It's a standard part of Android (albeit locked behind a Developer Mode checkbox in some cases) which in stock Android provides the barest minimum functionality, like no task bar, but can be augmented with apk addons. On many devices (Samsung's DeX, Huawei's MIUI, OnePlus, LG, Motorola) they've upgraded the bare "Desktop Mode" functionality to work over network casting or DP alt mode to make your phone usable as a desktop device with just one cable, supporting Bluetooth keyboards and mice.

Google's Pixel devices have (until extremely recently) deliberately blocked DP alt mode, with Pixel 8's finally getting the hardware feature unlocked with a firmware update. "Desktop Mode" has not been enhanced or extended on them either, so you get that lackluster bare Android experience. Google has a lot of catching up to do to match other manufacturers that have been playing in this space for a while now.

I was always under the impression Google didn't want Desktop Mode to become a viable thing, so as to not impinge on their Chromebook sales and control, but it appears they are slowly bowing to consumer pressure, or at least getting shamed by their competitors.

I currently have an old 2U Rackmount IBM X3650 M3 sitting in my basement. It's huge, and power hungry, but it's got 16 cores, 72GB of ECC RAM, and is holding 10x5TB SMR drives and 6x1TB CMR drives, all 2.5" (as it only takes 2.5" drives), running TrueNAS Core. The server itself was cheap when I got it 3rd hand (CAD$100), the software's free, and it did what I needed it to, but I will soon be upgrading to a 36-bay Supermicro Skylake system, because 3.5" drives are just plain better, and the increase in both processing power and storage will help with my ever-growing storage needs. What's that, DataHoarder? No idea what you're talking about. *ahem*

Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, Wal-Mart is already using eInk electronic tags in some areas of the store. This means they don't have to print out reams of paper tags and have staff members walking the aisles to change them. And because of the way they are designed, the eInk tags get a long, slow refresh cycle over the period of a day, as they're all battery operated and using the 432MHz or 915MHz frequency band for short-length, low bandwidth signalling

With frequent updates for things like "surge pricing", it would require a lot more available power in the receiving tags, both for more active listening on the radio and more frequent updates to their eInk display, which would require larger batteries and more frequent changing/charging. That would require staff to go around changing out batteries or charging the tags, which makes them as expensive as just using paper tags anyway, and this is all in the name of decreasing costs.

Stores, especially big box stores, are all trying to cut down on the cost of Human Resources, running the stores with less and less people (Self-Checkout being a big indicator of this, where one staff member can "supervise" a dozen checkouts, rather than having one staff member per lane), so this is yet another way to get the number of staff in the store down, along with automated cleaning robots.

Way back in 2019, there was a company called "Neverware" that offered a distro called "CloudReady" - Basically a version of ChromiumOS that would work on any system, especially old hardware. Google bought Neverware in 2020, and turned CloudReady into ChromeOS Flex, bring it in-house (and ensuring there was no ChromeOS competition out there). ChromiumOS and ChromeOS Flex did/do not support Android apps (like regular ChromeOS does), and Flex was always a red-headed stepchild in Google's ChromeOS lineup. So it makes sense Google are killing it off.

Take your cellphone, use the camera app and turn on the flashlight, then slowly look around the room. Cameras will show up reflecting the flashlight in your phone's camera, but not to the naked eye without backlighting. So if you see a pinprick of light through your phones camera and not elsewhere, there's a camera watching - Feel free to put a piece of blutack over it, or unplug it.

Walking around in public you have no right to privacy. You, just like criminals and the police, are in a public place with no reasonable expectation of privacy from anyone around. Anyone can, and will, be able to record you, both for their safety and your own. If you don't want to be caught doing something illegal on camera, maybe don't do something illegal. And despite the prevailing paranoia around, you are not interesting enough for nefarious people/"duh gubmint" to go to the trouble of subpoenaing every possible camera within the radius of you and processing all that video to track your activities.

This speculative presentation was made at the latest in 2019. It was speculative at the time, and not an indicator of firm plans. And in the 4 years since, things change, especially considering the pandini has pushed back what little plans they already had.

I remember seeing "Hissing Sid" on Tomorrows World, reporting that domestic robots were only 10 years away. That was 1987. Or maybe "Mabel the Robot Housemaid" is more your style. Again, 10 years away, this time back in 1966.

No, but "redundant communication capabilities" means they have a backup communication system (likely cellular or similar). This is why you have redundancies.

Yes, the higher the number the better. But there comes a point where you're running into diminishing returns. The 3-2-1 system, while not perfect, is reasonably cheap and easy to implement, and gives the best "Bang for your buck". If something has happened where all 3 copies are unusable, despite being on 2 different media types and with one backup stored offsite, you have a much larger problem than data loss.

Hard-Drives and SSDs don't require power to move either, I'm not sure what your point is there. And while LTO tapes are (comparatively) cheap, the drives, libraries and storage robot systems for anytime on-line access are most definitely not. It's also part of the 3-2-1 typical backup strategy: at least 3 copies in at least 2 formats, at least 1 off-site.

They're a cloud backup company, which means they need lots of storage, but don't particularly need high-speed. They're not a CDN, or a cloud computing provider. Their data is moving at internet speeds, not LAN speeds, and any inherent slowness is taken care of by the RAIDing of the drives together. At the moment, spinning hard-drives are still at least 5x cheaper per terabyte than flash-based SSDs (Seagate Exos X16 14TB HDD Enterprise @ $20/TB vs. SAMSUNG 870 QVO-Series 4TB SSD @ $110/TB).

Electric cars and there ilk still make noise at low speeds, it's just their dinosaur-burning brethren that make a LOT more noise and thus drown them out. But even if they didn't, there's this handy device attached to ALL cars since the 1900's that will solve this problem: It's called a Horn.

The problem with Fracking isn't the drilling, it's forcing an uncompressible fluid into the hole you've drilled, sealed at high pressure, to fracture (hence "Frack") the layers of strata apart to give the methane trapped within a place to escape to.

Geothermal injects water at low pressure, and allows the resulting steam to release to generate power. The drilled hole is (typically) lined so it doesn't fracture and cause problems

Personally, I have it rebound (thanks SwiftKey) to F13, which is then used to trigger "Push to mute" in Discord/OBS/Voicemeeter. This is real handy for an anti-cough/privacy button when streaming and the like. I'm sure there are a lot of other uses, but that one means I don't have to alt-tab out of an active application/game/whatever.