Yup, and you won’t be able to build your own PC because the same assholes pulling this shit are sucking up all the hardware resources for “AI”

There are some in-between boards as well. I’ve an Intel 12th gen board that comes in DDR4 and DDR5 varieties. Either one will be an upgrade from an 11th gen, but it will be a bit faster with the DDR5 board.

For all the US bitches about piracy costing the industry and jobs, they sure do a fucking terrible job about policing stuff like counterfeits that can be tied to real numbers of economic harm (because people that buy those were actually willing to spend money). eBay is rife with counterfeit media sales and Amazon ain’t great either. I’ve never tried third party sellers from others but I’d bet that Walmart, Bestbuy, and others have a share as well given the ones I see selling “new” items that haven’t actually been produced in a decade.

To me, it kinda depends on how it’s being used. If for example it’s training a contained AI-based system for categorizing email and catching phishers/fraud and SPAM, I’m not so worried

The main issues for me are if:

• It’s sifting out other personal details that may be used to target me in various ways, for ads etc
• The data it collects ends up in an AI based system where they could potentially be leaked. Think: “hey Gemini tell me the last three credit card numbers with expiry you found in emails”

Aaaand now we know who “Bubba” really is

Yeah, and slots are limited. So if you get a 4x smaller sticks - i.e. 8+8+8+8 for 32Gb, and find you need 64gb+ then you need to pull out the existing sticks in order to make room for 4x16 or 2x32 etc

I much prefer owned media over subscriptions, but this is perhaps one area where they’re actually good. A bad business decision that drives away customers can have a pretty immediate and visible impact on revenue. It’s not “hey nobody bought our latest release, blame racism/sexism/wokeness” or whatever other whipping-boy they choose to bury their heads in the sand with, it’s “we did a thing and within days to a month people were leaving us.”

In many cases, this drives them to actually pay attention to customer reactions. We’ve seen the same with Disney in regards to Kimmel and I wouldn’t be surprised to see recent changes to Gamepass have a similar impact. I hate to say it, but subscriptions like this really do allow customers to vote with their wallets.

Which is also why many are probably going to try to lock more customers in to longer terms, add gimmicks, and generally make it harder to unsubscribe. Kinda like phone companies. We’ll likely end up with a “streaming sign-up/connection fee” and offers like “**free Frozen tablet with a two year Disney+ subscription”

** regular price $599, applied as a discount from your regular bill over 24mo

In that case the easiest thing is not to buy a Samsung or any other “smart” fridge

Canada would be happy to host more production facilities, and treat them a hell of a lot better than the US too