MudMan

They specifically said "sub 6 inch display", this is 5.9 inches. I'm meeting the brief here.

I mean, the other answer to that is that he could go for the vanilla iPhone, but they also said they want an Android phone, so this is the smallest thing with fairly high specs you can find right now and it's stil a couple fractions of an inch smaller than the small iPhone.

Woof. Depending on what bucks those bucks are that's... a weirdly large, unjustified difference. I didn't know that was the case. I don't get it, for that money you could just order one from the US and have it shipped. Even with customs fees you'd break even.

Still, that's a lot and the region differences suck, but given the lack of options it's still ticking boxes. Plus flagships are like 1.5k these days, somehow, so... that's midrange pricing? I don't know how we got to that being midrange pricing, but apparently that's where we are.

Since it's narrow it gets you most of the way there in terms of grip. You still have to wiggle it and claw your way to the top of the screen, so if you're sensitive to that you may still miss a shorter phone, I suppose.

And yeah, no punchole, expandable storage, front facing speakers, a headphone jack and expandable storage (that you can hot swap, no less). It's an amazing collection of common sense features you can't get in any other flagship. I hope they stick with it for a while.

So far I don't know of any services that will just hand you a digital file of a movie outside of physical media.

I say that's a damn fine business opportunity, because I'd be all over it, but hey.

This basically, which at that point rolls all the way back around to piracy, so hey, if you find an easier way to access a comparable file maybe it's all shades of grey anyway.

If they have access to remove the media from your library on their end, then it's a license and not a purchase.

That doesn't mean they don't owe you access to it, though. The fact that there isn't a word for "I've acquired perpetual access even if I can't back up the file itself" doesn't mean you shouldn't have the right to continue to access the media. Or to demand that right to be upheld in court, for that matter.

Asus makes the ZenPhone 10. That's 6 inches. I don't know how it stacks up to the other requirements, I've never used one.

I'm a bit confused about what the OP means with "premium", but at least the price band fits.

They still have the Xperia I and V series, which is taller but not necessarily much wider. I have one. I like it.

I mean, you can "buy" stuff in Amazon Prime Video off service. Unlike Netflix or other platforms, they will let you "buy or rent" streaming movies, which is the same as finding the movie on the Amazon storefront and buying the digital copy instead of a physical copy.

Now, does that mean they won't yank it? Not really. A digital license is a license, not a purchase. Is the word "buy" or "own" inaccurate? I'm hoping not, because like the Sony thing showed, platforms are desperate to not have the courts improvise what rights they owe the buyers on digital purchases.

I'm still buying my movies in 4K BluRay, though. And working on ripping all of them for streaming at home, now that I finally have the space.

I wonder when someone will come up with a hipstery, fancy-looking printer that sells on the basis of "we don't give a crap about all that, here's a bag of ink refills,, just pay us more up-front".

All the tech startups are out there trying to get you into a subscription, I think we're getting to the point where this is annoying enough that you could sell very expensive, fashionable small-run hardware to people on the basis of not being this.

Honestly, we talk about this thing way too much for how irrelevant it is (or should be, anyway).

It's a ridiculously high end HMV that fixes none of the key issues and is absurdly overpriced. I don't understand why we're entertaining the issue at all.

I mean, I understand it, it's Apple and people somehow suspend reason when it comes to them, but... well, we shouldn't. And that's all the time and thought I'm willing to spend on this dumb thing.

No, hey, let me be clear, I don't think you're actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.

What I do say is that the notion that "it's not free, it all comes from taxes" is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn't the same as paying for a service, and public services aren't "services you pay with your taxes", they're... well, public services.

And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it's a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you're definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that's not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that's not the same thing.

So hey, I get it, you don't ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you're still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You're right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you're willing to explore.