It will be interesting to see how the consumer refunds from businesses play out in cases where a bill had a specific 'tariff surcharge' as opposed to a generic price increase.

I suppose one could reasonably argue that having a complete dataset makes it easier for the city to optimize its repair schedule; they can see that there is a cluster in a given area and schedule a crew to fix all of them in one go rather then piecemeal. Yes they could do that today, but this way there is more certainty about the amount of work to be done.

The article doesn't make it clear if the drives containing the key failed (all of them), or if the decryption failed. Assuming the drives agree on the content of the encryption key, it sounds more likely that the *en*cryption key was incorrectly specified, or the vote data was corrupted such that it cannot be decrypted. Or perhaps someone swapped the data during transportation and this is a feature-not-bug.

Pretty sure those mailings aren't hard-pulls; if they were then everyone would have a rock-bottom score from all of them.

If you have a trusted 3rd party that exercises administrative control over transactions, why bother with a blockchain -- you've already established that you trust that providers vision of who has what so the overhead of a blockchain isn't necessary. You could instead deposit your funds with that provider and let them deal with it until such time as you want the funds to leave that provider. You only need blockchain when no party trusts any other party.

CC providers already do this with holdbacks based on amount and chargeback history, I believe PayPal does as well. Coinbase doesn't expose internal transactions to the chain -- same concept.

They claimed to not have plans, and now they do, surprising nobody.

Critical point. In a fair world I'd expect it to be one of the biggies with a deep market. In a less fair world it'll be one that just so happens to be mostly controlled by connected insiders where paying the coinage to publish the stats is in effect a transfer of public funds to those insiders.

Laws change, interpretations of laws change, enforcement of laws change. Once the data exists in their control there is no clawing it back.

This was prior to DoH / HTTPS ubiquity so public wifi hotspots still had some risk, plus it was a fun toy.

Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

Consider the difference between calling a plumber out at 2am on a holiday vs a regular scheduled appointment -- if you wait until it is an emergency it is going to cost more and the result will be lower quality.

DRM as in 'flag in the drive firmware saying this is a Synology drive' such that the NAS won't accept non-flagged drives as 'legit'. Same idea as a printer that identifies OEM ink cartridges vs others.

Ubisoft will argue they didn't cancel the license -- you still have legal permission to run the software, but it just so happens that software you have no longer works because the servers it needs to talk to no longer exist, and they never promised to run them forever.

I would absolutely wave a magic wand to have the shelf labels include tax. Long gone are the days of having to relabel literally every item when the tax rate changes, and the advent of digital shelf tags makes it trivial. I do see some differences with the 'tariff surcharge' from sales tax though:

* Sales tax is the same across vendors. I know the approximate sales tax in an area. I don't know via what exact supply chain the store obtained an item, or when, so I can't know what the tariff was. The store doesn't either -- individual items that were subject to differing tariffs are indistinguishable on the shelf, thus the tariff surcharge will be arbitrary.
* Companies hate to disclose what they paid for stock, and in many cases are contractually prohibited from doing so. An accurate tariff surcharge would disclose this to me. Thus the surcharge is going to be an approximate / averaged amount.
* Approximate surcharges become the dumping ground for 'whatever we think we can add at the end of the sale process that won't cause the customer to abandon their cart' with little relation to the actual cost to the company.
* I am not aware of a case where a store gets to keep some of the sales tax. If the tax rate goes down, they don't get to keep charging the higher rate and 'oopsie' keep the overage. A tariff surcharge, since it necessarily can't be linked to the specific unit, is really just unbundling their cost of goods sold so they can double-dip.

Which is fine so long as they advertise the full price. If they want to break it out in the price details, fine, but don't advertise the lower price up front then tack on a surcharge at the end of the order flow.