In this case, it seems they own the governor, Kathy Hochul. To the point where she can be persuaded to block a law because some lobby group tells her to.
In a functioning democracy, signing a law is a formality unless the president (or in this case the governor I guess) has serious doubts if it is constitutional.
We had that case a few years ago in Germany, but as far as I remember it was the only case in decades. And the questionable aspect was the risk of indirect damage to free speech. Much more serious than some lost profits.

If you make it somewhat less abstract. i guess you could call the directories "Boxes" or "folders" ;-)

It will take time that could be used for math lessons. Or anything else. Ultimately, education can cover only so many things at meaningful depths. Math? Science? Civics? Arts? PE?

Something has to give, and if it is only that a new subject, even a valuable one, does NOT get added to the curriculum.

Time to take that CNC machine off the internet (if it isn't already, which manufacturing equipment IMHO should be). So it cannot get that downgrade masquerading as an update.

Best take an image of the hard disk too, so you can restore the system to the state it is in now.

An interesting angle I did not think of. Of course, it would still take someone to
  - first demand the information
  - then if it is (predictably) not given, sue. Which would be the expensive and arduous part.
Are you, by chance, aware of some lawsuit like that? I have recently considered supporting NOYB, but supporting a specific project might be even more appealing.

Both of the quotes show that Microsoft's spokesperson does either not understand the subject matter or is just giving a standard, generic answer to this kind of question. Probably both.

Keeping the system up to date does not require contacting third parties.

Transparency would be better served if Microsoft would publish what exactly they transfer.

As emergent behavior, that would be impressive by itself. But who knows what hard-coded rules are behind the scenes to make the chatbot look smarter.

I'd consider the shared files, if there are any, most important. If you need everything (for compliance reasons maybe?), here is a sort of HOWTO:
https://www.communicationsquare.com/news/6-ways-to-backup-microsoft-teams/
As I'm not using Teams myself, I cannot tell you how well that backup method actually works.

You should have a local backup anyway. If you neglect that, it is unfortunate but your own fault.

In this case, it may require a extra backup just before you switch to some other service. But you should already have a backup process established, so it will not be much extra stress.

But not all of them fuck their customers over top the same extent. I have an old Kyocera FS-1300D (B/W laser printer) that is around 20 years old, still works fine.

HP has been shit for a long time. They were one of the first who used DRM on their ink cartridges. Also, they sometimes have weird bugs:

In the late 90s I had a job as IT supporter at a European corporation, and the place had big HP laser printers shared by the whole department. These would reproducible lock up if someone tried to print a Word document in Letter (US paper format) if the printer was set up for DIN A4 (common paper format in Europe).
Then some guy like me had to march to the printer and manually cancel the document in the printing queue. And the company was "international enough" that there were quite a few attempts to print documents in letter format.
One might think that HP would figure it out eventually and reject the documents in the printer driver, with a suitable error message. Apparently not.

Depends on what metric you apply. Performance wise, Alchemist is good with high resolutions and current APIs (DX12, Vulkan), while 1080p and older APIs things look less appealing.

Also, reportedly the drivers are still the least mature of the current GPU generation.
There are no complaints about Nvidia.
AMD still has some homework to do in the 7000 series.
But most reports about serious graphics errors are still about Alchemist. At least the outright crashes seem to be a thing of the past.

Intel are coming to the graphics market, albeit with teething problems. ARC Alchemist (current gen) is not very impressive (yet), but has visibly improved since launch. Next gen, Battlemage, may be be a serious challenger.
Otherwise, perhaps people need to stick with their existing stuff for a few years. Last summer, I replaced a 10 year old GPU and the new one might last me another 10.

Considering the legal side, anti-competitive behavior usually has an element of trying to hamper others in their efforts to compete. In this case, it looks like AMD does not want to compete. Which is perhaps stupid but legal.

They essentially accused Huawei of working with/for the Chinese military. Just like Boeing, Lockheed etc. are supplying the US armed forces.
An embargo might be a (geo)strategically valid means of slowing them down, but don't be surprised if China embargoes western arms makers at some point.

They won't even have to eat grass. From what I read elsewhere, it seems China won't need to long to reach the 28nm node in its own manufacturing. That is what you have in computers from the early 2010s. Obsolete but still good enough for office applications, applications to control industrial processes and so on.

Where they might struggle with hardware like that is AI, especially the training part. Something like ChatGPT might not be viable without more advanced computing hardware.

I guess it will lead to more embargos. Because if banning Chinese products works now, why stop tomorrow?

But it might lead to China decoupling from the USA and western Europe. According to other news, SMIC can make 7nm chips today, at the expense of higher cost and worse yield. And if you don't need a new PC every three years, the extra cost might be tolerable.

Apparently the CEO does take a somewhat higher cut than everyone else. It is mostly symbolic, but it is not nothing.