I like ColecoVision best, but it had an unfair advantage, coming out a full 5 years after the 2600 and 3 years after the Inty. It’s really generation 2.5, competing with the 5200. But man, those arcade ports were so impressive, and the expansion module to play 2600 games made it the best of both worlds.

I loved how in Carnival if you could time it just right you could keep shooting the lowest bear in the bonus level and just keep him going back and forth like 20 times. Also the elusive diamond that would appear in a dropped apple in Mr. Do. I think I only had it happen twice ever in what seemed like thousands of games.

Pepsi Frito Lay is big enough not to care about the profits from one market globally. In Canada a couple years back they had a pricing dispute with the country’s largest grocer which resulted in all of their snack products being unavailable nationwide for that grocery chain. Pepsico increased prices during the heart of the pandemic and the grocer refused to pay the higher price so Pepsico just stopped shipping product to them. It lasted for 2 months, and in the end the dispute resolved with no benefit to the customer whatsoever. Lays, Doritos, etc. remain the highest priced chips in the store by a long shot.

I misgendered a woman who was already very irate. This was probably 30 years ago, before trangenderism was as common as it is now (or at least as publicly presented). It did NOT go over well, to say the least. Other customers were smirking and giggling, and even a coworker was having trouble keeping a straight face. In my defense, she was heavyset, had shaved hair and a raspy voice. Luckily I didn’t say any of this to her. I just got my manager and let her yell at me (and him) for 10 minutes. I learned the value of keeping your mouth shut until you’re certain that day.

It’s even more comprehensive than that. They don’t even want you to have it, even though it’s data about your use of your vehicle. If you want to use a third party telematics system or just hook up a laptop with software to pull the data, the manufacturers ironically cite data privacy risks as the reason they want to lock down the data so nobody but them can provide access.

I think it has to be EA because Atari as I think of it was just a company that launched the success of home gaming but mismanaged themselves into bankruptcy, putting a pretty big dent in the north American video game industry in the process, but a dent that Nintendo very easily fixed with the NES only a few years later. The subsequent uses of the Atari name and IP by successive owners doesn’t really do anything but make me sad - I can’t really attribute anything that Atari does these days to the company that did all the good (and bad) stuff in the 80s. More like Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s, being trotted out by companies hoping to capitalize on long-dead goodwill.

EA, on the other hand is the same company that started back in the 80s; they have an unbroken bloodline from the scrappy company making good quality computer games that hit the jackpot with their sports titles to the behemoth they are today with all the shitty practices we all know and hate. They are the company that lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.

Sadly, this may mean the days of homebrew programming for the 2600 are at an end. AtariAge is where all those programmers sold their wares, along with homebrews for other platforms like Intellivision and ColecoVision. I’ll have to head back over there for the first time in a while to see what they say about it.

But the treatment of photographs in the decision fits your description. The photographer sets up the environment that allowed the image to exist but it’s the camera that makes the image. The judge held that was protectable because the image represents the human’s mental conception of the scene. It’s not a ridiculous stretch to consider AI to be merely a camera for the prompt-writer’s mental conception. I am certain this argument has been or will be tried in court. The IP owner industry is far from done litigating this topic.

Your location matters. Some US states, for example, have laws that require the company to provide you with a salary range if you ask for one. Some EU locations have similar requirements. Google pay transparency laws in your location to see if the company has to tell you or not. But as others have said, it’s generally best to have the company make the first move.