That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
More like getting a job as a technical draftsman or a CNC milling machine operator, but the intent of your analogy is good.
The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more "generic and less timely and useful." Utter and total BS! A better user experience doesn't involve ads.
And you can argue that generic ads may bring something to your attention that you wouldn't have encountered with ads targeted toward the things you've recently read or searched for. When the advertisers start saying "less timely and useful", what they're saying is that they have to fall back on serving ads that you're less likely to respond to, making the ads less valuable, limiting the prices they are able to charge the companies for ad placement. Nothing about generic ads hurts you; they only inconvenience the ad-service agency. Which I think is a good thing; it puts them in the same boat as the companies who, say, pay for billboard advertising -- they have no control over who drives past them, so they're essentially serving a generic ad to drivers. The ad-service agencies want to have the sort of ecosystem they have with magazines, where they can expect that someone buying a magazine will be more interested products relevant to the theme of the magazine. The problem is that targeted ads on the Net are almost invariably flogging something that is relevant to something you looked at or searched for some time ago, and are jarringly discordant with what you're looking at now. And trying to make ads relevant to the site you're visiting is way too limiting to the ad service for them to make decent revenues off of it.
Um, if you're ignoring them why do you care what they are? Do you mean that you're trying to ignore them, but those damn timely, relevant ads are tempting you to use money you shouldn't? If so I think you're their primary market...
I don't know about them, but when I get an interest in buying something I'll look around various places looking at pricing and alternatives, then put it aside for a while to ruminate about it. If I start getting ads for that product every second or third webpage I go to, it makes me start wondering what's wrong with it that they need to try to flog it that hard to me trying to get me to buy it, and it makes me less likely to buy it.
I constantly get ads for the thing I've recently purchased.
Sometimes the websites are particularly stupid about it, too. I looked at a couple of items on Willams-Sonoma and other sites, and for a month after I received them after ordering from Willams-Sonoma, I kept getting daily emails from them saying that I'd put these items in my shopping cart, and they could only hold them there for 30 days before they'd fall off.
In your case, though, the ad company may only be getting information about what you looked at, and doesn't know that you bought it. If the ads are coming from the company you bought it from, though, then they've got the same subcompetent developers that Williams-Sonoma seems to.
I am reminded of Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants" (Hugo winner in 1983 for best short story), wherein a woman confronts a Congressman, trying to get him to throw his influence against a bill that would extend the term of copyright to perpetuity, arguing that with the increased longevity of humanity it would cause irreparable harm to the human race. The link is to the story in the Baen Free Library; read it.
For an even more extreme version of this, look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones. Published in 1953 and set in a future when humanity has spread out into the stars, the Astrogator's Guild has its 'secret books' that are essentially nothing but tables of conversions between decimal and binary, and the astrogators' job is to manually take star sights, translate the data from them into binary, then toggle the binary values into a computer that is hardwired to perform only the computation of integrating the previous sights with the current sight against the position of a wormhole to return values for maneuvering corrections, which are then converted back from binary and applied manually to the engine controls. No concept of the computer being tied into sensors and engines, with the crew able to enter a desired course through an interface that doesn't require conversion into binary and have the computer perform the feedback loop to guide the ship to the wormhole without requiring the navigators to overwork themselves acting as the computer's interfaces.
Another example is the Traveller RPG; published in 1977, and set in a future where human and alien civilizations spanned a significant part of the galaxy, ship's computers take up a minimum of 14 cubic meters of volume in the ship -- a starship of 400 tons displacement with a medium-size computer system would have it taking up 56 cubic meters of volume -- four 'tons' in the design process -- and this computer can only run eight programs simultaneously. It's like having ENIAC on your ship.
You are fooling yourself if you think taxes collected go to the thing they are "earmarked" for. People have died because the tax on phone lines that was supposed to go to 911 installations was instead used for police benefits like dry cleaning and other garbage (NYC). Once the government has the money, it's reallocated and slush-funded all over the place, NOT where it should be at all.
