Overzeetop

The point is that the designer gets paid once, at the time if design, and the car companies make as many copies as they want without paying an additional penny. Anyone who buys a car never pays an extra penny to the designers no matter hire many times they use the car (analogous to watching a movie or show multiple times).

But let’s take you’re argument- that it costs money to make a copy. All modern cars are filled with software - entertainment, operations, video processing, communications, autopilot. Afaik, no programmers at Ford are getting residuals for the number of times their startup menu plays, or the fuel injectors modulate for a different mix of fuel.

The crux is how these creators get paid - as a fee, or with a speculative, contractually-agreed rate. We’re somehow appalled when one field doesn’t get residuals they want, but other fields never get them at all.

Doesn’t matter how many times it’s sold or how many miles it’s driven - the engineers never see another dime. The only people who get money along the way are providing gasoline, parts, or repairs.

Exactly. Now, how much are the engineers who worked on the design of all of the 2008 Ford Focus are getting paid quarterly based on the number of miles driven in 2008 Ford Focuses in 2022?

Your passport contains biometric data (your photo - not as complete as a depth scan or multi-spectral image, but still biometric).

There are two (well, threeish, legitimate) reasons for biometric. First, it is currently harder to fake. Digital passports are difficult but not impossible and non-digital are relatively easy, especially for state actors. Second people are stupid (or unlucky) and lose their passports, which leads to a shit-ton of paperwork to fix. Third, and this is really the rule for which lost docs are a sub-problem, efficiency. Even the cheapest front-line human costs about $100 an hour, including management, training, benefits, etc and I’ve yet to meet an international (or domestic) traveler who enjoys waiting in hour+ lines to get through passport control. Less contact time / zero friction interfaces are both better for passenger attitude and cost efficiency.

Until we stop the practice of drawing imaginary lines on the planet and regulating which side each person is allowed to be on, nearly every travelers and pretty much all the boarder control apparatus is going to want to spend as little time and money on one another as possible.

From a practical perspective? They could eventually cross reference the exits to arrivals, automatically flagging those who have overstated their visa (or, more specifically, automatically clearing those who have left). The data (exit data) is generally useful for all sorts of mundane statistical work. From an automation standpoint it’s both cost effective and time saving. Anyone who’s queued up in an hour+ line to get through border patrol will attest that the prices can be infuriatingly slow.

Of course, that the data can be used for non-official or privacy-adverse uses doesn’t make the collection ok, but that fact also doesn’t mean that the data isn’t useful for its overly intended purpose (automated tracking of everyone who leaves)

Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn't. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it's simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.

Though exclusively single player, ABZU is also a nice, atmospheric game as well.

Esp. when you get to the Blood and Wine expansion. The stars at night are beautiful.

Dell Precision line for computers. They are not light. They are not slim. They are not fashionable. They can probably stop a bullet. Dell is still actively still selling (refurb'd) units from ~6 Intel generations ago. The desktop workstations are similarly bulletproof.

Facebook Messenger is probably the closest thing to a modern Yellow Pages as we have. Not everybody is on there, but most people are - even if they haven't checked their profile in years. With the fall of landlines, it can be the easiest (or only) way to find/contact someone - especially if you're a GenX or early Millennial because we have all dropped out landlines, but we created most of our social connections before any other messaging service existed. Heck, almost none of the people I knew from college in the 90s even had an email address that they stuck with (assuming I actually had email logs going back thirty years). It's nice that so many message services exist, but most have no way to "look someone up" the way it's possible to do on something like messenger/fb. (admittedly - it's both good and bad)

I suppose there's a chance that LinkedIn is the other major database of real names out there; I've never tried it for locating people.

Well, you have to expect it due to the increased cost of (checks notes) storage and data transfer?