They deliberately but in a system for verifying that the software is allowed to run, and deliberately used a certificate that has a fixed expiration date. Whether through incompetence or malice, Microsoft deliberately bricked the software. Technically, they did it a decade ago, and it is only just now being revealed that their time bomb is about to go off, but the effect is the same.

It is per se fraudulent dealing/false advertising to sell a perpetual license to software with full knowledge that it will stop working on a specific date.

This is, IMO, an open-and-shut Lanham Act/false advertising case. And any even remotely competent judge should absolutely throw the book at them.

If the class action lawyers are at all competent and the primary plaintiffs are not horrible people (bought off), the class action should demand that Microsoft release a hot fix that turns off the relevant validation. It's an hour of coding effort for Microsoft, though it would probably take half a dozen engineers a week or two to spin up a build environment capable of building it. The hassle of being forced to unlock the software would do far more to make them and other companies wary of such shenanigans in the future than any mere financial penalty ever could.

What we need is a clear duck typing law for digital purchases. If a purchase of a digital product looks like a sale, it is a sale, and there must be no known technological provision that is even capable of preventing its indefinite use. It must be possible to freely transfer it to new machines, to new users, etc. without limitation. Period. It must not be possible for the company to prevent this, either through action (deliberately disabling it) or inaction (failing to renew a certificate, failing to keep activation servers online, etc.).

If you can't do that, you should not be allowed to sell digital products. No grey area.

This means that your licensing servers must be available forever, or else you must not require their use. This means that when you buy a movie, it doesn't matter if the distributor's license for that movie is no longer valid, because you, the customer, bought a license that is perpetual, and it must be honored. And so on.

On the flip side, we really ought to get rid of the entire culex genus because of West Nile and various forms of encephalitis, and we also really ought to get rid of other Aedes albopictus as a secondary vector for several other diseases. There are few species of mosquitoes that aren't problematic to humans. This one is just slightly safer to get rid of because it is a recent invader, rather than something that has been part of the ecosystem longer.

Except when they swell up and become dangerous.

True. Most people don't keep them long enough to require a second swap.

I'm not convinced there's any reason you can't have both. As far as I can tell, the main thing preventing easy battery swaps on smartphones is the label on the back case with the IMEI and stuff.

As long as there isn't any legal compliance reason why that has to be on the back of the phone after the repair, you could make battery change-out as simple as "Remove some number of screws on the side, lift the sealed back off like a giant wristwatch, thus disconnecting the battery that's glued to the back, attach a new back with a new battery and new rubber seals, and put the screws back in."

The only challenging parts are designing a self-aligning connector between the battery and the motherboard (if you make the distance between contacts big enough, this is just trivial spring contacts, so when I call it "challenging", I'm being generous) and convincing the companies to stop making the back case and the sides as a single piece and spend an extra half cent per unit on a silicone seal strip between the two. Oh, and convincing the companies that user-visible screws is a good thing instead of a design horror, because form-over-function has been the biggest plague on the tech industry since the 1990s. The point is that it's more a "We don't want to" problem than a "This is genuinely hard" problem.

And even if there's a compliance reason why the numbers have to be on the back case, you could make part of the back case permanent, or make it possible for people to mail order the part customized for their device, or order iron-on decals, or... there are various ways to solve that problem.

That would be a disaster. There are real power and performance wins from having RAM on-die. And by the time you need more RAM, you'll probably want a newer CPU. Now if you mean flash *storage*, then... maybe.

There's probably too much metal between the cargo hold and the passenger compartment for Bluetooth to work anyway. I think all actual bombs on aircraft (other than the failed shoe bomber) have been triggered by pressure switches at altitude or timers.

So it's not just that they wouldn't be stupid enough, but also that it probably wouldn't be successful even if they were.

My house is a relatively normal size (1800 square feet), and it still takes more than three full minutes for water in my shower to reach full temperature when I run it straight hot. If I also turn on both faucets in my bathroom, I can get that down to about twenty or thirty seconds, which is barely tolerable.

At my mom's house in Tennessee, the distance the water has to travel is comparable, but it takes only ten seconds or so.

It's a huge downside to all the water-saving showerheads and faucets that were forced upon us here in California decades ago. We waste a lot of time and energy to make up for a water shortage that exists only because of decades of politicians being short-sighted and kicking the desalination can down the road over and over so that the money doesn't get spent on their watch.

Translation: A company that has the potential to benefit from regulation by squeezing out competitors wants more regulation.

I'm not saying they're not right, just that it seems awfully convenient for a company specializing in pumps that recirculate data center water to want efficiency regulations that would push customers towards their most efficient (and thus presumably most high-margin) pumps.

Instead of having your hot water fan out in a tree, you wire it like a token ring with a return pipe, where each faucet only has a short bit of pipe between it and the ring. Then, you have a pump to circulate hot water through the ring-shaped pipe network. That way, it takes half a second to get hot water instead of half a minute or more.

Sure. I'd imagine most hardware vendors will want it. I'm just saying that the wording, at least as described in the summary, is... problematic at best.

Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.