It's illegal to change your license plate. It's not illegal to scan someone's sensor ids, clone them on your vehicle, then drive by one of these 3rd party sensors while committing a crime (well the crime part is illegal). The point is someone can steal your 'car identify' by doing this. Today's that's not too useful. Maybe tomorrow it will be. Perhaps there's a push back against cameras and cities switch to tire tracking instead. It'll matter then. Or perhaps these ids are already being tracked into people's overall profiles. Similar to how people who take their phones onto roller coasters end up getting higher insurance rates because that movement data makes them look like bad drives, someone could clone your ids, speed past a few sensors, and now your rates are going up. It wouldn't be some criminal organization targeting you, it'd be some random kids thinking it's a cool/funny prank.

There's a bunch of other random 'pranks' you could as well, especially as cars are getting more automated. I doubt Waymo encrypted their tire ids. Clone theirs and give their car false alarms of flat tires. How will they react? You can mess with people on the road too. I bet you can get a lot of people to pull over if you feed their car false pressure readings. How will the car software react to readings coming in from multiple sensors with the same id?

The chance of any of that affecting you is small, but it's something the industry will have to deal with so they might as well get ahead of it and secure all their communication pathways sooner rather than later.

Do people not remember the hell of scrollable and nested menus? It was horrible trying to go to a menu, scroll it down, go to a sub-menu, scroll that down, then go to another sub-menu only to accidentally move the mouse off it and you now have to re-open that entire menu structure. The ribbon got rid of most of that. The one thing it did a good job at was giving every element a unique and visible shortcut key (once you learned the shortcut key to display them). The ribbon was far easier to use with your keyboard than the menus were.

I've skimmed the CA one. (Little) Kids can't buy computers so the theory is the parent buys the computer and creates the account for the kid. Once you have an income that lets you buy your own computer, you're probably an adult and nothing would be age gated for you so it doesn't matter if you lie about your age. Actually typing that out, I realize it doesn't prevent adults from creeping on kids which is one of the things people want these laws for.

Aged-specified accounts won't let kids swap devices with another kid to get around the restrictions. It's easy to borrow someone's ID for a moment without them noticing just to sign up with a random service. It's something else to borrow an adult's device for a meaningful amount of time to browse porn and then erase your tracks.

If we're going to have these laws then this model is probably the better one. However it'll probably get expanded with other things and might end up requiring Secure Boot to enforce it. It'll become much more of an issue then.

As you demonstrated in your post, telemetry's main purpose is to advance what you already want to advance. Your add-on example is a good example. There's no reason to take a widespread add-on and re-develop it as new built-in functionality. It's already working for tons of people as an add-on. Making a new version means you've now split that market, you probably introduced bugs, your implementation will be slightly different, and the features may conflict with each other when the browser automatically updates. You took a working solution and polluted it making everyone's life a little bit harder. Splitting that market might results in both versions failing in various ways. The add-on developer will view their idea as stolen, see a massive drop in users, and give up because they know they can't compete with a company. The browser will see not as much usage as they hoped (since half stayed with the add-on) while seeing people leaving that now dying add-on. They'll clam users no longer care about that feature set and remove it from the browser in the name of efficiency. Now the add-on is dead and the feature is gone from the browser. It's a fail-fail for everyone.

A better response would be asking if that add-on needed any new APIs and double-checking that browser upgrades won't harm it. Having an API means other people can make their own add-ons with similar but different feature sets. If you hate that all the tool/menu/tab/status bars are less flexible than their Windows 98 versions then you could simply swap a different add-on in for those features. Instead with those things integrated, their APIs are removed and you're stuck with whatever bullshit changes companies push out for marketing's sake. The company forces you to follow whatever fad they're afraid of missing out on rather than letting you keep whatever setup you decided was optimal for you.

A clear example of Firefox's telemetry abuse is their change of the Open vs Save download feature. Selecting Open used to mean the file was downloaded as a temporary file, opened by the default application, then deleted when you closed that application. It was pointed out that other browsers do it a little differently and telemetry showed the Downloads Preview Panel usage wasn't as high as they thought it could get. Firefox changed it's Open operation to mean Save and Open. When you close its application, the file is no longer deleted. This unwanted behavior forced people to use the Downloads Panel to delete that left over file. That massive increase in panel use increased it's telemetry and Firefox devs padded themselves on the back while proclaiming the increased metrics meant people really enjoyed the change. In reality they made their download system far less efficient. You now have to perform multiple actions at different times to accomplish something that used to only take one action. If you don't remember to do those multiple steps you end up with tons of poorly named files in your Downloads folder. You now have to go through all those files and figure out which statements you were just glancing at and which ones you actually meant to save. (If this feature was an add-on, like the original Firefox promised, people could have selected which download style they wanted and everyone would be happy.)

