Or those fun old "universal" phone chargers, which had one wallbrick with 10 different molded cables for Sanyo, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, etc. Which were all slightly different. And then when a friend visited and asked for a charger, they needed standard #11 which wasn't compatible with the 10 yours had.

And remember that the EU didn't mandate usb c: they told the tech industry to figure out some standards on their own or else... . It wasn't until AFTER the Samsungs, Amazon's, LGs and Sonys of the world all started standardizing their stuff with USB c and it hit critical mass that the EU mandated everyone else should follow that. It could just as easily been lightning cables if that was the direction the tech industry had decided to go.

Just remember: Japanese cars and electronics used to be a joke too, until they weren't.
Then they ate Detroit for lunch.

There is no reason other countries can't pull off the same, and then some.

...Their rationale for only showing hours and minutes and hide the seconds of the digital clock in the system tray was to "save power" https://devblogs.microsoft.com...

Which works great, until it doesn't. You risk that any future update can include cpu instructions which your system doesn't support, which could result in instability, crashes, or even being unable to boot. You're taking a /risk/ circumventing the cpu requirements. It may be an acceptable risk to you, but could come as a total surprise to the owner of a system who you helped upgrade on non-supported hardware.

You know what they call alternative medicine which actually works? Medicine.

Won't help, since amazon mixes inventory. All "new" items with the same SKU end up in one bin. Any marketplace seller who claims to have new stuff and offers "fullfilled by amazon" will simply send their batch to Amazon, and it will be mixed right in with the rest of the legit stock. You have zero guarantees that Amazon's own sales came from the legit distribution channel instead of a marketplace sellers trunk who lied through their teeth to Amazon that it was new. /Same for straight-up ounterfit chargers and such mixed in with genuine Samsung, etc.

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.