Yeah. That really jumped out at me. My very first thought was “Americans have privacy protections?” Since Roe v Wade was overturned, Americans have basically no right to privacy.

$3M to a single person. The real headline should be that this opens the door for hundreds of thousands of similar lawsuits, which will use this case as precedent.

FUCK CLASS ACTIONS! Those are made to cater to the defendant, by consolidating a ton of independent lawsuits into a single one. It only makes the defendant’s job easier, while the individuals who were directly affected get a few nickels and a “we’re legally obligated to say we’re sorry” letter. Sue them directly, and make them defend every. Single. Individual. Case. You want to really make them hurt? The best way to do that is with a million individual lawsuits, not one big lawsuit.

Yeah, a “torrented” cassette? That’s called bootlegging or ripping, depending on how you recorded it onto the cassette.

Bootlegging is setting the recorder up against the radio and hoping your parents/siblings stayed quiet long enough for you to record the whole song. Or maybe you simply abandoned the idea of getting a clean bootleg, and recorded a mixtape where you added your own commentary/sang along/etc.

Ripping was running the audio signal directly from the radio into a cassette recorder, bypassing the whole “room noise” issue entirely.

Of course, every radio recording (regardless of whether it was bootlegged or ripped) would always have a few seconds of the goddamned DJ talking over the beginning/end of the track.

And CD piracy was a big deal back when consumer-grade CD burners first hit the market. I remember my dad checking CD albums out at the library and using his dedicated burning setup to copy the albums. He built an entire desktop with the express purpose of ripping CDs for himself and his friends. It had one CD drive, and like five or six burner drives right below it. So he could make five or six copies at the same time. He’d keep two copies (one for the house, one for his truck) and then the rest would get passed around to his friends. He even made custom CD labels with printable CD-shaped adhesive stickers, so he could peel the album art off of the page and stick it directly to the CD. He had a template saved that let him print out like four labels at once.

This was basically the concept behind Cost Plus Drugs. Mark Cuban realized he could sell generic drugs at a basic 15% markup and $10 pharmacy+shipping, and drastically undercut the competition. Their drug prices literally list the breakdown of manufacturing cost, 15% markup, $5 pharmacy labor, and the $5 shipping on each page.

He has been blunt that the business isn’t really about lowering drug prices. That is certainly a bonus, but he’s not doing it to be magnanimous. He simply realized that the markup on drug prices was so mind-bogglingly absurd (oftentimes over 2500% markup) that he could undercut the market by thousands of dollars and still make a tidy 15% profit.

Patient drug prices in the US are insane, and he is simply exploiting that fact to undercut everyone else on the market.

That’s a shame, because KH2 is pretty widely regarded as the best in the series. If you stopped with Chain of Memories, I wouldn’t blame you. The gameplay for that one is definitely… Uhh… Divisive. But KH2 was when the series really hit its stride.

It’s the reporter’s profile picture:

Not sure why the article chose that as the thumbnail, but it definitely got a chuckle from me.

Fair warning, Bowflex dumbbells are under an active recall. You should check and see which model you have.

Probably the part where keeping everything local would allow the driver to easily bypass the device. Splice a few wires, and boom. But if it is doing some off-site verification, they’ll be able to immediately know if the device is disabled. Similarly, they could do things like monitor the car’s location in real time, and have it throw up a red flag if the car is moving but the driver hasn’t performed a test. That would be a sign of tampering.

It also allows them to know if the driver fails the test, which is important for probation/parole reasons, where not drinking is often a condition of release. So if they fail the test, it should automatically alert their supervising officer. Can’t do that if it’s all local.