My neighborhood (suburb of Washington DC, near NASA Goddard) has underground utilities.
We have lost power for maybe 12 hours total over the past 30 YEARS.
When there's a lot of wind and rain, we sometimes lose power for seconds, maybe tens of seconds. Outages of more than a minute are extremely rare.
That's why the FIOS box, the routers, and the most important desktop are on small UPS units - primarily to avoid losing work.

Nearby neighborhoods with above ground lines lose power approximately annually, sometimes for days.

In OSS there's a certain desperation for quality code where a lot of bullshit has historically been tolerated.

In the comment you posted at the top of this thread, you talked about servers, desktops, and mobile devices. Now you want the conversation to be only about desktops.

Extreme? Not in my opinion.

Swappable batteries seem to make sense for city cars, otherwise they don't really work out. It would perhaps work better if we built space frame vehicles, but unibody is actually superior for overall user experience, especially in NVH.

Why more people are buying DVDs/blu-ray. They have the movie. They own it. It can't be taken from them. It won't change.

The same with books. No worrying that your digital copy will mysteriously disappear one night. You have the book. You bought it. It's yours. The words won't change.

... expect the solution to be no more movies "sales," just rentals with a fixed time limit, either "until [date master license expires/is up for renewal]" or "some number of weeks/years".

Another solution will be to shift to a "library access" model, which is already common. At least that will be understandable by the general public: Most people know that brick-and-mortar public libraries retire old books to make way for newer ones.

As for existing complaints, the best hope consumers have is that some law firm will successfully argue that the fine print is too buried to create an enforceable contract, then reach a settlement that gives consumers some partial credit depending on how long they had access to their purchase, with vanishingly-low credit if the purchase was more than a few years ago.

When it comes to AI, I expect there will be many years between any credible, widely-recognized claim of sentience and the time when more than a few countries recognize "human rights" for them, if it happens at all.

Having sentience is not required for most people to say "this person/entity deserves human rights," and such rights are routinely granted to non-sentient individuals or entities:

We rightfully give legal human rights to people with medical conditions that render them not self-aware and not intelligent in any meaningful way (e.g. newborns with severe anencephaly, who may only have a brain stem and may only live a few minutes), because they part of a larger class (people) who by definition are supposed to have human rights.

We give limited "person rights" to corporations and other legal entities, but they only exist as legal fiction.

We do not give "basic human rights" to primates, dogs, dolphins, octopuses, and other animals even though there are examples of each that are arguably smarter and more self-aware than a typical 4 year old child. Even in the USA, dogs - "Man's best friend" - are routinely killed (albeit humanely) in some animal shelters for no reason other than the shelter they are in is too full.

In some countries and periods of history, we don't even give "basic human rights" to all healthy adults (e.g. repressed political minorities, children, the ill, the elderly, slaves, women, etc.).

In short, being sentient doesn't mean you get legally-protected human rights, and you (rightfully) may get legally-protected human rights even if you, as an individual, are not self-aware and show no signs of being intelligent.

On one hand, you raise good points, and on the other hand they don't apply to automotive traction batteries. Battery packs are chassis structural members.

Errr, hearing aids are significantly larger with standard hearing aid batteries being larger than airpods themselves,

No, they're not. My dad has hearing aids and they are about the same size as an airpod.

For reference, this is close to, but not the same as, what he has. This shows the size of the various airpod models. They are not "significantly larger" than a hearing aid, and in fact are nearly identical in size.

Like seriously that is an insanely ignorant example. Cheese also contains calcium so what excuse does chalk have for not being used as a sandwich topping?

Yes, your example is insanely ignorant. Cheese is a food. Chalk is not.

It's not just up to them, it's up to copyright law.
And why do you think you speak for all book authors over all time?

People like you think libraries should be shut down, fair use removed, and no one allowed to resell a book they read.
Literally the logical conclusion to your post.

Guess you forgot that we totally fucked up Iran

We have to both be thinking of TNG and later because in TOS the primary interface is physical controls and most readouts aren't screens.

In TNG the primary interface for casual use is verbal, but there are displays everywhere and it's common for people to ask for something to be displayed on them, and the primary interface for technical activities is touch screens.

I suppose I need to pay you every time I point someone to you works to?
Do I have to pay you when I finish you book and give it to someone else?

Did they ever mention copyrights on Star Trek???

Why would that even come up?
We would absolutely have a form of copyright post scarcity. Because post scarcity one of the thing that differentiate people is what they created.