raise the wages of all service workers to a livable wage, which all these companies can certainly afford, and we'd be done with it. But I know that's a huge leap, so we need to take baby steps to get there.
Having a well-defined notion of which positions should be tip-based and which should not is the first baby step.
Great film, but bad scene, honestly. The arguments it makes are intended to make Mr Pink look like the pseudo-intellectual a-hole of the group, rather than be the social commentary on capitalism, labor relations and whose responsibility employee compensation actually is or should be, which is at the crux of any good discussion about the appropriateness of tipping.
I guess what I am getting at with my other comments is that we do not have a clear understanding of said appropriateness, and thus, we, the consumer, along side the food service worker, are generally taken advantage of by the companies that perpetuate the idea while said companies are off the hook for labor costs.
Now, before someone (if anyone is still following this thread) chimes in with "but if the restaurants pay the bartenders/servers a full wage, the food and drinks would be way more expensive!" I am here to tell you "travel more." I have been to many other countries where tipping is not at all a thing, and the food costs about the same as it does in the US.
When you walk into a restaurant in the US, you're getting ripped off. The dish you just paid $16US for cost them about $3 to make, including wage. It's not like the cooks are prepping one dish at a time, or the servers are only taking one table at a time...not to mention most restaurants in the US are using frozen, prepared ingredients that they are really just heating up or re-hydrating. Overhead costs like electricity and rent? A drop in the bucket compared to what small businesses have to deal with. The staff is making bare-minimum wages as it is while the parent companies and investors are making bank. That money from your $16US meal goes up, but very little of it actually comes back down.
Tipping exists because greed at the top exists and its unfair to both food service workers and the customers, but we've been at it so long that it's been normalized. And now it's spreading to other industries, like retail and online sales.
To be honest, this is part of why TVs can be offered for so cheap these days. Same reason really cheap phones are stuffed with bloatware.
Luckily with TVs you can freeload: just never connect it to the internet and only apply updates via USB. Stick an Apple TV / Chromecast / console into it for playback. This might even become standard operating procedure considering Samsung is getting into the ad game, and LG and Sony likely to follow.
It'll be a cold day in hell when I believe corporate lies that they're doing all of this for my benefit. Especially when they neither clearly disclose all the ads and spying before purchase, nor offer an option without it at any price.
Also when they add these "features" to TVs that were purchased without them.
Like how would it be received if the builder of your house could come in and put up ad murals on your walls without asking? Would we accept "it subsidizes costs" as an answer?
I bought a Philips many years ago, and it was perfect until an update suddenly gave me a lot of crap (ads) on the home screen.
Ironically they also provided a button where I could "adjust what you see on the home screen", but it turned out I could only add more crap. Not take anything away.
It's annoying, because it is not the same product I bought. It's worse.
I don’t know how much longer that will be possible with how cheap 5G is getting. Sooner or later they’ll be able to install a $10 part and make a deal with wireless carriers as backhaul for unconnected TVs. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already made a deal with Spectrum or XFinity to use those open wifi networks that are open to customers via their account signin.
The best solution is commercial displays but those can be quite a bit more expensive and hard to pick out.
This idea doesn't bother me at all. I won't buy any TV for which I cannot disable the 5G antenna with basic tools by following a simple procedure described on some website.
If said TV won't work without 5G connectivity, it goes on my "Do Not Buy" list.
Good for you? What if you won't be able to find any tv that works without cryptographically signed periodic online check-ins.
Sure we could all try to ignore the horrors of modern society and move to a cabin in the woods (and then get to know our local mailmen when we find out that even that isn't enough) but perhaps it would be better and take a stand now while we can.
> I don’t know how much longer that will be possible with how cheap 5G is getting. Sooner or later they’ll be able to install a $10 part and make a deal with wireless carriers as backhaul for unconnected TVs.
I had a really snarky reply to this, about how I'd just crack it open and remove the sim card, warranty be damned. Then I realized that even sim cards are going away, that's all done in software on the latest phones (no doubt an option soon for everything). Sorta fucked, I wish you were wrong.
But the TV functionality does not have to work if one does that?
We should really have laws that makes it illegal to not function without connectivity.
Adding 5G today increases the BOM by 10$-30$ in volume production.
Keep in mind that the tv already has ethernet and wifi to ISP controlled networks. Basically almost every consumer ISP offer mandatory includes an ISP managed gateway, that can pre-certify your appliances or operate hidden ssid networks or "public" wifi access point to the ISP's network. So "smart" appliance operators only need deals with a few big ISPs to get this reach, no 5G required.
With less than a dozens deals you would cover most of the US and EU.
I fathom with 5G RedCap you can drive a low cost BOM and pair it with a "reduced capacity" yet still fairly moderate speed (up to 100mbps) 5G service.
Market the 5G as "always connected" to the customer. Free 720p streaming, a "plus" OTT platform that costs $10/mo that gives 1080p streaming over cellular (and 4K on traditional internet - advertise the 5g as a backup in this case).
Ads sold at an upcharge to the advertiser to reach the "always targetable" smart TV. Hit 'em hard with the ads to pay it.
> Basically almost every consumer ISP offer mandatory includes an ISP managed gateway
Is that really true? I never thought Internet subscriptions would require use of ISP's own device. I for sure have been using my own DSL modem/router/wlan device for my own connections (EU).
Providers are (I believe) required to let you bring your own equipment. Every DSL or cable service I've seen has allowed this.
However, it is also required that the modem you plug into the network accepts and runs firmware provided solely by the network operator. They can update your device at any time and there's nothing you can do about it.
So yeah, you can run your own hardware if you want, but the ISP will run their software on it whether you like it or not.
Definitely not the case. How would the firmware even end up in the device, which protocol delivers it? And which ISP would have the expertise to patch a collection of random devices in the network?
