When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

It is.

How the fuck did this become acceptable?

Certainty of punishment is much more likely to help here than severity. Severe punishments are even likely to lead to an increase in police enforcing it selectively, not citing or arresting people they decide don’t deserve it.

So you want to abolish time zones

That’s a little less surprising to me. Organizations are likely to pick competing communication software if Teams is not available to everyone. Web browsers are generally interoperable after Microsoft lost the war to popularize one that wasn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the mere existence of software I’m not interested in using.

Microsoft Edge was a recent surprise. It’s surprising both that Microsoft would create it and that any Linux users would run it. Since its Chromium based, there should be no need for developers to test Edge separately.

A phone is a computer. A smartwatch is a computer. The computers running a car’s infotainment and engine control systems are computers.

With all the ads that get shoved to our eyeballs, looking forward to the options.

Blocking ads on Youtube is fairly easy. uBlock Origin does it without any tinkering, for example.

There were also reduced fuel economy requirements for trucks and off-road vehicles, which contributed to the rise of SUVs.

You can’t. You can, however tell if a particular URL is believed to be dangerous by any of several organizations that track such things.

Your browser probably has something built in; Firefox and Chrome do, for example. If you attempt to visit a known-bad URL, the browser will warn you and make you click through the warning before you do. Some other comments in this thread suggest third-party services that will also do this, and may even attempt to check the content found at the URL for known malware.

If I do not have or cannot easily get root access to a computer, I don’t really own it.

I guess manufacturers could embed the protection circuit in one of the terminals but that’s expensive so surprise surprise no one does it.

Battery OEMs don’t do it, but adding a protection circuit to the end is extremely common in the flashlight industry. Ideally, the springs in the battery compartment provide some flexibility about battery length so both bare and protected cells work.

You, in particular know that’s not a requirement for using modern batteries, but a user-hostile decision companies make.

Quite. Unfortunately, most devices that use modern batteries have the battery sealed inside with an onboard charging system, such that when the battery wears out, the device becomes e-waste. There are many standard, or semistandard sizes of cylindrical lithium-ion cells, and devices could be designed for field-replaceable versions, but the only product category where it’s common is high-performance flashlights.

Even in common consumer form factors, there have been improvements. Here’s a test of one of the best alkaline AAs. Note how the capacity drops as the load increases - by a factor of about six at 3 Amps. Contrast the Eneloop NiMH rechargeable, which has less capacity under light load, but barely loses any at 3 Amps and can handle 10 Amps while retaining most of its capacity.

The best Li-ions in a form factor similar to AA, called 14500 have even better performance with over 5 Watt-hours of energy, but devices have to be designed for them since the voltage is much higher; putting one in most devices designed for AA will result in damage, if not fire.

We know reddit used bots at the beginning to generate activity to make the site look popular.

That’s not quite it. The founders made a few of throwaway accounts and posted a bunch of links that exemplified what they wanted people to post. It was fake activity, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t automated. It was maybe 50 posts and I don’t think it was a bad thing to do.

I just wish the modern things would use standardized, field-replaceable batteries.

you need a different account for every single Lemmy site

What are you talking about? You are using a lemmy.world account to comment in a lemmy.ml community right now.

That seems likely to work.

# ls -l /dev/video0
crw-rw---- 1 system camera 81,   0 1974-07-26 10:09 /dev/video0

Android doesn’t handle users and groups like standard Linux, but the user account assigned to Termux is not a member of the camera group.

Yes. I could talk about quantum indeterminacy as a scientific argument for it, but fundamentally, I believe in it because I want to[1]. I don’t like the idea of being a deterministic machine with a fate I can’t influence with active choices. It’s not provable either way with the current state of science, so I choose to believe my preferred option is the correct one.

[1] Of course such a statement presumes free will. I think I want to, anyway.