sushibowl

Often, licence agreements stipulate that they are not transferable and thus you have contractually agreed not to resell them. To what extent this is enforceable is... contentious. Different courts have struggled with the topic and have ruled both directions on the issue.

Copyright law as written was not designed for immaterial goods in any way, and the DMCA has done little to improve that. So effectively the judicial branch is in limbo. Corporate America is content to leave the confusion as is. They can just adopt an interpretation of the law that is maximally beneficial to them, and consumers generally don't have the resources to challenge that interpretation.

I don't get this article, it's clearly got a bone to pick with self-checkout and seems to be contradicting itself in the process:

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. [...] In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice

Okay, so even given the myriad of poor implementations out there, a majority of people prefer it. But then at the end:

Simply, "customers hate it".

Oh really? Because your quoted survey seems to say the opposite. And then there's stuff like this:

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same.

This is too light on data. Even a luxurious 1 cashier per 2 self-checkout stations will result in large cost savings for a business where employee costs are a significant fraction of total expenses. Especially in low margin businesses like grocery stores, removing even small amounts of overhead makes a big difference. Just because stores are adding a few employees back, doesn't mean cost-savings are completely negated.

Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Surprise, a large nation did not completely get rid of cashiers! The number is meaningless without more context: did the number of cashiers go down? What about average cashiers per store? Where is the data?

My point is, maybe companies just went too hard on the cost-cutting and are trying to find the right balance. What is the best ratio of self-checkout to classic cashier checkout? What is the right amount of self-checkout assistants? How do we make checking out yourself a good user experience? All of these things are still being experimented with. What does seem to be clear is that self-checkout has become near ubiquitous, and therefore it is most certainly not a "spectacular failure" by any definition.

LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.

No, there are no updated keys that need to be downloaded. It's kind of like, they just stop including the key matching the revoked device on future Blu-ray releases. All other devices are completely unaffected by this, because their key is still on the discs. So they don't need to change or update anything.

Hydrogen is actually technically very light. Just 1kg (about 2lbs) is about the equivalent of the battery in a lot of EVs. However the equipment to convert that energy into motion at the wheels tends to be quite heavy and expensive.

More than that, the storage tanks required to store an effective amount of hydrogen are insanely heavy and inefficient. A full tank might be only 6% hydrogen by weight, the rest being the weight of the tank itself.

The tanks are kept under extremely high pressures to achieve acceptable storage density, so safety is a concern as well. Unless this problem is solved I don't see fuel cells replacing batteries in transportation.

the Japanese manufacturers (Toyota/etc) seem to think it's the right way to go.

A big factor in this is that Japan's overall energy transition strategy is heavily focused on hydrogen, and has been since the 1970s. Back then hydrogen was considered one of the promising alternatives alongside biofuel and battery electric vehicles. Today battery electric has taken a clear lead and fuel cells are nowhere close, but Japanese industry is already heavily invested in hydrogen tech (and receives substantial government subsidy).

There is some potential for hydrogen still. It's probably the only feasible means of decarbonising heavy industries such as steel production. It's a potential option for grid-scale energy storage, given that it's fairly easily produced using surplus renewable energy.

They do not require any online connection. AACS has some ability to revoke media player keys, but it does so by encrypting future releases in such a way that the revoked player can not decrypt them (how this works technically is a bit complicated).

So if they decide to revoke your player, it can still play every Blu-ray disc manufactured before the revokation went into effect.

He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.

One of the neat tricks you can do when you're wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don't have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren't doing great.

Obviously, since the company is private now we don't get as much insight into financials.

What he means is, if you want to download the document from ISO that describes the standard, you have to pay a fee. Here's their store page: click.

It's about 190 USD for a 38 page document describing the rules of the standard. There's another document with extensions for a similar price. Quite pricey for a PDF file obviously, and the RFC is free to download.

On the other hand, no one in the history of time has gone "hmm, I don't know how ISO-8601 works, let me go buy this document from the ISO store to figure it out." Most people just call datetime.isoformat() or whatever their library function is called.

There's a good case to be made that Germany would have lost the war even without the Americans entering. The defeat at the battle of Moscow was basically the end of German offensive capability; they suffered a disastrous shortage of resources.

If the US invasion had not taken place Germany would likely still have lost, and the Soviet Union would have occupied a large chunk of Europe.