> I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already made a deal with Spectrum or XFinity to use those open wifi networks that are open to customers via their account signin.
I’m skeptical an arrangement like this could work. The authentication mechanism would be interesting enough to attract security researchers and likely open anonymous Internet access that may undermine any potential benefit gained from viewer data. I could be wrong but I hope not.
I knew a guy who basically got internet access at his apartment in college via his local DOT. The message signs on the boulevard he worked on were just cellular mifi units with open or default credentials. Not super fast, but the price was right.
I once got a few years of free broadband Internet because I signed up for broadband plus basic cable, but they never put broadband on my bill. They came and did the installation and everything. Then when it eventually shut off, I called them back to complain and they said they had no record of me being a broadband customer, so I was able to sign up for the lower new customer rate.
At the same time, my TV had a built in digital tuner that could tune into the on-demand streams of other people in my neighborhood. I could watch as the paused/rewind/etc. The watching trends were interesting. Late nights you'd see soft-core adult movies, Saturday mornings you'd see lots of kid's shows.
> The message signs on the boulevard he worked on were just cellular mifi units with open or default credentials. Not super fast, but the price was right.
That's more clever than my reuse story. I repurposed an outdoor AP into a client bridge and pointed at the nearby walmart. I had it feeding an unlocked AP and a yagi pointing into the neighborhood.
I ran it for a year without getting my door kicked in.
I think it’s only a matter of time until TVs refusing to work without internet or randomly interrupting your watching experience to ask you to connect to the internet.
Heck, they can even learn from Microsoft now and demand a Vizio account, iPhone apps, etc.
Additionally they could start producing them without HDMI or other ports to prevent Apple TV or other similar devices from connecting.
What I’m trying to say is that corporate greed is limitless and the only thing that can prevent abuse will be strict regulations at the end of day.
I hate this as much as you, but don't agree regulation is the only solution. In part because it tends to get things wrong, skew markets, favour incumbents and ultimately retard innovation by startup efforts like mine.
When a company treats its customers like crap, that opens an opportunity for someone else to come along and do better.
Corporations are copying each other's bad habits right now, the kind of behavior you've described is a trend and the ones partaking in this race to the bottom will fail. I'm looking forward to a "revolution" when one rediscovers there's actually a market for quality consumer electronics that treat you decently and are a joy to use (think Apple's earlier iPhone models, auto manufacturers going back to knobs and buttons, etc) and might pursue this myself if nobody else does.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to legislation enforcing some basic, much-needed principles (like privacy preservation, requiring opt-in consent, attaching more liability to collected user data even to the point of establishing fiduciary-like duty on the sensitive stuff, stricter transparency and better user controls promoting consumer choice). I just think you need to be careful about getting too prescriptive on the "how".
> Luckily with TVs you can freeload: just never connect it to the internet and only apply updates via USB. Stick an Apple TV / Chromecast / console into it for playback
With things like Amazon sidewalk, Samsung smartthings network, etc. it can still get data out
Wouldn't the data be a lot less useful to them? Instead of 'customer watched X show for Y minutes' it'd be 'customer X watched Y minutes of unknown on HDMI1'.
A low res, low quality jpeg once a minute or N seconds into a scene transition is quite small. I think audio fingerprinting can be effective and very low bandwidth as well.
I recall reading a few years back about some crapware that opportunistically would attempt connecting through any available AP (e.g. your neighbor) and smuggle data that way.
Buying Studio grants a lifetime license to the current major version only. It's just that DaVinci has been upgrading everyone for free with every major update. They can stop doing that at any moment.
Not that they'll ever do that. Resolve / Studio is their loss-leader product to pull people into their very premium camera ecosystem.
No, that is completely wrong and would be nuts. The only way the whole session gets elevated is if you'd launch explorer.exe with an admin token.
The way privilege escalation works on Windows is that pretty much everything gets launched with a standard user access token by default, and processes can request an admin access token in a few ways, UAC being the main one. When a process is supplied that token, that process is elevated.
It is more akin to 'sudo' rather than 'su', which makes sense because its progenitor is 'runas' from Windows 2000.
(Only) the process is elevated, but the process has a window on a shared session, and the OS does not successfully protect processes that share a session (and user, and registry, and disk, etc., etc.) from controlling each other.
From an API point of view, only one process is elevated. From a security point of view, if one process is elevated they all are, due to a lack of any effective mechanism that actually stops them.
No, even then there are things like Mandatory Integrity Control and Windows Message Restrictions / UIAccess. I'd dive into to deeper but I just got home from going out haha. Those terms should help you dig into it though!
I do fully agree that desktop OSes are a legacy security model and they can't hold a candle to that of iOS. Android is getting there, but because it also started from mostly an open all-access model it's been having the same warts.
It's not really a fundamental problem if plastic was only used for things that are meant to stay whole a long time. Say an RFID tag or a piece of trim on a car.
Currently we put supermarket-made perishable salads in a plastic container, we wrap the container in plastic, we put a plastic strip lid on it, and we put the oil and nuts in two separate plastic wrappers inside the plastic container. That is ludicrous insanity for something that perishes in a couple of days max.
Your point was that Microsoft "gives a couple of hoots" about which platform Gamepass is on, implying that they specifically care about making Gamepass not accessible on Linux. Them having a guide for Gamepass access on Linux proves the opposite.
But you're just nitpicking looking for an argument. So, goodbye.
No they won't. OEMs will do that to put the 10% higher number on the box ('OC edition!'), but undervolting / powerlimiting has become increasingly popular. Taking a 2-5% haircut on clock frequency lets you reduce power draw by 20-50% for a 1-3% haircut in performance. Suddenly your CPU and GPU are whisper quiet on aircooling.