It's really hard for me to feel sorry for any of the parties involved so the ethics feel weird.
I guess the law firm saved the shareholders from being fleeced and they want their cut. It's obscene, but still a small fraction of what Elon would've walked off with.
They're not, but a little cumbersome to carry around and find power on a heist.
There are loads of little pocket sized battery powered jammers available now.
Yes. Because it still works and hasn't all been replaced yet.
The burden is on the telcos to prove otherwise and justify all the subsidies they got to wire unprofitable areas.
Most people shouldn't buy a home printer at all anymore. Unless you're a crafter or work in a field that still uses lots of paper (i.e. law) they're not worth it.
It's a rapidly shrinking market and HP knows there's no saving it so I guess they're following the cable company playbook.
Squeeze your remaining customers as hard as possible before the music stops
You're not wrong, but it's not just the UI on the kiosk, it's the whole checkout process. A trained cashier on a real checkout line is much faster because the machine isn't nerfed and trying to hold their hand while preventing them from stealing. The real problem is the stores are trying to shift the labor onto the customer but the customer isn't getting much benefit for the effort nor has any motivation to be particularly honest in light of having this chore thrown in their lap.
I don't think they can redesign the UI to overcome that. It's not really a UI problem, it's a conflict of interests problem and they're not going to solve that unless they completely redesign the checkout process. The little Amazon convenience stores that know what you have as you shop seem like a better approach, but I'm guessing they're not all they're cracked up to be since they haven't seemed to catch on that much.
I have nothing against advertising in general, but I won't tolerate OS-level advertising and I don't want ad-subsidized hardware.