meet 30,000 watt light bulb.

Let the endarkening commence.

Hmm, that's insightful.

My original "and for the past few decades" was a lot more pedestrian: I was merely acknowledging that, just as today, if you made a joke that could be mis-read as an actual threat in, say, 2015, 2005 (a few short years after 9/11), or even 1995 (just after the Oklahoma City bombing), you could expect an unpleasant visit from your local or national police.

TFA acknowledges that Vantablack and another darker-than-Vantablack black are blacker, but the key is that this is a fabric which is relatively inexpensive to mass-produce. Vantablack and the even-blacker-black are expensive to make.

I think it's because people recognize ads as "trying to sell you on something/some idea" so they have their guard up more than they do for AI chatbots.

are getting more and more attractive by comparison.

Maybe, just maybe, at least one major automaker that caters to Americans will see this and decide that annoying your customers with ads is bad for business.

... these days (and for the past few decades or more) you don't want to make jokes like that. We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual. If you are in the USA, the feds can probably track you down unless you went out of your way to hide (throwaway device, overseas proxy/TOR/similar, mooching off a public WiFi with no security cameras around, etc.). Same if you are in a country that takes jokes like this as if they were serious threats and that country is able to get subpoenas from US courts.

The first time someone is found to be "at fault" in an accident because they were dealing with this ad, you can bet everyone on the other side will be suing Subaru and SiriusXM.

If Subaru's and SiriusXM's lawyers are smart, they will want to have these ads turned off, or at least turned off while the car isn't in "Park." Whether they actually speak up or not I have no idea - they may choose to stay silent as long as possible to avoid creating a legally-dangerous paper trail.

politically-indebted robot overlords.

"robots must avoid met" dog collar as mandated by law.

Until the late 1980s/early 1990s, the "Internet" - IPv4 - was pretty much restricted in the United States to universities, the government, and to companies doing work with the government. Your average Joe Citizen couldn't get access without becoming a student or getting a job from one of the companies with access.

Advertising and all that advertising pays for would come later.

Someone else already covered the fact that the pre-web internet was pretty inaccessible (in the "too much technical mumbo-jumbo" sense of the word, not the "you aren't allowed to have access" sense) to the average non-techie anyways.

>Where there's Africa, there's corruption.
Where there are people, there is corruption.

There, fixed that for you.

Hand-held phones you put in your pocket typically aren't desktop devices, but many VoIP desk phones used in businesses are. Some may even run Linux (I haven't checked).

Not all desktop devices use a mouse or keyboard.

That said, the total number of desktop phones running Linux is probably small enough to be considered noise, at least for now. But in a few years, who knows?

> It's not really applicable for businesses and companies, though, since they likely don't have the expertise or the man-hours required to cobble together their business-critical systems from used parts.

Even if they do have the expertise to do so, they have the wisdom to NOT do so.

If you have to manage thousands of computers and buy dozens of new ones every month, you want all the computers you buy in the same month or quarter to be either the same base model or maybe one of two or three base models. You do NOT want a bunch of bespoke computers that you will have to maintain for 5-10 years just because you needed to save $100/unit for a few months during a price crunch. The colloquial term is "penny-wise, pound (as in British money) foolish."

What a business MIGHT do is push back the scheduled replacement cycle. Instead of buying 20 computers a month to replace "aged out but still functional" computers like it normally does. it might buy a few from now until the price crunch passes just to cover failing hardware, but defer the "normal replacement of old equipment" until the price bubble pops. This isn't without its own problems though: There will be a "bubble" of computers that will age-out at the same time a few years down the road. But at least that's something the company can plan for.

Back in my day kids were born with only 640KB of memory.

>Soldered-in RAM is not acceptable
Soldered-in RAM is not acceptable in SOME use cases, including perhaps 100% of the use cases that apply to you.

As for me, I'm fine with soldered-in RAM for devices that make no sense to have a RAM either upgraded or swapped out due to failure. I'm thinking "throwaway" things like "disposable" e-cigarettes; "appliance" things like routers, cable TV boxes, microwave ovens; embedded systems that won't be touched until it's time to replace them like the chips that are in my car radio or in a satellite; and much more.

I'm kind of torn about soldered-in RAM on my phone. Sure, I'd like to be able to upgrade it, but going from soldered or SOC-based RAM to user-upgrade-able RAM involves tradeoffs and costs that I may or may not want to make. Even if I want to make them, if enough people don't it's not going to happen because it won't be cost-effective to make a RAM-upgrade-able phone for the relatively few people who want it. Same argument goes for soldered SSDs vs user-upgradeable ones. Same argument goes for "super-thin" or "super-lightweight" tablets and laptops.

For "ordinary" laptops and desktops, where there is plenty of room for air flow and plenty of room for the extra space needed for user-replaceable RAM (and SSD) I agree with you: Soldered RAM (and SSD) is unacceptable unless the end user is demanding it.