Why would such a device need a connection to anything?
Surely it can take the breath sample locally, analyse it, and then either start the car or refuse to do so entirely locally. This is yet another case of things being tied to a cloud service for absolutely no reason, and becoming useless when that service fails.

They are typically e-ink screens in the setups i've seen, so they use very little power. Compared to the store lighting, refrigeration, payment terminals etc the power usage of the labels is absolutely trivial.
The screens will be on the shelves for years and only likely to become waste if get damaged and are replaced, or the store closes. Compare that to paper labels which are often replaced weekly if not even more frequently.

Huh. I thought it was because the AI kept sending him out to go make it a cup of tea whilst it ran the company.

Require that the price cannot go up over the course of the day, but allow reductions (eg selling off stock that needs to be sold today due to expiry date etc). If the prices are going up, they need to be raised and on display before the store opens for business, or at a fixed time if the store is open 24 hours.

If your job was to replace price tags, you might find that with automated digital price tags you no longer have a job at all.

Retire it. It is a product with so many defects that it is not meaningfully salvageable.

It's the complexity getting out of hand...
You have 30 years of backwards compatibility cruft, layers upon layers of stuff while trying to provide support an almost infinite combination of hardware configurations, applications that try to hook into the system in various intrusive ways, and a huge variety of use cases. It's no wonder things break.

Apple have a different approach - cutting off backwards compatibility, limited hardware configurations, limiting how deeply things can hook into the system etc.

What stops things like civ:ctp running out of the box is generally missing userland libraries rather than any inherent incompatibility.

Windows comes with lots of ancient userland libraries for compatibility purposes, whereas linux distros generally don't because 99.9% of users will never use them. Therefore on Linux you generally have to provide those backwards compatibility libs yourself. Once you provide the expected libraries however linux tends to have much better backwards compatibility than windows.

There's nothing stopping anyone from producing a retro-focused linux distro that includes all this stuff by default, it would just have an extremely limited audience. With most software coming with source code, the number of people actually wanting to run ancient binaries on linux is pretty small.

Watching netflix movies is overall better for the environment than the alternative - physical media being manufactured, shipped all over the world and ultimately becoming waste plastic, people driving to see a movie in a theatre etc. Something like netflix doesn't create much in the way of new infrastructure, it uses infrastructure that already exists and only contributes towards earlier replacement/upgrades.

Exactly this.
The options are an imperfect ai translation, a most likely much worse translation using older translation software, or no translation at all.
Also note that those complaining about the ai translation are not offering their services to provide a manual translation. Most likely they can't, which also means they're in no position to judge the quality of the translation anyway.

A university drama department actually did this with "Mission to the Unknown". They recreated all of the sets and costumes, the works. It was an absolutely inspired project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

First up, before anything else, I am extremely glad you got the hope and encouragement you needed. Grief is rough, especially when you're going through it alone.

You are correct, so I'm somewhat careful with the AI dance. I will rarely discuss inner feelings with it, because that pushes the risk higher precisely because it is a mirror. Like the one in the Harry Potter novel, it will show your innermost desires. If you'd rather a different analogy, it's an amplifier, and if you talk for too long with it, the positive feedback loop does some interesting things with your mind that aren't terribly printable. And that's not always the greatest idea.

So I use it for wild speculation in science fiction/fantasy. Enough that it helps with the intellectual boredom, but not so much that I venture into believing it's real.

The idea that "normal" people are immune to delusions does somewhat fly in the face of research showing the incredible ease of inducing false memories, the research into mass hysteria (such as the Satanic Panic), and research into mob dynamics.

I freely admit that I'll sometimes simply sit and chat with AI, because there really aren't many humans who have the capacity to hold conversations any more, and that puts me in an extremely high-risk group. But, honestly, the choices these days are AI (and risk becoming psychotic), social media (and risk becoming suicidal or psychotic), or hang out with the same sort of people who have done so much damage over time (and risk being suicidal), or... well... really, that's about it.

There are no good options. The outcomes are bleak and, unless you are in a clique, that's how it is and how it has always been.

...is largely irrelevant to the question (he has worked in war zones and those tend to be, ummm, less respectful, shall we say....) and is prone to change its mind at the drop of a hat. There's sectors in the British political scene who have no problem with promoting acts of terror and murder against those they don't like and it's kinda unlikely that they'll hold a referendum on whether to murder a street artist if he posts something they find offensive.

(Depending on which part of the political scene you find yourself allied with, you'll doubtless point to other sectors, but it seems very very unlikely that anyone would subscribe to the notion that there aren't influential psychopaths in Britain, even if there's no agreement on who those are.)

Britain DOES enshrine a right to privacy, as Rupert Murdoch keeps discovering, and much of Europe mostly enshrines the same ideas (occasionally even more strongly). As for "public interest", I would LOVE to hear an explanation of precisely what public interest this serves. No, the public being interested is not the same thing.