The author seems to spend a lot of time talking around the story rather than explicitly stating what one would actually lose by buying these cars without the display.

Putting my "presumably sanity is still ruling the roost" hat on, surely selling a car without basic features like a speedometer, fuel gauge etc would be illegal in pretty much every developed country?

For me personally, if that screen purely provides optional stuff that manufacturers can leverage prematurely EOL'ing features and/or subscriptions, it seems like this is a really cool idea. Just give me the option to hook my phone up to the car (an AUX cable is fine) and all is well for me.

Why did anyone think that conversations with chatbots would be protected by law?

Which surely has been already paid by the app developer as a result of publishing their app in the App Store? I read this as an additional charge for using a payment system not controlled by Apple.

I have to say though, that's a really great get-rich-quick scheme: You all give me money, and in exchange I don't supply any service to you. They should charge Android users double for not using iDevices.

... the auto industry lobbies governments to declare in-car advertising while the car is in motion to be not a distraction from driving. "Responsibly designed adverts" or some similar tripe.

Your information is over ten years out-of-date. These days, unless you opt out of all auto driver installs (e.g. Windows won't attempt to auto-detect/install printers on the network), or apply registry settings to disable auto driver installs for specific devices), Windows 11 will happily 'update' your video driver for an older version because reasons. I even had the video driver updated while I was playing a computer game, which obviously crashed the game. My video card software has an option to auto-update but I have it disabled, and I tracked the auto-install back to Windows Update. I've also seen Windows auto update drivers for HP printers to ones that don't have the option to print in colour, and when that is combined with HP removing all 'older' drivers from their website, that turns into a real problem (luckily the customer still had an old driver install file in their Downloads folder).

As Ben Stiller once said, "here we go again... again".

"Block the auto updater then" And don't forget to always have the offline installer available locally in case your software maker pulls sketchy stunts.

(or on 4K/BR... usually)

I'm watching Spider-Noir at the moment directly off Amazon Prime Video (in the B&W mode that they offer), and I'm frequently seeing dark back background gradients and even characters' faces being reduced to about three grades of really obvious blotchiness, transporting me to the era of 16-bit gaming and extremely limited colour palettes. I've stopped watching the occasional pirated movie for bitrate-related sins that were nowhere near as bad as this. Also, I'm reminded of the time when the anti-piracy adverts used to argue that you would get far better quality with the genuine article, now the only time that's true is at the cinema.

The line that made me chuckle was the "it focused on 'a foundation that no other browser can match"', for the same reason.

A clean break from a character with something like a 30-film run that they can only do so much with might encourage something new to be written?

I remember as a kid considering the A590 hard drive expansion for my Amiga 500. Years later I learned that it was apparently very failure prone.

I wonder how many fossil fuel lobbyists will be present at this conference.

It definitely could have been worse: they could have taken a page out of their competitor's book and named three different products the same name.