It's a two-step process. First, because expense X is receiving money from a dedicated tax/fee, the legislature diverts money that had been coming out of the general fund for that expense, because it's being paid for by the special tax. Never mind that the special tax was needed because the share of the general fund that it had been getting wasn't enough for the expenditures that needed to be made -- now there's the special tax, and if it's not enough, the legislature can just point at the taxpayers and declare that they're not doing enough to fund that expense the way the tax was supposed to. After the allocation from the general fund has been moved elsewhere, then the special tax can be raided -- on a temporary basis for a more 'urgent' need, which lets them pull the general-fund allocation for need, after which the more urgent need is no longer temporary, and the tax has been de facto repurposed.
so that the communication between the car and the 'other end' has low latency. Not the communication between the 'other end' and whatever network it's connected to.
If you don't understand the internet then just please say so. If a vehicle is making an internet connection to something AT THE OTHER END (and there is always "the other end") and the other end is not getting the packets from the vehicle in a timely manner, then it cannot RESPOND in a timely manner. A "paid fastlane" isn't just for the "vehicle end" of the data, it applies to the full path from vehicle to ANYWHERE.
Unfortunately, as part of their argument Comcast has stated that the paid fast lanes "might be fair to sell to automakers for use in autonomous vehicles" -- which is the part of the communication path between the car and whatever device is on the immediate other end of the wireless connection the car makes, not any communication between a roadside device and deeper into the internet. Any non-vehicle device that the car connects with isn't going to be the purview of the auto manufacturers to arrange bandwidth for, so Comcast is talking about needing to be allowed to sell 'paid fast lanes' to auto manufacturers, who won't be making use of them, because the communication devices in the cars won't be communicating on Comcast's -- or any other ISP's -- wireless bandwidth.
If an autonomous car driving through a city makes a connection to a roadside device that then connects through the internet to another host, the bandwidth from that device to the host is under the control of the city, and Comcast selling "paid fast lanes" to the auto manufacturers isn't going to affect that connection; their statement is a misdirection and irrelevant to the issue.
Except that what Comcast is arguing is that they need to be able to create prioritized 'fast lanes' for electronic communications so that the communication between the car and the 'other end' has low latency. Not the communication between the 'other end' and whatever network it's connected to. The connection between cars and between cars and roadside traffic systems is not, and will not be, in a spectrum block controlled by any commercial wireless provider. Comcast could create 'fast lane' wireless that covers 100% of the country with quadruple redundancy, and it would have zero effect on inter-vehicle communications.
This is a classic piece of misdirection. Comcast is presenting inter-vehicle communications as an application of wireless technology that requires low-latency data exchange, knowing that the average reader is going to nod sagely in recognition that this is true, and then be more willing to accept Comcast's claim that they need to be able to create paid 'fast lanes' for internet and wireless communications because of it... because the average reader isn't going to know that neither Comcast nor any other wireless provider has any control over the spectrum that will be used for inter-vehicle communications.
Having a continuous-loop system, while it would allow you to put more cars in the loop, is vulnerable to a single-point-of-failure attack; jamming one car's door open piles up every car in the loop behind that one; doing that with a conventional elevator bank disables only that one elevator. To a lesser degree, this could happen under normal use simply by having people being slow getting on and off, or by having someone hold the 'door open' button to allow someone to keep the elevator on a floor to allow someone to catch that car. The problem could be reduced by having each loop feeding two or more loading stations per floor, but that adds more complexity to the system.
Let me get this straight... It's a non-binding accord (other than we can't leave until 4 Nov 2019). So nothing changes.
An argument can be made that, if we can't leave the Paris Agreement for four years, that's binding on the US -- and if it's binding on the US, that means it's a treaty, which has to be ratified by the Senate, which it never was. So the provisions of the Paris Agreement, including the conditions on exit, are of no effect.
