(that 16 is 16 of my NiMH AA devices, part of the 20 "nicd/nimh cells")

According to my notes, I have here:

9v: 13
AA: 13
AAA: 17
AAAA: 1
C: 8
D: 2
coin: about 30
SLA/FLA: 5
LIFE: 4
lipo/nimh pouch and pack: 25
lipo cell: 9
nicd/nimh cells: 20
sealed plug-in charged: 16
sealed usb-charged: 27
uncommon disposable: 3

Those are not battery cells, those are devices. So for example, 16 of my AA devices use six AAs. (I have a crap-ton of NiMH AA, well over 100) and all of my C devices use at least three cells. So, sadly for me, there's a huge amount to keep an eye on. I realize I'm somewhat of an edge-case here, but that also makes me a good "how bad can it really get?" case study.

I reviewed all the gadgets in my house that have batteries. Not just non-replaceable or rechargeable, but ALL batteries. I'm a bit tech-heavy here so I was expecting there to be a lot, but the final count still surprised me. (and I'm still finding stragglers from time to time)

The "biggest offenders" I have are flashlights. I've got a few cheap "webcam" lights, as well as several house flashlights that all use built-in lipo pouches, which I can replace, but not the average consumer. And I've had to replace my car GPS batteries several times over the years. I'd bet 98% of these are thrown away as soon as their battery gets marginal. I like to maintain and repair my stuff, and it "grinds my gears" to see these made to be thrown away.

The other thing that annoys me is that most of these gadgets have almost no "battery management". When you plug them in, they charge to full, and hold at full charge if left plugged in, which will inflate a lipo pouch in a few months at most. And many of the others will allow their battery to deep-discharge to the point of battery damage or even placing the device in an unrecoverable loop. My Garmin GPSs are terrible that way. If they get too low, they'd be bricked for most people because they always boot up when their dead battery gets a little bit of a charge in it, which isn't enough to boot the device, and then the boot process crashes, draining the battery faster than it can charge. Recovering that requires removing the battery and manually charging it, which most users can't do since the battery isn't "user" removable.

And then I have the related problem of dozens of infrequently used devices that I could easily go a year between uses on, and when I get them out their battery is dead and probably slightly deeply-discharged. And I can't leave it on charge because it'll cook off the battery by the next time I need it. Which again is really frustrating.

Then there's the "big ticket items like the exploding (pun intended?) market on rechargeable yard maintenance. Be it a hedge trimmer or a mower. Nobody knows how to take care of their batteries, they don't tell you in the manual, and few have management, so they leave them on charge over the winter and the battery is half cooked by spring. Then after another winter on charge the battery is totally cooked and they have to replace a $40-$150 battery. It's quite the scam! Along with removable batteries, built-in management needs to be legally required for batteries over a certain price. Even my quad (DJI Spark)'s batteries are smart and will self-discharge to 65% if not used for 10 days straight - so it's not difficult to do even for smaller batteries, they just refuse to do it because they want to sell you new batteries regularly instead of making the batteries last.

Clearly we're all terrified now, so I'd say their job is done.

They can just sit back and relax and watch us all live in fear.

POTS lines use very little power nowadays. Decades ago they still used very little power, except when ringing. Those electromagnets hitting big bells did take some juice, but the actual power required once you lifted the receiver is very low. Modern (transistor-based, with piezo tweeters for ringing) are much more efficient, all the time.

This is about them having to continue to keep tabs on and maintain equipment that they've been maintaining for decades. This isn't about additional costs, it's about them wanting to cut costs by ditching gear that's expensive to maintain and gets far less use than it was designed for. (it's efficient at scale, and the scale has gone)

I can't say I blame them. Imagine your old house got central air a decade ago, and you still have a window air conditioner in the living room, and you'd like to get rid of it, but the city is saying you can't remove it, and have to keep it maintained and working, and pay for annual inspections.

The only reason we still see around 4% landline usage is simply inertia. Old people don't want to give it up because they don't like change or learning something new, younger people that have it don't have a reason to get rid of it and see it as a cheap "just-in-case" backup, and there's a really small percentage of people (I'd venture a guess at under a tenth of a percent) that have a good reason to keep it.

So the question is "at what point do we tell that tenth of a percent to look elsewhere?" There's tons of other good examples, how about leaded gas? or R34 freon coolant? or businesses accepting cheques? or something closer to home on the issue - pay phones on many street corners? Technology moves on, and the longer you wait to move on once the writing is on the wall, the bigger of a personal hassle it's going to be. (I see this all the time with computers, upgrade people! get rid of that ten year old doorstop! I don't care if "it still works", you need to modernize!)

so the TL;DR of my rant is "it's not about the power use, but the telco doesn't want to come right out and call you a hold-out that needs to get with the times so we can all move on." Power savings looks like something that's "good for everyone" instead of pointing fingers at the stubborn few.

