Amazon has admitted numerous times to their investors that they'd had a very hard time monetizing Alexa, which is running at a loss because the vast majority of users use them to control lights and music, but NEVER buy a single thing through it despite Amazon's more and more desperate attempts to shoehorn purchases in there.

Forcing ads down the throats of paying customers is not going to magically make them more likely to suddenly start buying things, it just means they'll start looking at alternative smart speakers that don't annoy them.

At least this time there is a mechanism to transfer some of your purchased media to various participating 3rd parties and keep it, unlike last time.

When Microsoft gave up on and abandoned their oh-so ironically named "Plays4Sure" music DRM scheme in 2008 (4 years after launching it), the only options they offered were either: "Authorize your your playback license for each purchase before the shut-off date and that specific device will be able to continue to play it while it still functions and while you don't reset it, but it can't be transferred to another device or activated anywhere else anymore " or "You can remove the Plays4Sure digital protection by burning your purchased Plays4Sure music to CD and rip it back as MP3 by following these 17 easy steps. Better hurry and finish before , though!"

IIRC there was just a two-month (?) window between their initial announcement and the deactivating of the license servers altogether, if you missed that window all your music just became expensive digital dust.

Microsoft already tried to do that a few years back, when most new PC's and laptops preloaded with Windows defaulted to "Windows 10 in S-Mode" -- which didn't let you install anything except things downloaded from the Microsoft Store. To disable that and revert back to "normal" mode and regain the ability to install regular 3rd party windows software, it required you to create a Microsoft account and sign in to the Windows store (which involves verifying your email address and phone) to download their "disable s-mode" app. Needless to say, that app was not offered outside of the store.

"Surprisingly", users didn't like it much.

Note validating the destination server name is not the only purpose of an SSL cert -- it also encrypts the traffic between the browser and the server, which could otherwise contain potentially unencrypted usernames, passwords, or credit card information.

Anyone in between you and the server can potentially snoop on the data packets in transit, but it is far less likely that they can decypher it when you use SSL than with plain unencrypted HTTP. Yes, you can access a server by IP that uses an SSL cert associated with a domain name or self-signed certificate instead, but your browser would always complain that the name doesn't match or that the issuing authority is untrusted.

Even if it works, depending on 1970s hardware is a really bad idea if for no other reason that replacement parts are near impossible to get, and parts WILL be failing left and right. Even Ebay will only be able bail you out for so long.

If a car's LIDAR system can permanently damage camera sensors, then Tesla may have a serious problem on their hands in the near future.

All of Tesla's self-driving systems depend 100% on optical cameras, as a cost-saving measure. But the more other brands start deploying LIDAR based cars, the higher the likelihood that one of those LIDAR emitters would be literally two feet in front of or behind a Tesla at a stoplight, slowly frying its cameras the entire time you're waiting for the light to turn green. The more damage to the sensor, the more difficult it will be for those affected Tesla's to make the right decisions in self-driving mode.

Traffic cams could be impacted as well, albeit to a lesser extend since they would generally be positioned much higher and further away.

They better figure out a way to implement easily user-replaceable batteries as well, since 2027 is the deadline the EU requires those by, for all cellphones on the market.

Adding fuses to a laptop costs money.

Schools tend to by the absolute bottom of the barrel Chromebook models where the vendor cut every single corner there was to cut and then some, to get the price down as low as it can possibly go. If there is one thing public schools don't have, it's spare money.

Economy of scale. When you deliver letters to almost every house, often multiple letters to the same house, it is FAR more economical to deliver them than delivering one-offs spread out across a large neighborhood.

It would take a delivery person 30 seconds to drop 5 letters in your mailbox and five in your neighbors slot, which would be more than covered by the price for 10 stamps. If it takes several minutes to hand deliver your single letter and drive two blocks to deliver another single letter to the next person, the cost of those two stamps will NOT cover the salary+benefits for the person who had to take the time to do the delivery.
And those costs really spiral out of control once you start including rural areas where the distances between houses are much larger.
virtually no one would be willing to pay the true cost of those deliveries, which means that it simply isn't economical to continue delivery once the volume gets too low.

You won't have to, the digital tickets just mean that you wave the barcode on your screen in front of a scanner at the boarding location. No need to hand over your phone to anyone.

Is that despite plans for AI powered serarch, or because of plans for AI powered search?

Once Apple is forced to remove it from their appstore, the # of users is bound to dwindle over time.

Federal net neutrality laws would have meant one set of rules.

Now the big providers get to follow 50 separate set of rules.
Congratulations, you played yourself.

But it brings a different issue: with a barcode, all they know is you buy product x, not which individual can you grabbed. With qr code, they will know the exact can and it's expiration code, but only if the register scans each and every can individually. No more *beep* x 10 as they do with barcodes, but having to scan all 10 cans individually. If they don't, current inventory expiration dates will still be completely unknown because you have no idea which dates the other 9 cans had that you grabbed without scanning every single one individually.

this is a survey counting people who *admit* they don't know how. Actual numbers could vary drastically.