No 'subsidy' ever existed on EVs; rather, it was a tax incentive. Denmark has a huge tax on new cars, which can reach 180% of the car's value. EVs were exempted from this tax through the end of 2015; beginning in January of 2016, new EVs were assessed a 20% tax. In December 2015, as people rushed to avoid the looming tax change, 1,588 EVs were sold; the following month, 68 were sold. Last January, the tax on new EVs rose to 40%, and the tax reduction compared to conventional vehicles will be phased out completely by 2020.
Because of the collapse in EV sales as a result of this (1,300 EVs were sold in Denmark in 2016, while Tesla alone sold 1,300 EVs in Denmark in December of 2015, before the tax exemption expired), Denmark is walking back the changes to an extent; the tax rate will remain 20% until there have been 5,000 EVs sold, or until the start of 2019, whichever comes first. At that point, the tax rate returns to 40%, rising to 65% in 2020, 90% in 2021, and 100% in 2022. In addition, there will be a new tax on the electricity used to charge EVs, both private and commercial.
...and I certainly don't want to pay taxes to the "world" at large.
Unfortunately, that's the entire premise of UN climate policy. In a 2010 interview with Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, he stated: "One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy... One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy any more.... That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there."
The IPCC is nothing more than a cleverly-assembled government-supported lobbying organization, which seeks to enrich the UN by putting it in charge of "solving" climate change. If the UN fails to find manmade global warming to be a problem, it no longer has a reason to continue the climate panel, and therefore can't be in charge of proposing "solutions" to climate change. How many bureaucracies across history have returned reports stating that there was no reason for their own existence?
I wonder just how much handwaving there is in the actual technology, given that you have entertaining remarks in the article like
It is much cleaner to burn natural gas than to burn crude oil or coal. However, natural gas has the huge disadvantage that it generates CO2 during combustion, which has a detrimental effect on the climate.
This can be read as implying that crude oil or coal, when burned, produces combustion products that are dirtier than natural gas, but don't produce CO2, because it describes producing CO2 as specifically being a disadvantage when compared to coal and oil. Since all three fuels produce CO2 when burned, natural gas producing CO2 when burned is not a 'disadvantage' in comparison.
Which brings up another issue... with the kind of payload most consumer drones are capable of lifting, they're just not a threat worth getting worked up about. There's plenty more damage you could do on the ground, a lot easily, if you were of a mind to do so.
How heavy is a timer- or remotely-opened container with enough anthrax spores to infect a few city blocks?
Excuse me? What have they patented exactly? A sticker saying "Do not remove"? Some software on the chip? And this invalidates my rights to buy, install, or use aftermarket parts or services because..... of.... what clause in patent law exactly?
Lexmark patented the design of the toner cartridges for their printers. Their argument is based on the premise that the long-standing "First Sale" doctrine doesn't apply, and that their patent rights extend to any subsequent use of their patented product, so that Impression Products' refurbishing and refilling, and subsequent sale of, expended Lexmark toner cartridges constitutes infringement of their patent. If SCOTUS rules in their favor, it would put a severe damper on, if not kill outright, the ability to sell refilled and remanufactured cartridges. Since I don't see (although IANAL) how a toner cartridge could be a sufficiently innovative and unobvious advance to justify a utilityt patent, this patent of Lexmark's would presumably be a design patent, which would have a term of 14 years; the ability to prevent knockoff and refilled cartridges from being sold would effectively give Lexmark a monopoly over sales of toner for its printers; I don't see many people continuing to use the same printer for more than fourteen years.
The real stumbling block is setting up an orderly approval process by the Chinese government for the 'recommended products' pop-ups on the Windows start pane so that Microsoft can push ads-in-all-but-name to Chinese users with the same frequency as users of thte regular versions do, and to arrange to fork all their telemetry transmissions to ensure that the Chinese government gets an automatic feed of every individual's use of Windows 10 without having to have pesky monitoring software installed.
