Meh. Smart people in the US donâ(TM)t profit much from inventing things any more, either. Capitalism turns out to reward exploitation more than innovation.

There was a Planet Money episode on exactly this recently. Turns out it's not a legal thing, but simply a conventions thing.

The summary is worth reading:

Notably, they didnâ(TM)t force the turnover of a password. They used facial recognition to unlock the laptop. Passwords have better protection under the law than biometrics.

It's very odd that LSM LOCKDOWN is controversial. This is roughly the same feature as BSD Securelevels, though with some more fine-grained control. In theory, it's very useful if you want to protect your system against attackers who compromise a process that runs with root privilege. In practice, the kernel attack surface is so large that a motivated attacker can probably bypass it.

I'm quite surprised that they didn't. Prior to the launch, they said that they were going to market it as 'plant-based' and not 'vegetarian' or 'meat-free' because it didn't meet the requirements to be classified as vegetarian. They were aiming it at flexitarians that wanted to reduce the amount of meat that they were eating, not at vegetarians or vegans. I guess someone in marketing realised how big a market they were losing and decided it was a big money maker to advertise it as meat-free but didn't bother to see if this was actually a true description.

It's true for about 20% of people. You're probably not one of them.

It's also something that people need to stop viewing as a bad thing. The most FOSS in a proprietary product, the easier it is to build a fully FOSS alternative.

It got boring when Slashdot disabled (broke?) the message center so it is now impossible to see when someone has replied to your posts. That was the thing that, early on, allowed Slashdot discussions to be discussions and not just disjointed monologues. Since it went away, the quality of discussions has gone way down. The AC spam was just a symptom of this.

Nope. Note in TFS the key phrase: 'In its default configuration'. The university that I used to work for bought Office 365. This was even before the GDPR, but the university deals with a lot of confidential commercial data from industrial partners and with health records in life sciences departments. Google's stock T&Cs were completely incompatible with this and they refused to negotiate. Microsoft's stock T&Cs were also incompatible (which is why this ruling is completely unsurprising), but Microsoft was happy to negotiate a contract that gave much stricter controls over data.

For Germany in particular, the German Azure data centres are actually owned by a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft and so out of US jurisdiction. Companies in Germany (and the rest of the EU) can buy an Office 365 subscription that guarantees that their data doesn't ever leave Germany.

What do you mean by 'a cycle life of 1000 cycles'? Most batteries that I've seen are rated as a number of cycles after which they are guaranteed to retain 80% of their initial charge. That number is typically 1,000-3,000 cycles. After that, most of them don't die, they just have a lower maximum charge, which continues to degrade.

It gets more complicated when you factor in partial charges. LiIon batteries are most efficient if you never fully charge or discharge them. If you use around 40% of their total charge cycle each time then they last a lot longer, but then you have to increase your up-front costs in exchange for the lower TCO.

Solar cells are now very cheap. They are a negligible part of the cost for a small-scale installation. The cost of deploying rooftop solar is dominated by the installation cost (putting up scaffolding and having competent people climbing safely around on the roof is not cheap). The second largest cost is the storage and the alternator system to drive AC mains. Both of these costs are amortised significantly in larger installations. Most large installations are at ground level, so require a fraction of the manpower to install each panel. They use much larger alternator installations, which also come with higher efficiency.

TL;DR: Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.

The problem is not GOG, the problem is a credit card that charges a fee based on the location of the transaction processor. The fix is to get a credit card from a reputable company.

Advertisers and marketing departments are full of woke social "justice" idiots. Just look at the Gillette ads, painting all white men as rapists-in-waiting. Or Nike's embrace of Colin Kaepernick.

If advertisers actually had a clue, and only cared about the bottom line, they would completely ignore the tempests in a teacup and advertise where the viewers are, and be content neutral. It's the only sane policy.

We know you're full of shit.