Yeah, Verbatim still remains… For now.

Oh that’s right - I forgot that the drives were slowly going disco too. Bleak indeed.

I have bad news for you - Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung have all stopped production on BR-R discs.

Well last time we had the deplorable, violent racists trying to run the show, they had to be crushed into submission - so maybe, yeah. They must be shown that their vile ideas and actions have consequences. CLEARLY they haven’t received enough consequences lately, given their utter lack of shame in <current year>. When it really comes down to it, I’d bet their small minority can’t possibly put up a large enough fighting force willing to stick their necks our for racism anyways, certainly none of the octogenarian monsters at the top.

He just accepted a gold bar and Rolex in exchange for removing tariffs on Switzerland. Even if that were a 1 kilo gold bar, that’s $160,000. He got all his tech goons to contribute $1M to his inauguration.

I’m certainly not forgetting, but in the interest of brevity, I decided not to detail out the hundreds of different ways Diaper Don has been bribed or otherwise fleeced his loyal idiots.

I read she made $30M from the film - that’s pretty shockingly obscene compared to all the big tech innaguration bribes - of “only” $1M.

You’re definitely right about them prohibiting devs from pointing to a web browser to subscribe. They can’t link, can’t even use language that explains WHY you can’t subscribe in the app (if the dev decides to forego using Apples payment system entirely). I think that THIS was what Apple recently was forced by a judge to relax, after the Apple v Epic case.

I must have been conflating the policy that they ABSOLUTELY did have (but only til 2011) and the outside links issue. Hughes Hubbard

Under the February rules, if developers wanted to use content purchased outside of the app, they also had to offer the content for in-app purchase and it had to be offered at the same price or less than it was offered elsewhere, despite the fact that Apple takes a 30% cut.

Macrumors

Apple has quietly changed its guidelines on the pricing of In-App Subscriptions on the App Store. There are no longer any requirements that a subscription be the “same price or less than it is offered outside the app”.

Apple doesn’t allow this - they expect your price to be the same everywhere or they’ll remove the app from their store or decline version updates. There have historically been a few high profile exceptions privately negotiated, and I think they were forced to relax this in the last year or two, but here they are again trying to claw away money they did literally nothing to earn.

I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people that could give a shit less about me. Probably throwing parlays. Fuck you guys."

I mean, I appreciate him taking a stand here. But I’m not really sure what he thinks his day job even is? MMA ticket prices for floor seats can be around $1,500, options up into the $10,000 range.

It’s funny - before I actually clicked that link, I assumed it was Sony bricking PSP devices with custom firmware. I’d entirely forgotten they put ROOT KITS on their music CDs. They didn’t get in near enough trouble over that.

So you read all of that, and came away with “checks out”? If they were technically correct, maybe. But the way their post was stated, they implied the colonies were freaking out over a tax cut that benefited them. Instead, it was the age old tradition of cutting taxes for the wealthy and continuing to tax the Americans disproportionately.

I haven’t read every single comment, but yours is the first I’ve found that eliminates presidential immunity. One of the most important things we can do is close up all the loopholes these vile billionaires have located and abused and this is definitely a big one. Use the powers granted to the president to codify real progress, then shut down the ability for a president to crown himself king permanently and throw away the key.

I never did get too into PVP - I did enough arena to get a bunch of low hanging achievements and always enjoyed the occasional casual battleground, especially when there was a lot of downtime between patches… But otherwise PVE was my jam.

I think it’s a pretty easy call for me - World of Warcraft raiding was some of the most fun I’ve ever had gaming. The pinnacle was probably when my guild got Realm First! Fall of the Lich King (25-man heroic). We spent MONTHS grinding away at it - we had the 10-man realm first achievement as well and could clear heroic with a variety of group comps, 2 or 3 groups per week would run on off-raid nights. But for 25-man heroic, we could clear the rest of the raid in 2-3 hours as I recall, so we’d take some swings at him on night 1 and then we’d spend 2 full raid nights on The Lich King - the final boss of Ice Crown Citadel raid and in fact the final boss of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

For SEVEN months we did this. He was tough af. He had a number of abilities where a single person fucks up and either the whole raid wipes immediately, or it rapidly snowballs out of control otherwise. So after a month’s long uphill fight, and with competing guilds just as close as we were, it was an INSANE moment when we got our realm first kill. It was such a ridiculous high, everyone screaming with relief and excitement. The realm second kill happened that same night, too - so we just narrowly managed to earn our server first kill.

We continued with realm firsts in the Cataclsym expansion on Sinestra, Ragnaros, and Deathwing. I got my first and only legendary weapon - Dragonwrath this expansion. And finally the Mists of Pandaria expansion was the beginning of the end for our guild as a lot of long time players like myself started falling off, so after earning #1 for the first raid tier, things slipped from there. I had a ton of personal victories in game too - after earning Dragonwrath, the most esteemed of all was earning the achievement Insane in the Membrane.

And yet - none of those other victories remotely compared to that first kill of the Lich King. It was truly a special moment.

He thinks we’re both the same. Problem is, violence comes predominantly from the right - that’s why they did exactly what he wanted, and why the left is not. That, and education I guess.

What in the fuck is happening. I’m disgusted that we have this plague of racism in 2025.

Sorry, you’re well out of the loop on this one, boss. Sideloading has been common practice for thousands? millions? of users since the beginning of android. There are plenty of apps not listed on Google Play - the ones that come top mind are Fortnight for a time and now the Epic Games Store app, and some VPN apps that couldn’t offer features like ad/malware blocking in their Play store versions. Sideloading means downloading an executable install file (an .APK file in this case) rather than installing from Google Play. And they are SEVERELY limiting this ability next year.

It’s really funny to me that we’re having these conversations all over again. I had the Moto Z back in 2016 and it was almost half a mm thinner than the 2025 iPhone Air. (As always, here’s Apple still playing catchup, a decade later this time.)

I honestly didn’t mind it - the Moto Z had a Moto Mods battery that snapped on the back (in a MUCH more elegant manner than Apple’s magsafe battery implementation in my opinion) and so I always knew that was an option if the battery life became a concern over time. And I loved that the extended battery made the back of the phone perfectly flush with the camera bump too, so if you elected to add battery life, it was literally what we’ve all asked for the whole time: Just make it thicker and add battery. But if you didn’t need extended battery life, then you had a razer thin phone (and a camera bump), probably the thinnest I had until the Fold7 at 4.2mm.

I wish that Motorola’s solution had stuck, because they solved this problem already, meanwhile everybody is here reinventing the wheel over and over again in 2025. 🤦

I feel like all the responses you’re getting are probably generally correct in the context of wind at/near ground level. But I feel like sticking a bunch of these in a JET STREAM is (maybe?) an entirely different matter. Or at least it could be, and I too am curious what the potential ramifications are.

Jet stream winds are not just wind like any other, are they? Various jet streams have serious impacts on weather. If they harnessed and substantively bled off the Pacific jet stream, are there potentially grave consequences on the already variable El Niño and La Niña oscillation? If it could cause serious shifts in the weather, that would affect the livability of areas, create more dangerous weather conditions, and impact farming way around the globe from their wind farm installation.

Maybe none of these are genuine scientific concerns, but frankly I don’t trust China to do the science for the rest of us. Pretending these are genuine concerns, say they screw something up - it probably doesn’t too seriously impact Chinese weather as they harness the jet stream winds right at the point where it leaves their airspace. But the ramifications for the rest of the world could then be dire, and I’m not sure that is remotely a concern for them. Could be an economic advantage even. Two birds, one stone.