A cautionary tale illustrating some of the associated risks of this sort of augmentation is Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Memory. One of the major characters, decades previously to the story, had had a mnemonic memory chip implanted, which gave him perfect memory and recall. During the course of the story, the memory chip is damaged (which throws the character into disjoint fugues as it begins to kick back memories randomly) and later removed, after which the character discovers that after decades of the chip giving him perfect recall, his brain learned to rely more and more on the chip for long-term detail memory, impairing his ability to retain long-term memories after its removal, as well as the outright loss of most of the memories the chip had held because there was no 'local copy'. A clear case illustrating the problems of memory storage with no backups.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
More like getting a job as a technical draftsman or a CNC milling machine operator, but the intent of your analogy is good.
The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more "generic and less timely and useful."
Utter and total BS! A better user experience doesn't involve ads.
And you can argue that generic ads may bring something to your attention that you wouldn't have encountered with ads targeted toward the things you've recently read or searched for. When the advertisers start saying "less timely and useful", what they're saying is that they have to fall back on serving ads that you're less likely to respond to, making the ads less valuable, limiting the prices they are able to charge the companies for ad placement. Nothing about generic ads hurts you; they only inconvenience the ad-service agency. Which I think is a good thing; it puts them in the same boat as the companies who, say, pay for billboard advertising -- they have no control over who drives past them, so they're essentially serving a generic ad to drivers. The ad-service agencies want to have the sort of ecosystem they have with magazines, where they can expect that someone buying a magazine will be more interested products relevant to the theme of the magazine. The problem is that targeted ads on the Net are almost invariably flogging something that is relevant to something you looked at or searched for some time ago, and are jarringly discordant with what you're looking at now. And trying to make ads relevant to the site you're visiting is way too limiting to the ad service for them to make decent revenues off of it.
Um, if you're ignoring them why do you care what they are? Do you mean that you're trying to ignore them, but those damn timely, relevant ads are tempting you to use money you shouldn't? If so I think you're their primary market...
I don't know about them, but when I get an interest in buying something I'll look around various places looking at pricing and alternatives, then put it aside for a while to ruminate about it. If I start getting ads for that product every second or third webpage I go to, it makes me start wondering what's wrong with it that they need to try to flog it that hard to me trying to get me to buy it, and it makes me less likely to buy it.
I constantly get ads for the thing I've recently purchased.
Sometimes the websites are particularly stupid about it, too. I looked at a couple of items on Willams-Sonoma and other sites, and for a month after I received them after ordering from Willams-Sonoma, I kept getting daily emails from them saying that I'd put these items in my shopping cart, and they could only hold them there for 30 days before they'd fall off.
In your case, though, the ad company may only be getting information about what you looked at, and doesn't know that you bought it. If the ads are coming from the company you bought it from, though, then they've got the same subcompetent developers that Williams-Sonoma seems to.
I am reminded of Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants" (Hugo winner in 1983 for best short story), wherein a woman confronts a Congressman, trying to get him to throw his influence against a bill that would extend the term of copyright to perpetuity, arguing that with the increased longevity of humanity it would cause irreparable harm to the human race. The link is to the story in the Baen Free Library; read it.
For an even more extreme version of this, look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones. Published in 1953 and set in a future when humanity has spread out into the stars, the Astrogator's Guild has its 'secret books' that are essentially nothing but tables of conversions between decimal and binary, and the astrogators' job is to manually take star sights, translate the data from them into binary, then toggle the binary values into a computer that is hardwired to perform only the computation of integrating the previous sights with the current sight against the position of a wormhole to return values for maneuvering corrections, which are then converted back from binary and applied manually to the engine controls. No concept of the computer being tied into sensors and engines, with the crew able to enter a desired course through an interface that doesn't require conversion into binary and have the computer perform the feedback loop to guide the ship to the wormhole without requiring the navigators to overwork themselves acting as the computer's interfaces.
Another example is the Traveller RPG; published in 1977, and set in a future where human and alien civilizations spanned a significant part of the galaxy, ship's computers take up a minimum of 14 cubic meters of volume in the ship -- a starship of 400 tons displacement with a medium-size computer system would have it taking up 56 cubic meters of volume -- four 'tons' in the design process -- and this computer can only run eight programs simultaneously. It's like having ENIAC on your ship.
