They need to reanimate Ferdinand Piëch. The company has lost its way.

It's a massive, sprawling, brutalist building constructed in the '60s. That figure doesn't surprise me at all.

I don't know about that particular model of GPS tracker, but some of them are used by finance companies to track cars with high risk, high interest (credit card high) loans. Those ones are absolutely able to disable the car. The staff at a local dealer gave them the very un-PC name "poor person modules".

I live in a small town in Ontario and my experience is the total opposite. The district municipality and the hydro utility have used federal rural Internet funds to build a fibre network in the area. I pay $70/month for unlimited, gigabit fibre to my home. It takes more than just the federal funds. I think the local government needs to be involved in building it, because if it's left to Bell and the other big telcos, we're all screwed. But yeah, it's easier to just yell "Trudeau bad".

Yes and no. I remember the days when not having Internet Explorer (the Windows version specifically) was a big reason not to try another platform. Corporate sites and banks would require the use of Windows IE or wouldn't function properly with anything else. Now that IE's market share is so low, all of those sites are forced to support Firefox and Chrome (at the very least) which function the same on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Years ago browsing the Internet on a Mac or Linux PC made you a second class netizen. The irony is that it's IE users on older versions of Windows who are second class now.