I hope nobody's complaining that it got publicly disclosed because "they only had two and a half years to fix it but hadn't gotten around to it yet"

IMO, "responsible disclosure" taps out after six months. Anything that happens after that is entirely on the devs for not bothering to plug holes that they were privately notified about.

does anyone (govt etc) have back-door access to it?

It seems that lately governments are "insisting" on back-doors into user-encryption, going so far as to bar sales of products to their citizens that they can't just look at anytime they feel like it.

We need to read your texts to stop Terrorism! and Think of the Children!

Yes a bit OT but I remember the one-liner contests the magazines would have. You had to not use any unnecessary spaces, single-letter variables, use any command shortening method (like "?" instead of "print") and other tricks to get as much function as possible out of the ~253 bytes of line space available. Amazing what some people could squeeze onto one line of BASIC! (games were the most popular, though graphics displays were frequently featured)

It was pretty normal for those "one-liners" to take up a third of the screen or more when LIST'ed

Back in the day most of the computer magazines had one of those. I think it was Nibble magazine that published several programs for the Apple ][.

IIRC you'd start the program in the background and it would watch what line your cursor was on and display a two digit checksum in the upper right corner of the screen that would update as you typed. Just make sure that number matched the check on the end of the line in the magazine and you were clear to hit Return to save the line.

A different magazine had a similar method, but I believe it provided line-by-line checksums after you were done entering the program, and would also generate a "program checksum" at the end that would match if all lines were correct.

I also remember several occasions where there was a printing problem in the magazine and everyone's checksum was wrong, they'd publish a correction in next month's edition and everyone would cry "THAT'S why I couldn't get it right!" (probably after receiving hundreds of letters in the mail complaining about hours of frustration trying to key it in!) This was frequently due to the magazine omitting a line of code. (all the line checksums matched, but not the total at the bottom)

ahh the good ol days of Human OCR....

modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout.

I'm amazed we can OCR in Egyptian scrolls on papyrus, but struggle with 30 year old green-bar printouts?

it's a classic downward spiral. Like when the local mall is losing stores, instead of enticing new stores with lower rent, they raise rent to make up for their income loss, which drives out more stores.

But here they're getting lower attendance so instead of doing something to entice people to come to the theaters, they're raising ticket prices and piling long ads at the start of the movie, which drives away more patrons.

Are they stupid? With the malls, it's usually a case of the anchor stores having left, which triggers contract clauses that are going to kill the mall in a few years, so it's just a (somewhat) understandable last-minute cash grab before the doors close. But I don't know of any silimar issue with the theaters that would encourage them to press the self-destruct button? Anyone have any good ideas?

The only explanation for this reaching a grand jury is after a lawyer has told their handler "this is totally illegal and will never stand up in court", and being told to "just DO IT ANYWAY", making it only very thinly veiled harassment.

One nice thing here though is they can't lean on the individual exercising ther rights. (they don't even know they're the ones being targeted) Reddit is taking all the heat and standing up to the bully on the playground for them, which is awesome to see. And unlike the victim, they also have the resources (legal team, money, patience, media attention) to cleanly defend against this blatant over-reach.

If this plays out like it should, the grand jury will return a "no bill", which basically means the accusation doesn't even have enough merit to pass the lowest legal bar in existence. Or more specifically, "Your case has no chance of winning, and we've concluded they are probably innocent and you are just trying to waste the court's time and/or harass an innocent citizen"

In a more perfect world, filing garbage to grand juries should result in lawyers getting sanctioned (or even disbarred), but seeing as this administration is going through lawyers like kids go through shoes, I'm pretty sure any lawyer that joins this legal team already knows they're disposable. Hire a new one, let them submit some garbage filings, and just about the time the court's ready to start sanctions, kick 'em to the curb and bring in a fresh one. Unfortunately there's not a lot of check-and-balance for this sort of behavior, all you need is enough money to keep feeding into the fire.

I thought there were a lot of groups praising the repairability of the new Neo? Did they not consider it? or is it more a matter of it being a single model in a larger brand of less repairables?

There'd be no need to rescue a downed pilot if we hadn't started an unnecessary fight. The administration is taking credit for solving problems that they themselves are creating.

It kind of reminds me of the legal principle of "unclean hands", where someone creates a problem and then tries to get damages from someone else because they were harmed by the fallout of their own actions. Sort of a "I walked into the campfire and he failed to pull me out".

Though in this case, they TOSSED airmen into the fire, and then they rescued them, and now they want praise and thanks for saving them. Sir, your hands are unclean, you will get no praise from me for rescuing people from a peril you yourself created.

One approach is for government to control its people, where "the people should be afraid of their government".

Dictators, absolute monarchies, military juntas, despotisms, all tend to go with this plan.

The other approach is for people to control their government, where "the government should be afraid of its people".

Democracies, parliaments, and parliamentary monarchies tend to go with this other plan.

I guess it's time for Russians to be afraid of their government again?