Because we may all be needing our own Bobby Tables soon...
Although
HOME)`; DROP DATABASE msdb; --
might be more fun to watch.
You are fooling yourself if you think taxes collected go to the thing they are "earmarked" for. People have died because the tax on phone lines that was supposed to go to 911 installations was instead used for police benefits like dry cleaning and other garbage (NYC). Once the government has the money, it's reallocated and slush-funded all over the place, NOT where it should be at all.
It's a two-step process. First, because expense X is receiving money from a dedicated tax/fee, the legislature diverts money that had been coming out of the general fund for that expense, because it's being paid for by the special tax. Never mind that the special tax was needed because the share of the general fund that it had been getting wasn't enough for the expenditures that needed to be made -- now there's the special tax, and if it's not enough, the legislature can just point at the taxpayers and declare that they're not doing enough to fund that expense the way the tax was supposed to. After the allocation from the general fund has been moved elsewhere, then the special tax can be raided -- on a temporary basis for a more 'urgent' need, which lets them pull the general-fund allocation for need, after which the more urgent need is no longer temporary, and the tax has been de facto repurposed.
where packages are in pressure cookers for up to an hour until both bacteria and nutrients are largely gone
Until the nutrients are largely gone? Doesn't this sort of defeat the purpose of having food?
On the other hand, this explains so much about shelf-stable food...
Scroll down the page, and it's there.
Meanwhile, the city of London has tried putting pads on their lamp posts "to soften the blow for distracted walkers."
There is an ICD-10 diagnosis code for designating injuries as having been caused by walking into a lamp post:
ICD-10 diagnosis W22.02XA: Walked into lamppost, initial encounter.
ICD-10 diagnosis W22.02XD: Walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter.
For those people who get up and bump into it again.
so that the communication between the car and the 'other end' has low latency. Not the communication between the 'other end' and whatever network it's connected to.
If you don't understand the internet then just please say so. If a vehicle is making an internet connection to something AT THE OTHER END (and there is always "the other end") and the other end is not getting the packets from the vehicle in a timely manner, then it cannot RESPOND in a timely manner. A "paid fastlane" isn't just for the "vehicle end" of the data, it applies to the full path from vehicle to ANYWHERE.
Unfortunately, as part of their argument Comcast has stated that the paid fast lanes "might be fair to sell to automakers for use in autonomous vehicles" -- which is the part of the communication path between the car and whatever device is on the immediate other end of the wireless connection the car makes, not any communication between a roadside device and deeper into the internet. Any non-vehicle device that the car connects with isn't going to be the purview of the auto manufacturers to arrange bandwidth for, so Comcast is talking about needing to be allowed to sell 'paid fast lanes' to auto manufacturers, who won't be making use of them, because the communication devices in the cars won't be communicating on Comcast's -- or any other ISP's -- wireless bandwidth.
If an autonomous car driving through a city makes a connection to a roadside device that then connects through the internet to another host, the bandwidth from that device to the host is under the control of the city, and Comcast selling "paid fast lanes" to the auto manufacturers isn't going to affect that connection; their statement is a misdirection and irrelevant to the issue.
Except that what Comcast is arguing is that they need to be able to create prioritized 'fast lanes' for electronic communications so that the communication between the car and the 'other end' has low latency. Not the communication between the 'other end' and whatever network it's connected to. The connection between cars and between cars and roadside traffic systems is not, and will not be, in a spectrum block controlled by any commercial wireless provider. Comcast could create 'fast lane' wireless that covers 100% of the country with quadruple redundancy, and it would have zero effect on inter-vehicle communications.
This is a classic piece of misdirection. Comcast is presenting inter-vehicle communications as an application of wireless technology that requires low-latency data exchange, knowing that the average reader is going to nod sagely in recognition that this is true, and then be more willing to accept Comcast's claim that they need to be able to create paid 'fast lanes' for internet and wireless communications because of it... because the average reader isn't going to know that neither Comcast nor any other wireless provider has any control over the spectrum that will be used for inter-vehicle communications.
