This was prior to DoH / HTTPS ubiquity so public wifi hotspots still had some risk, plus it was a fun toy.

Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

Consider the difference between calling a plumber out at 2am on a holiday vs a regular scheduled appointment -- if you wait until it is an emergency it is going to cost more and the result will be lower quality.

DRM as in 'flag in the drive firmware saying this is a Synology drive' such that the NAS won't accept non-flagged drives as 'legit'. Same idea as a printer that identifies OEM ink cartridges vs others.

Ubisoft will argue they didn't cancel the license -- you still have legal permission to run the software, but it just so happens that software you have no longer works because the servers it needs to talk to no longer exist, and they never promised to run them forever.

I would absolutely wave a magic wand to have the shelf labels include tax. Long gone are the days of having to relabel literally every item when the tax rate changes, and the advent of digital shelf tags makes it trivial. I do see some differences with the 'tariff surcharge' from sales tax though:

* Sales tax is the same across vendors. I know the approximate sales tax in an area. I don't know via what exact supply chain the store obtained an item, or when, so I can't know what the tariff was. The store doesn't either -- individual items that were subject to differing tariffs are indistinguishable on the shelf, thus the tariff surcharge will be arbitrary.
* Companies hate to disclose what they paid for stock, and in many cases are contractually prohibited from doing so. An accurate tariff surcharge would disclose this to me. Thus the surcharge is going to be an approximate / averaged amount.
* Approximate surcharges become the dumping ground for 'whatever we think we can add at the end of the sale process that won't cause the customer to abandon their cart' with little relation to the actual cost to the company.
* I am not aware of a case where a store gets to keep some of the sales tax. If the tax rate goes down, they don't get to keep charging the higher rate and 'oopsie' keep the overage. A tariff surcharge, since it necessarily can't be linked to the specific unit, is really just unbundling their cost of goods sold so they can double-dip.

Which is fine so long as they advertise the full price. If they want to break it out in the price details, fine, but don't advertise the lower price up front then tack on a surcharge at the end of the order flow.

The power consumption isn't really related to the amount of transactions -- a block holds a fixed amount of transactions, and the chain adjusts so that blocks happen about every 10 minutes. The power consumption is only due to miners trying to 'win' the mining race and get a payout. You could process the same number of transactions with 10 machines mining blocks as whatever you have now.

Slack huddles *are* Chime under the hood.

This was predicted in satire in 1954: https://archive.org/details/ga...

Except they have a MASSIVE investment in petro infrastructure that they don't want to write off. All those oil rigs, oil plants, oil tankers... An oil company wants the transition to non-oil to happen at no faster then the natural depreciation pace of their infrastructure. Otherwise they are left with a $5-15B oil refinery that still has useful life left but is not generating income. That refinery was built on the expectation that it would process oil for 75+ years.

So, even if a $ invested in renewables will return more profit then a $ invested in oil starting from today, the company has to look to protect its massive *past* investment. If a $ spent on oil prevents them from having to write off $100 in oil infrastructure, it still makes sense for them to push for oil.

Unfortunately that only took one misplaced package becoming
  the responsibility of the employer for them to decide not to be in the business of handling personal packages and ban the whole thing.

Wasn't there some move by the ISPs to charge Netflix etc to allow content to traverse their lines?

Anyway, power doesn't degrade as gracefully as streaming. Either you have 120v / 60hz, or you sag more then a few % below that and equipment fails => rolling blackouts. Media can downgrade the bitrate it is using. It is rare for equipment to be able to have a way of sensing this and load-shedding.

However, it does seem like registering critical loads is more beneficial then registering noncritical loads.

From the article: The council initially customized Oracle but now plans to reimplement the software out-of-the-box, adopting standardized processes.

From what I've heard, you conform to the way the ERP does things, not vs/vs. Attempting otherwise for anything other then cursory detail is where you end up fighting hideously complicated software into oblivion.

This is exactly the problem. 'We moved to the cloud' == probably not taking advantage of cloud features aka lift-and-shift. Of course it is going to be more expensive as you haven't reduced your footprint but are paying the vendor premium. If you migrate into the cloud, making use of cloud-native features to shrink your environment to what you actually need right now, that is a different story.

The first part (L&S) happens. Then, since nobody wants to rebuild-what-already-exists-and-works, the rework to make use of the cost savings aspects of cloud never happens and it is more expensive then on-prem.