Customers must pay more if they exceed limits â" but it's not a cap,

That's fine with me, if they'll also give me a refund if I don't reach my limit. After all, fair's fair, right? They estimate how much data I'll use when I sign up, and if I exceed it they charge me extra, if I don't reach it they charge me less.

Breach of contract is not a criminal offense. Entering into a contract with the intent to breach it from the onset is fraud, and a criminal offense. Obviously the threshold of proof for the latter is a lot higher.

I find it interesting that white rice always gets the blame laid on it, but there are literally billions of healthy people who eat white rice almost three times daily.

Running software written by the lowest paid developer they could find.

Space constraints are already an issue, laying down is going to consume far more space ... and ...

Do you do this on an empty train/bus? Do you always lay down at home or at the office? Do you lay back while sitting in your chain in front of (insert whatever it is you do in your leasuire time)? Whats that? No, you don't? Because it isn't really all that comfortable unless you're sleeping? Oh, my bad, maybe you should leave the engineering up to engineers who put more than half a thought into ergonomics.

Bwhahahaha. Only if they work perfectly and you're strong enough to do so, its not power assisted And its always on the rear wheels ... even in a front wheel drive car.

And for reference, that handle ... isn't called an 'emergancy brake' its called a 'parking brake' and theres a reason its called the later instead of the former.

Wouldn't a remotely-accessible VM have access to your LAN?

iPhones have had the ability to be remote wiped for a long time. Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones. Dirty hipsters and their iPhones have been at the center of a lot of protests yet we haven't heard of mass iPhone shutdowns by the police in response to demonstrations.

I believe Apple implemented their wipe The Right Way and only the phone's owner can initiate it. There's no way for the police or government to shut down iPhones without knowing the users' iCloud credentials. There have been spurious cases of hackers locking phones by getting those credentials.

I think this just finally cuts off the ability of the cell carriers to encourage and profit from theft by activating stolen phones.

Too many people try to project their personal viewpoint onto the carriers as "evidence" of malfeasance. Your phone got stolen and you have to buy a replacement. You have to spend more money, therefore the carrier must be making more money.

It's totally different from the carrier's perspective. Person A bought a phone. Person B somehow gets person A's phone (stolen or bought, does not matter). Person A buys a new phone from them, but person B does not buy a phone from them. The net result to them is that they have two customers, and have sold two phones. It's a zero-sum game - theft does not result in the carrier making extra sales. It may lead to them selling more high-end phones (i.e. Person B could not afford a current iPhone but steals one; person A buys another current iPhone). But smartphones depreciate so quickly I suspect they make far more money from people replacing their phones for newer models, than from upsells due to theft. i.e. If person B would've bought the old iPhone model anyway, and person A would've bought the new iPhone model anyway, then the carrier hasn't made any extra money from the theft.

The carriers have resisted tracking and disabling stolen phones because they are not a law enforcement organization. If Bob and his wife get into an argument about who owns the phone, the carriers don't want to get involved. Why risk getting sued by Bob's wife because they bricked her phone when Bob called them and told them it was stolen? They want to sell the phone, and be done with it.* Anything that happens to the phone after it's sold is between the buyer(s), their insurer, and law enforcement. (*Not that I particularly agree with this stance since the carriers were simultaneously trying to claim rights to keep your phone locked.)

California has a GDP just shy of $2 trillion. If it were a country, that would put it at #10 in the world, just behind the UK, Russia, Brazil, and Italy; just ahead of India, Canada; bigger than Spain, Austrailia; nearly twice as big as South Korea, Mexico; and four times as big as Sweden, Norway.

That said, I seriously doubt this will have repercussions outside of California other than the capability being there if other legal jurisdictions should choose to require it. This isn't like a new formulation for gasoline, or an entirely new engine emissions system which needs to be designed from scratch. It's basically software, and it'd be trivial write to a PROM upon delivery or sale to permanently enable/disable the functionality. In this case, the cost of "manufacturing" two different devices for different markets is trivial.

I heard the NSA has one, though I dunno if they're still operating the server.

I agree, having a manual break should be required as a bare minimum.
Even if the software is perfect, if there is an unexpected power outage, you will need a manual break to stop the car that just may be aimlessly costing.

Bezos was in the right place at the right time with some great techies leading him.

Pretending amazon is because of him is like pretending Microsoft is because of gates. The CEO is generally not that important, he/she gets lucky and also picks the right people to do the real work.

Thats likely intentional, to cut down on cheating by relaying information from the stream being watched back to a player.

They don't buy the tech, they buy the user base and in some cases the contracts the company already has with others OR to prevent this service from being competition directly or in case another organization buys them. A lot of times its nothing more than stifling competition and innovation.

Ridiculous amounts of money for companies that clearly are entirely not worth it aren't because they are buying the company, they are buying company related assets, usually the most important of which is the existing user base which they then generally proceed to utterly destroy.

Google didn't buy YouTube for video tech, they already had their own, that very few people used ... They bought a bunch of users for the user base and content, which they now use to peddle their ads.

Why do they do this? Because they are such shitty companies that they are unable to innovate and satisfy any customers so they have to buy someone else's, which is also the reason they utterly destroy the user bases of the company they buy ... they don't know how to satisfy them ... hence the buying ... circle repeat.

GNU/Linux is the term for the standard Linux OS Distribution.
As opposed to Android and many of the other imbedded OS's that use the Linux Kernel.

If you are using an OS that is very Unix Like and is based on the Linux Kernel then it is probably GNU Linux, unless it is not using most of the GNU licensed tools.
cat, ls, mv, cp...