Also, a segment of users disabling telemetry isn't a valid excuse for anything. People are supposed to have brains, not blindly take any metric at face value. Telemetry is good at figuring out if/when something breaks. It's poor at determining what users want/need/enjoy.

No, it's because one group put competent people in charge while the other put in loyalists who were more focused on looking tough than being efficient at their jobs. Trump is getting a lot done, but he's doing everything in the most wasteful ways possible. That is what's causing the drama to come out.

What is the RDA for coffee?

Bitcoin is not money, it's an asset. That's also settled law. If someone sends you something, you're not required to return it. There used to be extortion schemes were companies would mail products to people and then bill them for it. Returning the items was difficult and often had fees on top of shipping charges, so people were forced to pay for things they didn't order. Laws changed to allow you to keep things mailed to you.

You'd have to argue it out in court, but there's a reasonable chance you'd be able to keep it. Of course this story doesn't take place in USA so none of this matters.

You can't outrun a bad diet. If you're doing all that and are still unhealthy, your main culprit is your diet.

How long have you been doing that?

That wouldn't work. You could simply hand off the verification card to someone underage.

Granted you could have an adult login to one of these sites then let a minor interact with the site, but that puts the liability on the adult who logged in.

If you are going on a +10 hour drive to visit family for a holiday (mid-range EVs adds 50% to the travel time, so that'll turn into a 16 hr trip), it's cheaper to rent a gas car to drive there. You only rent the car for the time you're traveling, you don't keep renting it while you're at your destination thus you only rent it for 2 days. The average car rental in USA is $50 to $80 a day.

If you take into account the cost of booking a hotel in the middle to survive a full day of driving, the gas rental is far cheaper.

If you take into account the total cost of ownership, comparing total cost of a gas car vs total cost of an EV along with a couple gas rentals a year, the EV is still cheaper even if those individual trips cost a bit more. I have a mid-range EV. I've performed these calculations. Granted I still don't rent the gas vehicle as driving long distance in an EV is noticeably less stressful than driving in an ICE vehicle. You don't notice how much the vibration of an ICE engine slowly wears you out until it's no longer there. I listen to audiobooks so the extra driving time doesn't bother me. Work form home also means my hours are more flexible so I don't have to factor in vacation time. If that mattered, I'd just fly. Annoyingly, the cost to fly tends to be very similar to the cost of driving which sometimes makes it hard to decide on which option to pick. You can't pick the cheaper option when everything costs the same.

In other words, the input data was very poor. Please accuracy tell me everything you ate in the last 4 years, including the amounts of things such as the amount of salt and pepper you added to each meal and the amount of creamer you added or didn't add to your various cups of coffee across that timeframe.

If they don't follow this study with another one directly looking at dosing people with just caffeine, then the study is just statistical propaganda.

You can't just whip out that phrase and wave it around to solve all your problems. What is the moderate amount of water? What is the moderate amount of alcohol (fyi, the negatives outweigh the benefits at all doses)? Moderate amount of salt? Etc... Everything has a different moderate amount and those amounts all dynamically change based on other factors.

Saying to just keep to moderate amounts is a bullshit argument if you don't specify what those amounts are. It's the opposite of good advice. It means "I don't have a clue what's healthy or not so I'll just take a little bit of everything and hope the good things outweigh the bad things." That's not how nutrition should work. Science lets us do better than that.

True, but you're missing that each owner of the vehicle would have to buy that subscription. The $500 is a one time cost. $415 might be paid by owner 1 then paid again by owner 2 and finally by owner 3.

BMW isn't going through all the effort and risk of creating subscription services if it isn't going to earn them more money. That also means on average it's costing people more.

You can increase an audiobook's playback speed. I used to listen to books at around 200%. I could re-listen to them at 250%. Nowadays I'm normally at 130%... My brain must be aging or maybe modern books are faster now or something.

It's also difficult to read while driving, mowing the law, doing dishes, etc... You can consume audio content while doing all of those things.

However as you pointed out, they are horrific at trying to find a specific point in the story or skimming through one.