How hard would it be to replace the software on these devices?

This sounds attractive but what I've seen on their site and reviews is not very clear on how good it is as a phone. I don't care about most cell phone apps. I either don't need the functionality or I do it on my Linux laptop. I want a voice phone on which I can text, take photos, and run a browser. That's about it. The option attaching a keyboard is attractive as I find typical virtual keyboards very slow and error prone. So, how well does it work as a telephone? Is it limited in which services it is compatible with?

EOM

You're either repeating what I said or getting into esoterica that isn't relevant: this isn't even on SCOTUS radar yet, and it if ever gets there, SCOTUS won't be entertaining any of the possibilities you mention: no political force in the US is going to intervene with SCOTUS on behalf of "Xinuos" et al. in our lifetimes. That's fantasy that exists exclusively in only the more demented minds of IP rent seekers.

Some rulings are made by partial ("panel") courts, for expedience, and when that happens the option exists to request the same court reconsider the ruling, but with a full bench ("en banc" court). That's what's going on here. This pattern of panel/en banc rulings exists at both appeals courts and SCOTUS.

When en banc SCOTUS makes a ruling or declines an appeal, that's the end of the road: there is no higher authority for appeals. It is possible to get SCOTUS to reconsider a ruling, but such requests are truly extraordinary, like POTUS or the Senate asking SCOTUS for reconsideration, with new evidence or some emergency situation at hand. None of that is even on the same planet as this Xinuos stuff.

They're probably not going to get their en banc hearing. And it won't take long to not get it, either: this isn't adjacent to any Great Issues of our time, and it's not an opportunity to thwart Trump on anything he cares about, so it's probably not going any further. If, by some tragic chance, they get an en banc hearing, they still have to win the appeal. Who knows though; appeals courts in the US are rife with irrational and/or highly partisan people. Anything could happen. If that came about, the victory will likely die in SCOTUS, like so many the other miscarriages of justice that come from federal appeals courts.

It's not really that complex. 94-ish district courts under 12-ish regional circuit appeals courts, then SCOTUS. Three layers. The "-ish" in there is because there are some special cases and special regions (DC), but those don't apply in this particular case.

Wanting total internet connectivity is a sign of utter ignorance, and that ignorance is a choice.

Make ignorance shameful again.

Ban them for safety reasons.

Nicotine addicts have plenty of delivery options including lozenges.
Selling products intended for volatile substance abuse is illegal in the UK. Products inherently designed in a way that their normal real world disposal is dangerous make sense to regulate.

Not everything everyone wants to do makes sense for society to permit, including producing flammable products whose nature makes them into incendiaries when broken.

I inert all my expended lithium cells by destruction either in my welding shop or outdoors on my land, then dispose of the metallic slag safely with other mixed scrap metals. Small cells make impressive incendiaries so I'm not surprised cell disruption during recycling of objects containing them causes fires.

I use welding PPE so it's no risk to me and have ample water to flood cool spatter (which I do anyway after welding outdoors). I suggest other Slashdotters (the original techy sort who know how to safely break lithium cells which is quite simple) self-educate so they have direct experience of how powerful small cells really are.

Ay, there's the rub. They can put up data centers quickly. Electrical capacity expansion takes time.

They want the electricity now, not "when the electrical utilities get to it."

Hmm. Probably originally implemented to enable Kremlin surveillance of Russians (in Russia), but there was no reason to remove the surveillance back door for the export version/

That turns out not to be the case.

Really, air conditioners are not the problem (or at least, they are such a tiny part of the problem that they can be ignored.)

However, they are also not the solution to the problem.

Bonus karma for Futurama reference. I was actually amazed that the ñ displayed correctly on my post here. Slashdot usually garbles non-English characters.

(Maybe I'll try posting about topology next, and I can see if "Möbius strip" displays correctly.)

The first line of the summary:

Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive...

It's not the batteries that are the bottleneck. It is the equipment to connect them into the net, and the skilled labor to do so.

"Should" is not really a useful word in economic analysis. The cost of expanding capacity is a cost that has to be paid now, while the income from selling electricity is an income that occurs in the future. If this were an unregulated free market, if the data centers are offering slightly more per kilowatt hour for the power than the current price for the consumer, they win the bid for power, and everybody's prices go up.

Electrical power is not an unregulated free market; it's vastly more complicated. But the overall law of supply and demand still drives prices up, although the maze of regulations complicates how the costs are distributed among customers.

("scarcity drives prices up" is only in the short-term, of course. In the long term, scarcity drives new suppliers into the marketplace, which may lower prices.)

Depends on what you mean by "point of no return." Yes, the carbon dioxide we have already put into the atmosphere will continue to result in Earth being warmer by something like 2 C, and this will last for at least a hundred years, possibly more.

But, no, we have not yet reached a point of cataclysmic climate change. It is not too late to avoid worse results.

The longer we wait to start implementing solutions, however, the worse it will be.

The post you're replying to was making fun of the lack of a tilde (~). There is no Spanish word "nino", it doesn't mean anything.

El Niño, not El Nino.