You need to show your passport in Germany for SIM cards since before 9/11 (2001). Of course there are enough places where you can buy one (especially if you buy a phone too) without much fuss, especially around train stations.
Greece introduced this much later, after some criminal escaped from the prison TWICE by just having a helicopter show up and picking him up. Yes, they caught the dude and then he escaped again with a helicopter. I think the second time a guard shot himself in the foot. You can't make this shit up. Of course the fault was not with unbelievably corrupt and incompetent people but with anonymous SIMs.

In short: yes, we're beyond that point, and this thing is out of control. Jake is "they" until otherwise explicitly specified. I've just received an email from Greg who needs to put in a different color in his signature that he's "he/him". But by default he would be "they". What to do when you want to use the "real"/multiple "they"? There's no more "they helped me" when multiple, you either enumerate the persons you mean or you say "Team X helped" or similar!

Obligatory Larry David: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

... and there you don't even have an alternative!

The whole Windows 10 hoopla is a nothingburger. Never mind that being PCs you have tons and tons of alternatives they aren't really needed, never mind that there are Windows 10 editions supported into the 2030s, Microsoft has officially documented under support.microsoft.com the registry setting literally containing: "AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU".

We're talking about a software company that's known for their self-hosted server software, not for whatever generic ad supported TV streams you could get otherwise in 5 other places for free if you have nothing better to do.

"will prove critical as the ad market continues to be unpredictable" - who cares about the streaming, I mean sure if they make an extra buck from it (as it was surely the plan), whatever, if not just axe it and that's it, most customers weren't thrilled about it anyway. It's paid software (either a relatively expensive lifetime subscription or a monthly one), most importantly there is no "piracy" to speak of (as in people "pirating" Plex itself) as it calls the mothership (and on the other hand the resources for authentication and metadata aren't breaking the bank for sure). If they let the software development on life support (as it is anyway except for the new ads, renting, and whatever else they want to put on top) I'm sure they can do just the regular support for next to nothing. It'll take a "special" kind of management to flop this, there's a solid base of customers and they're for better or worse by far number one in what they do.

They're allowed to treat the stop sign like a yield sign, not as if it doesn't exist.

How is that working in this particular case where it's a "four-way stop" which is kind of everybody/nobody yields?

Just fixed today some Outlook that started out of the blue to open the links in Edge, guess what the options were Default (which of course wasn't Edge) and specifically Edge and it went to Edge by default...

That's WAY too inefficient, and not only for the charging itself but also for the needed infrastructure and maintenance.

Your phone number is now required for logging in.

You know what's the nastiest part, it isn't even "your" phone number, as in some number associated with the account, it is a phone number. How is a random phone number going to help more than the actual credentials to the account?! If there's a fraud-prevention limit to the number of accounts you can log into with the same number I couldn't get to it, that is after countless throwaway accounts and using the same phone number for support for all friends and family. The phone doesn't even have to be from the same region, and I'm sure if one is seriously up to no good with this (although I can hardly see how) they can get for next to nothing confirmation codes from thousands or hundreds of thousands of real phone numbers from these SIM-farms.

They just want "your" phone number to have it ...

... is this year too, as it's been for a fair while. Maybe we can combine them both, as they'd be a fairly good match.

Yes, the central bank had an interest that was stupidily low. Like 0.1% 0.0%,

Worse, it was STRICTLY NEGATIVE between 2014 and 2022. Started at -0.1% and went to -0.5%. That was true for the whole Eurozone.

Precisely this, they went to a bank that wasn't charging this negative interest (but I'm sure was meeting all the requirements, not only in general for banks in Germany - which I guess are plenty of requirements- but also to keep lots of public money there). The ironic part is that the whole mechanism was built to prevent bank runs and generally help banks with liquidity. Instead it took away money constantly, for no good reason, just the opposite.

In fact, even a decent savings account does, because it pays interest.

For quite a few years the interest in Euros were negative. While most consumers managed in various ways to avoid ever paying negative interest (yes, the bank would take money for having money with them!) bigger entities couldn't do that. The ones trying to avoid the negative interest (including relatively rich cities from Germany!!!) actually lost their money when the bank just went bust from just having too many deposits! Because a fraction of the deposits had to be with the central bank and they had to be paid this negative interest! Imagine that, for the safety of the deposits and to avoid the bank going bust some of the money sits with the central bank AND THEY HELP THEMSELVES FROM THEM of course making the bank completely unviable. You can't make these things up.

At least my ICE won't get a random update in the middle of the night and stop working.

Your CAR no matter the engine might not have such "features" because it's really old or lacking a modem or is a Dacia (a low-end no-frills Renault brand made mostly in Eastern Europe) or whatever, but no matter the engine cars are computers on wheels. You can very well have any shenanigans like OTA updates, leaking anything from your location data to your address book, heated chairs subscriptions and so on with any new-ish car, no matter the engine.

Heck, you can have firmware updates for pedal bike (bicycle, you are the engine) shifters nowadays.

Not to worry, they aren't seriously trying this ARM thing. Except for the marketing calling the ARM Surface not "X" but "5G" now - which reminds me of the Windows 10 Mobile (ex. Windows Phone, ex. Windows Mobile 6.5-6-5-) which got renamed to just Windows 10 (like it would fool anyone...).

But otherwise at least in Europe the ARM Pro 9 8GB RAM is more expensive than even the 16GB i7 (of course, the best value is the i5 16GB which is even cheaper and still a beast, but also gets VERY heavy discounts every now and then, while the ARM doesn't). It's not that the ARM ones are bad, but they're still toys with uncertain future while the Intel ones are regular decent machines you might be using 10 years from now. Oh, and the Intel ones have a very useful 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports (no TB on the ARM!).

What they're doing with extensions appears to be designed like they'd have special objectives to make it as outrageous as possible for the sake of it, trying to push it as much as possible to see what is the point where they get called out.

See the workflow for Expanded extension support in Firefox for Android Nightly https://blog.mozilla.org/addon... , it's beyond ridiculous. One would think it's just get the right "unstable" FF version, enable some (possibly hidden) switch and that should be it. No, noooo way, need to make an account on AMO, wade there through various configurations, get a specific ID, build some URL from that, and configure some ID from there in the mobile browser.
Oh, and the icing on the cake is that you still can't sideload anything, you just need the option to pick some more extensions from their store, and then you scratch your head "what doesn't work now" when specifically the extension you wanted and you spend days to bring to your mobile is just taken down https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04... . And again, there is no option to just sideload whatever you want.