Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

name one other mainstream os that supports 486 processors.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

In my experience on laptops and tablets, I've found the exact opposite (eager loading) helpful in some situations with limited or no data. I would download an entire page on unmetered Wi-Fi, go offline, and read while riding as a passenger in a car or bus.

I sincerely doubt that 14,500 USD per year (full-time minimum wage) is near enough to pay for income tax, rent, food, health insurance, and a round-trip taxi ride every weekday in most of the United States. I'd be interested to read examples of budgets that you have in mind.

Recent graduates tend to be stuck with hourly food service and retail jobs. These tend to treat availability outside 9 to 5 as a condition for hiring, not to be doable from home, and not to pay enough for a taxi. Even a cyclist needs a backup during bad weather.

If someone happens not to have this privilege, then how would they go about traveling to or from work at night or on Sundays, when all the bus drivers are at home with their families? (Source: Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA)

I imagine that most gamers are unwilling to pay for business-class service if business-class service is the only "real" service offered at their home address.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

Four of the top five and five of the top ten games on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet's list are marked "Denied", which it defines as "Games where the developers have explicitly stated that they will not enable the anti-cheat solution to work on Linux or have denied the possibility of Linux support".

A proof-of-work puzzle would disadvantage phone and tablet users. One targeted specifically toward GPUs would disadvantage users of older off-lease ThinkPad laptops with an Intel IGP.

I can think of a few things leading to Voight-Kampff-style polygraph tests being phased out in this timeline

1. Several U.S. states have banned reliance on polygraph test results by employers. "Polygraph" on Wikipedia lists Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Delaware and Iowa. In addition, the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act 1998 generally bans polygraphing by employers outside the rent-a-cop industry.
2. Autism advocacy organizations raised a stink about false positive results on autistic or otherwise neurodivergent human beings.
3. The LLM training set probably picked up answers from someone's cheat sheet, such as "The turtle was dragging its hind leg, and I was waiting for it to stop squirming so I could see if it needed to go to the vet."

there is this general notion that people keep sprouting, that if EVs can't do everything we shouldnt bother. That if an EV doesn't cover every possible vehicle use case then nobody can have one.

Electric trucks are a thing. They can do many jobs. Yeah you aren't pulling a road train across the nullarbor, but you can certainly handle a lot of deliveries.

Firefox adds more crap nobody asked for.

If the developer has ever published the application on Google Play Store, this means the developer is verified, and the unmodified APKs still work on devices that haven't gone through this 24-hour process.