Why have automated calls at all? Sports are social events where people got to see other people who have trained to peak human performance compete against each other at popular games.

I don't want to see perfect play by optimized automatons, I want to see the earnest best effort on the part of the participants and argue about different plays with my friends later. The players will make mistakes, and so will the officials. That should just be part of the game.

Only if you don't live near a Staples, CVS, Walgreens, etc. You'll get even better results because (at least CVS but probably everyone) has dye sublimation printers, which are vastly better for photographs than color printers.

For other color prints, Color laser printers are not that expensive, but I haven't had much success. I'd recommend stick with B&W, and outsource color stuff to office supply / pharmacy type stores.

B&W laser is so vastly cheaper and lower maintenance, particularly in a sporadic use case, that it's not even a competition - Last time I bought a laser printer, the starter toner was good for 1500 pages at 5% coverage, and it worked fine even if I last printed something 8 months ago. Compare to a typical inkjet in which a full toner pack is good for 200 pages at 5% coverage, has to run ink through every so often to keep the tubes clear, and (for the last HP inkjet I owned) prints black text using all colors despite having a full black cartridge.

Caveat: if you are planning on printing addresses on envelopes to be mailed as a substantial use case, go with the inkjet. Toner fuses to the outside of the paper, so it can get stripped away by the sorting machines.

Any other purpose would certainly be suspicious.

But are they trying to sell the latest phones, by having it, or clear out their stock of older phones by not having it?

To sequester zinc and a small amount of copper in our nations landfills? Why not just.. leave it at the store where they gave them to you? Drop them in the take-a-penny tray[1])?

[1] The existence of a take-a-<thing> tray should be more than enough evidence that its time to retire that unit of currency, as it means people are willing to round up to not deal with the burden of carrying them around.

The last iPod before they started the iPhone had some form of all of the major features of the iPhone except the cellular radio, so one could argue that the iPhone continues the iPod lineage, including having less space than other devices at the same price point.

This feature doesn't actually affect most people - it currently requires specific hardware - Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite - so it seems like you might have to go out of your way to get a machine infected with it. Those people aren't going to complain because they're buying the machines to get that as a feature.

I'm sure they will keep salami slicing until it covers everyone, but every step of the way it will only be a minority who are actually affected so there won't be enough outrage at once to get something done before apathy and "industry standard practice" kick in.

I'm a bit concerned that we are now using the term "ransomware" to include situations where data have been exfiltrated. It used to only mean that the data were encrypted in place, and the ransom was for the decryption key (which you still can't trust, btw. How do you know that the data weren't altered during the encryption or decryption process?).

A case where data are exfiltrated is more properly referred to as a breach.

Are we just being sloppy with language, or does calling it ransomware give companies cover to avoid penalties and responsibilities associated with breaches?

This might even create a market for the older hardware, if that's the only way you can prevent being upgraded....

Is it better than "nothing" though? How many snow days does NYC have? Shouldn't the kids have a chance to go sledding, build snow forts, have an epic snowball battle?

They used to just build it into the schedule that there would be a small number of surprise skip days. Is that really so terrible? It's not like remote learning addresses the daycare issue - parents need to have a plan for the home day whether their kid is outside getting exercise or inside staring at a screen.

What was wrong with the 3D tv's? Tons of TVs are using 120hz or faster panels, why not add some kind of control signal (maybe IR, or RF) so that users can buy shutter glasses and watch the small number of 3D movies (or the even smaller number of 3D movies that actually look good in 3D) if they want?

What services do they sell, though? Why not just connect directly to the (I assume publically held) infrastructure?

Not really, they are the advertising that draws in the ones who don't.

Further, I've never met anyone who bragged about having big winnings that didn't, after a bit of questioning, reveal that they were net negative overall.

A very large fraction of everyone carry around a gps-capable pocket computer, and most people get their time from that these days anyway. Just have that computer constantly calculating local true solar time (sundial time) based on geographic location and let Noon be Noon, everywhere under the sun! (And, obviously, just UTC or a linear offset from UTC under the hood for scheduling things)

The real question is why are fueled heating units apparently not required by building code to be able to run entirely on the fuel itself. Fans and a control system are so small compared to the heating that I'd bet they can be powered off of thermoelectric effect without adding too much complexity to the system. Certainly there is more than enough energy if a heat engine is used. No one not using electric heating should be stuck without heat due to power outage.