jj4211

I'd research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn't buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don't want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an 'advanced alternative', ok, but that isn't going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can't do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don't have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

So in my case (I didn't want to, but not my choice, but at least it was cheap and without subscription at the time), it was about the water cooling/warming. It's really nice and essentially inaudible.

I think Chilipad is a brand that does it without the online bullshit, though I didn't get to try that.

None of this should ever require an internet connection, and it's abundantly clear that's an anti-consumer hostile forced behavior Eight Sleep did.

The designers were thinking "we want to force users to a monthly subscription".

So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn't so crazy expensive and the basic 'cloud' functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.

From the onset, they were hammered with "phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something", and they kept responding with vague "we are working a solution". Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.

This is not "crappy developer stupidly doesn't know how to make local control work". This is "developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working".

A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.

I suppose what helps for me is that the tatoo is kind of hard to make out, and he doesn't deny the design intent matches what that is purported to be. I don't know if anyone would have accurately made that connection without help.

I too think the picture is uselessly bad, and that's key to another part of the story in the comments. Basically an unnamed associate seemed to be in the same boat of not knowing what it was and the man himself described it by name.

Now he didn't explicitly say it was a Nazi symbol, but he allegedly used the specific German word for it instead of saying it's some skull and crossbones.

Curious why you got a downvote, if there's a good reason, I would have found a reply more informative...

Why Putin seems to be so good at doing that is anyone’s guess.

It's probably not all that hard. We've seen him waffle back and forth on this one so it seems like just about anybody with the patience and will to be a sycophant can butter him up and convince him of anything.

Even then there would be a collective 'oh that sucks, but without a clean election we can't know how it would have gone so we will just wait for the next election and be more careful'.

I suppose I may be overestimating Louvre security. I guess I would assume a criminal might have to be somewhat smart to overcome what I presumed to be higher security than you might find at a typical target for idiot criminals.

There was a concept I thought was neat. Imagine around stops you had a parallel set of tracks with cars that would connect to the train and passengers would have X number of minutes to transfer between the parallel trains before they decouple.

So a 'fast lane' train wouldn't actually stop, it would just couple to another train that does pretty much nothing but transfer passengers to and from the stop.

Though the reality is that would require a lot of work when the counter argument can be "fly a plane direct instead"

I'm not familiar with AWS myself, but they seemed to be referencing something they vaguely characterized as 'security infrastructure', kind of as a handwaving for why they thought it made sense to be single point of failure because to enable distribution of it would somehow be insecure...

I frankly wasn't interested in delving deeper, because that excuse sounds pretty stupid, but I'd be trying to get details I don't personally need about something I probably shouldn't be arguing about. I've gotten burned too much by someone championing something stupid ostensibly in the name of 'security' to try to sign up for another one of those arguments.