Each 7-11 in Japan has one of those big business multicopiers. You can copy, print, scan, fax. The printing is sweet because it does photo printing on glossy paper, but also laser printing up to A3 size or even making custom post cards. They also have databases of paid content like sheet music and stuff you can print. I prefer Lawson/FamilyMart though since they also have sticker printing!
Exactly like vinyl!
This is why when when CDs originally came out, the industry kept saying "soon CDs will be super cheap since they're so much cheaper than manufacturing tapes!" (which really DO need to be dubbed linearly, even though they can be done at like 10x speed in digital high-speed dubbers) before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.
This is also why they kept trying to make laserdisc (and RCA's CED) be a thing, since they were cheaper to mass manufacture by stamping than prerecorded video tape's slow dubbing process. It was thought that prerecorded video tapes were always going to be too expensive (originally they were like $100 a tape, hence the rise of video rental stores)
Some things make more sense with additional context. Like, Europe was on the PAL standard while Japan was on NTSC, so even if you put them both in the same region, they couldn't watch each other's discs, so the region code could be re-used without it actually conflicting.
Usually it's because they have a distribution deal with a local TV station in that country where the deal prohibits them from distributing it themselves. The local station wants you to watch it on their own streaming service. That would also explain why it's mostly English-speaking countries since nowhere else would carry an English-centric news show like this.
I just googled "YouTube region block checker" and there were a bunch of results, I used the first one https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/
Pressed discs (like movies) are physically... pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.
Pressed discs have a completely different manufacturing method
It's available in my non-US country. Probably there's some local deal wherever you are (edit: using a restrictions checker app, the link is only blocked in Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, and Iceland, and available everywhere else)
They also go out of their way to put up whole episodes for non-US viewers (these are not available in the US) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCRySbsLKiA
Every car I've driven with keyless ignition (which seems to be the standard now) refuses to lock if it detects the key inside the car, even if you try to do it manually by pressing the lock button, so hopefully this is a solved problem now.
I've honestly never heard of self-locking cars doors, that's a crazy idea.
Not just "US fuckers". These countries have also announced plans to bring AC units: Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Germany, Japan, Greece, Denmark and Australia
There was an updater for iTunes or something for MacOS X that would wipe out your home directory if your hard disk had a space in its name. The default name for the Mac hard disk from the factory is "Macintosh HD".
They're not banning people (like Steam may), just telling you to resubscribe in your new country.
until whatever VR app has a plug in for every thing you’d want to do on your phone
Isn't that the big difference with Apple's visionOS vs the other VR headsets? It's basically iPadOS, where you can run multiple apps at the same time and move windows around, without anything needing to know what else is going on, and everything uses the standard window and widgets toolkits. Unlike the Meta Quest, which is basically SteamOS where you're switching between Unity games that take over the whole device and they all have to re-invent the world with slightly different controls and everything.
"A couple of days" seems like the worst of both worlds - it needs to be charged often, but not on a fixed schedule, so you have to keep tabs on the battery and plan ahead.
Personally I just have a charger on my night stand and charge it every night alongside my phone. It's an easy routine and I don't want to sleep with a watch on anyway (smart or not) since when I do I eventually get a rash on my wrist.
For those who want to do sleep tracking, they need to speed up charging so that the "charging while I take a shower" works for those of us who take shorter showers
My experience is that the tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwaters are the places with the cheapest plans, and places like Germany and Canada have the worst ones.
RCS was designed to be implemented by the carriers, but all the carriers tried it, failed to gain any traction, and dropped support again, so now the only server is the Google one which is used automatically by the Google messaging app (which, to their credit, does support encryption, through a proprietary extension which they are now allowing Apple to use as well)
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU action to reign in a US company
FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).
ChatGPT is a separate, opt-in feature for the generative text stuff that’s integrated into the text fields. The on-device and private cloud models used to work with your private data for search and interacting with apps are Apple’s own.
The data is unavailable to Apple.