This is "victory" because the Dems like the environment, so stopping anyone from knowing about it is ergo "beating the Dems".

Same reason the Republicans were all about demolishing the ACA (an act written by a Republican and then edited by Republicans because the Democrat proposals weren't acceptable to them). The ACA was voted on by Dems and therefore had to be destroyed, the fact that it has led to many Americans being without any healthcare at all and more than a few dying as a result is considered an acceptable price to pay for killing something Democrats voted for.

"Victory" is not about doing anything worthwhile, it's about "owning the Dems".

Of course they colluded with foreign powers. However, it's irrelevant. Since the legalisation of corruption (Trump abolished any enforcement of corruption laws), the US has slid from an already disastrous level of corruption into total degeneracy. It will take years, maybe decades, simply to root out all of the evil that is now in place and by then those who committed treason will either be safely overseas, or their records will have been "accidentally" destroyed, making any investigation impossible.

I would point out, though, that the countries the GOP has historically strong ties with also have extraordinarily high levels of corruption - and have done for a long time - and nobody bothers to do anything about it. This is what Trump is relying on. Once corruption at this level is normalised, everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Worse, I just don't see any serious will to fix the issue amongst any of the other political groups in the US. The Democrats aren't being honest with themselves over why they lost in 2024, and have swung so far to the right themselves that Ronald Reagan would have considered them right-wing extremists.

This is something voters can fix, but almost half of Americans have totally disengaged at this point and the other half believes themselves so powerless that (to use a Douglas Adamsism) they're only concerned with preventing the wrong lizard from being elected.

Customers who care should just sue. This is pretty strictly a civil issue, and the government isn't going to bother to intervene. It's up to the customers to force them to reverse that.

That said, 22 kW AC charging is absurd. It requires 32A of three-phase power or 90A of a single phase 240V, which means a three-phase 40A circuit or a single-phase 120A circuit. That's larger than the total capacity of my entire breaker box at my house. In a sane universe, the demand charges alone would be enough to discourage anyone from charging at more than about a third of that rate, because unless you just happen to be producing solar power locally at the time, it's horrible on the electric grid.

Even Tesla never went much above about 17 kW for home charging, and they stopped doing that years ago because there was approximately zero demand or real-world use of higher charge rates.

So while technically speaking, they are absolutely doing something wrong, they're still right that the number of people who legitimately care is likely to be within the margin of error of being zero.

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.

They're finally going to unleash a Bob / Clippy mashup that does something.

Hilarious stories await us.

Sad ones too.

They forked SailfishOS to create a domestic OS to avoid these kinds of problems.

Russian linux devs still contribute to that tree though Linus banned their ethnicity from his tree.

Since we're all speculating, probably their phone is clunky and some Generals kept their iPhones against advice or orders because they're more featureful and convenient.

We'll hear eventually.

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.

Meanwhile, X.AI has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 100 million hyperfecund pesticide-resistant male mosquitoes in California and New York over two years to own the libs.

Which is, of course, nonsense. Nothing stops you from making a copy of encrypted data. What sucks is that for a backup, you likely can't do incremental.

That site is blocking VPN clients (sus) but here's another one you can pick up at CVS:

https://www.cvs.com/shop/ijoy-...

Imagine how much jet fuel was wasted on being stupid.

This is an example of "sometimes you can be too careful".

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.