Probably when Chinese fabs really start churning out DDR5 and high end flash memory. That's the truth of it, it's a gift to them.

They probably need to keep the data around for a while, for legal reasons. They might get sued, and if it was deleted it will be worse for them. They might get a law enforcement request for the data, and it would look bad if they deleted it.

The bigger issue is that unless you get lucky and go viral, there is no way to get this kind of thing resolved and all you can do is sue to get your costs covered.

See, that's the thing... By having this be handled now they take care of it for a measly $14 mil. Whereas if the current administration had ignored it, then a later one could come after them for a lot more. So it's really doing them a favor "punishing" them at this time.

And also diver's watches, so there is no excuse for smart watches not having a replaceable battery either. People understand perfectly well that they need to have the gasket properly replaced if they want to maintain water resistance. Not that anyone would warranty a smart watch by the time the battery needs replacing.

It's almost impossible to anonymize search data. Google can do it internally and simply avoid processing it in a way that could reveal identities, to comply with GDPR, but other companies will not be so limited. In theory GDPR applies to them too, but the danger is that we end up in a Facebook like situation with shadow profiles on people who have never used their services.

Isn't Intel already doing 18 Angstrom?

Ours doesn't like being picked up either, although he is slowly coming around to it. Something traumatic happened to him, and I wonder if it involved being picked up.

We think ours did formerly belong to someone, but was in a poor state when he came to us. No microchip and nobody recognized him on the local noticeboards. He's very shy around people, but was definitely house trained before we got him. Over time he is getting a little better with people, but it's a very slow process.

You clearly haven't met my cat. We rescued him and he's not very cuddly. I suppose he is kinda cute sometimes.

That's the problem, in my experience those chatbots can't resist telling you how great you are. I had to ask Google Gemini to tone it down a bit.

Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.

Europe is developing P2P payment systems, and IIRC Brazil already has a very successful one.

PayPal used to be the way to pay for stuff on eBay, but it was terrible, and now thanks to Trump efforts to remove US processors from the loop are accelerating. It seems like the future for PayPal is uncertain at best.

The way it has worked for many years on Android is that even when you enable "install apps from any source", you still have to enable each app that wants to start an installation separately. So your would authorize the app store of your choice, and random .apk downloads in the browser (which Chrome and Firefox will shit a brick over anyway) are still blocked.