Batteries all used to have an aqueous electrolyte. After all, that is what "wet cells" are. And you can still buy NiMH cells - they last pretty well, and they have absolutely no fire risk. They are also expensive and have low energy density.

Why would you want to go back to those days? It is nice that they got magnesium to work, which means slightly higher voltage and energy, but I just do not see these being competitive against LPF, LMFP or sodium batteries, which all have great fire safety.

Why would this surprise anybody? The Prius Prime has been the most economical car ever since it was introduced in 2016. It easily beats all ICE or non-plugin hybrids, it beats FCEVs, and it will beat many EVs depending on the usage case.

I guess the second would be the GM Bolt, which has more embedded CO2, but slightly less during driving.

If the football coach is the best paid member of staff at a university, it is not really a university, it as football team with education as a side hustle.

This is the inevitable consequence of treating education as a tradable service commodity. Few students can judge the quality of research and education, but they can see shiny new buildings. So shiny new buildings it is, because that attracts students and generates income.

I am not sure there is a way back to the "good old days", but we should consider universities again to operate in the knowledge sector, and not the service sector. They offer so much more than just a piece of paper, and that is often lost in the discussion.

... news at 11. Next they will find out that the NRA is pro guns!

I don't. It looks like an ugly and less functional variant of Teams.

In my country, that is illegal.

I still love GMail - it is still one of the best email solutions out there. But it is not as a good as it used to be, since they broke GTalk and the integration with GCalendar or Outlook. And I still use Google, because it is great, although the new Bing also makes an interesting (but different) proposition. I have Android, because it is more configurable than iOS. I use Sign on with Google, because their security is industry leading.

The rest of the Google products are mediocre at best, afterthoughts at worst. I actively boycott any communication product by Google, because after ten failed attempts, they still do not understand how communication works.

AI lies with impunity, while people might have scruple.

> Scanners have transitioned away from laser line scanning a long time ago.

That is strange, because just yesterday, I used one. A standard red laser with the classic mirror scanner. And it was a reasonably new checkout, too.

I agree that this seems like it is set up for failure. Replacing UPCs by 2027 is never going to happen.

But the reason is more complicated.

Embedding nutritional data is all very nice, but essentially pointless. That could be in a database or on the web, if manufacturers would like to share it, which they don't.

Indicating the expiry date would be very useful, but it requires a new dotcode every day. And dotcodes are difficult to print, so this is not possible with existing machinery.

PS: There are no 2d barcodes. They are called dotcodes, because they are made from dots, not bars.

No job security, no benefits, getting your own IT equipment etc.

But the contracting rate needs to be at least twice your salary.

Even if they did, they had to expect this.

Google has a long history of not getting social networks, buying in stuff, and then shutting it down:

Google Talk (the original GChat)

Google Huddle

Google Hangouts

Google Voice

Google Allo

Google Chat

Google Orkut

Google Wave

and now Google Currents

Google Meet is still going, but for how long?

The already have an app store, and it is pretty pathetic. It used to support Windows Mobile, which was nice in theory, but equally pathetic in reality. Lots of promises, little action.

Why should this one be different?

The only mistake is that they got found out.