Expect specialist “open” hardware capable of installing any software/OS to become increasingly expensive, while increasingly locked-down, mass-produced consumer hardware remains at current price. You only need to look at TVs for an example of this - try finding a recent non-smart TV at a reasonable price as the cheap models are all subsidised by the revenue from pushing ads into your face.

Spidermәn

That wasn’t intended as a correction. Mastered is definitely correct. Tamed is a bit more poetic maybe.

Tamed

Yeah, I don’t think I would be playing the game if crashing had real-world consequences.

Then I will have my encryption program make the encrypted data look like text/images/whatever…

Taking a stroll past the knife factory.

For me its: “There are two ways I could go about this and there’s no way I could possibly be expected to choose which one”. I guess thats just a variant of top left though.

When I saw the trailer to Shutter Island, a film about a detective trying to solve a murder at a mysterious and secluded mental institution, I immediately guessed that the twist was going to be that the detective was actually a patient the whole time. This made me decide that I didn’t need to watch it and I never looked up a plot summary so I’ve no idea if I’m right.

In the UK we at least still have most of the residual EU consumer protection law in place, so a lot of this kind of stuff that’s common in the US would be illegal here. That said, companies still manage to innovate new ways to screw the consumer all the time.

I’ve often thought it would be fun to get a big group of Flat-Earthers involved in a scientific project to ‘prove’ that the Earth is flat. They’re not allowed to rely on any existing science that might be biased towards ‘Big Globe’ so they have to start from scratch using simple instruments. Using existing maps and GPS are definitely out of the question. Have them conduct cartographic surveys and take astronomical measurements so that they can show that reality is inconsistent with a round Earth. Basically, see how long you can keep them going for before their brains break.