One does wonder what they are thinking - why would anybody want or tolerate this?

Most ads we are stuck with because we want the media or service that the ads support. Oh, you want to watch two teams of 53 millionaires play football? OK, but 30% of your time will be watching ads.

On a fridge what is the payoff?

Please name one. There is a difference between a USB-C connection and a Thunderbolt connection.

How about the hardware does not support it? To use a Thunderbolt connection, the motherboard must have a Thunderbolt controller chip. I do not know of any phone that has one currently. Due to cost and space limitations, phone manufacturers do not include them. Laptops and desktops can have them.

Given the vast amount of data that is collected and sent to the mothership in modern "connected" cars, maybe they realised they can sell that on? Apart from all the obvious stuff like realtime tracking data and telemetry on your driving style while you are are on the road, there's your preferences on playlists, what kind of temperature you prefer (from which health info can be inferred), what stores you prefer and where your friends and family live, (extracted from parking location data), all tied into the real ID you used to buy and register the car - no "dark profiles" here.

It's a model that seems to be working very well for browers and certain OSs, as well as pretty much all of the Internet of Shit. It might cost a bit more and be a lot larger than some connencted $20+tariffs widget, but a modern car is still just another component of the IoS. It's said the margin on a mass market car is around 5-10%; care to bet that the captured data is being sold on to info brokers for a whole lot more?

No matter what, you're still going to need someone in a red shirt to duck into the circuit bays and reverse the polarity.

Yeah, growing up in the cold war it was a foregone conclusion the commies would always lose because central planning doesn't work. You'd hear the story about a factory overflowing with left shoes and no matching right shoes were being made. I still think there is some truth to it, but China has been on a run for quite a while now. I am skeptical of any narrative in which a key element is them being very stupid.

Something that seems to constantly get lost in this discussion is that violent crime in the US is not particularly high right now by historical standards - e.g. murder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you were to ask the average "person on the street" to guess the murder rate, it would probably depend hugely on whether a school shooting or racially- or politically-motivated murder was currently a big media story. But that hardly corresponds to your risk as an individual.

Oh yeah, I've had that experience where a co-worker "points" to something on your screen by touching it, evidently in the midst of eating a big greasy cheeseburger.

I don't care about a touchscreen, but if it folded over and took pen input, I'd be a big fan.

Note that China doesn't need to build GPUs. It just needs to build AI chips, which is much simpler since you don't need to invest vast numbers of man-years into developing the graphics side.

Build something as fast at AI processing as an x70 Nvidia GPU and put 128GB of RAM on the board and much of Nvidia's market simply disappears.

Yes. China is trying to build a Falcon-9 competitor while SpaceX is working to make Falcon-9 obsolete.

Based on the summary this seems to be comparing government-funded space programs while ignoring the commercial space programs. A single Starship, for example, apparently has a similar internal volume to the entire ISS, though obviously it would shrink once you added life support and other hardware required for people to live on board for long periods.

But still, dock four Starships to a central module providing power and other requirements for long-term habitation and you have something with far more volume than ISS for probably a fraction of the cost of a single ISS module when it was launched twenty or thirty years ago.

The wet market hypothesis claims the Covid outbreak began in the Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

We now know from analysis of stored patient samples that it was in Italy by October 2019(*) and have inconclusive tests from September 2019 so it may have been there earlier. I also have been told by people working in medicine in North America that they have found positive stored samples from patients in October 2019.

So wherever it came from, it almost certainly did not originate in the wet market in December 2019 and appears to have been worldwide by October 2019. This explains the 'super-duper scary spread' in spring 2020 because it had been going around for months and as soon as they started mass testing they started finding lots of people who tested positive.

(*) And we already had pretty good evidence of this in early 2020 as an Italian virologist had been tracking an unusual respiratory disease through the winter before it suddenly became The Pandemic.

However, this is getting a bit off-topic for railways, unless it spread by rail.

Yeah. One of the reasons the buses suck so much here is because the bus drivers won't force the scumbags to pay the fare because they don't want to get attacked by scumbags.

Most of this kind of transport planning is created by people who think we're still living in a prosperous, high-trust society where people will obey their dictats. And we're not.

The only reason most people run Windows is to run crappy old Windows software from years ago. So the faster Microsoft kill backwards compatibility the sooner they kill Windows.

Which they probably don't care about as apparently most of their profits come from "The Cloud" these days. Which probably explains why Windows tries so hard to steal all my data and shove into "The Cloud."

I haven't tried it, but I've seen many people online say that they installed Windows 11 on 'unsupported' Windows 10 hardware. Few people care about the rest.