Having a continuous-loop system, while it would allow you to put more cars in the loop, is vulnerable to a single-point-of-failure attack; jamming one car's door open piles up every car in the loop behind that one; doing that with a conventional elevator bank disables only that one elevator. To a lesser degree, this could happen under normal use simply by having people being slow getting on and off, or by having someone hold the 'door open' button to allow someone to keep the elevator on a floor to allow someone to catch that car. The problem could be reduced by having each loop feeding two or more loading stations per floor, but that adds more complexity to the system.
Let me get this straight... It's a non-binding accord (other than we can't leave until 4 Nov 2019). So nothing changes.
An argument can be made that, if we can't leave the Paris Agreement for four years, that's binding on the US -- and if it's binding on the US, that means it's a treaty, which has to be ratified by the Senate, which it never was. So the provisions of the Paris Agreement, including the conditions on exit, are of no effect.
No 'subsidy' ever existed on EVs; rather, it was a tax incentive. Denmark has a huge tax on new cars, which can reach 180% of the car's value. EVs were exempted from this tax through the end of 2015; beginning in January of 2016, new EVs were assessed a 20% tax. In December 2015, as people rushed to avoid the looming tax change, 1,588 EVs were sold; the following month, 68 were sold. Last January, the tax on new EVs rose to 40%, and the tax reduction compared to conventional vehicles will be phased out completely by 2020.
Because of the collapse in EV sales as a result of this (1,300 EVs were sold in Denmark in 2016, while Tesla alone sold 1,300 EVs in Denmark in December of 2015, before the tax exemption expired), Denmark is walking back the changes to an extent; the tax rate will remain 20% until there have been 5,000 EVs sold, or until the start of 2019, whichever comes first. At that point, the tax rate returns to 40%, rising to 65% in 2020, 90% in 2021, and 100% in 2022. In addition, there will be a new tax on the electricity used to charge EVs, both private and commercial.
More details at electrek.co.
More accurately, "Fuck you, we are big enough that net neutrality would hurt us by making competition easier."
...and I certainly don't want to pay taxes to the "world" at large.
Unfortunately, that's the entire premise of UN climate policy. In a 2010 interview with Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III, he stated: "One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy ... One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy any more. ... That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there."
The IPCC is nothing more than a cleverly-assembled government-supported lobbying organization, which seeks to enrich the UN by putting it in charge of "solving" climate change. If the UN fails to find manmade global warming to be a problem, it no longer has a reason to continue the climate panel, and therefore can't be in charge of proposing "solutions" to climate change. How many bureaucracies across history have returned reports stating that there was no reason for their own existence?
I wonder just how much handwaving there is in the actual technology, given that you have entertaining remarks in the article like
It is much cleaner to burn natural gas than to burn crude oil or coal. However, natural gas has the huge disadvantage that it generates CO2 during combustion, which has a detrimental effect on the climate.
This can be read as implying that crude oil or coal, when burned, produces combustion products that are dirtier than natural gas, but don't produce CO2, because it describes producing CO2 as specifically being a disadvantage when compared to coal and oil. Since all three fuels produce CO2 when burned, natural gas producing CO2 when burned is not a 'disadvantage' in comparison.
Which brings up another issue... with the kind of payload most consumer drones are capable of lifting, they're just not a threat worth getting worked up about. There's plenty more damage you could do on the ground, a lot easily, if you were of a mind to do so.
How heavy is a timer- or remotely-opened container with enough anthrax spores to infect a few city blocks?
"The database definition requires this field to be populated; I don't need to check to make sure it's not NULL."
Excuse me? What have they patented exactly? A sticker saying "Do not remove"? Some software on the chip? And this invalidates my rights to buy, install, or use aftermarket parts or services because..... of.... what clause in patent law exactly?
Lexmark patented the design of the toner cartridges for their printers. Their argument is based on the premise that the long-standing "First Sale" doctrine doesn't apply, and that their patent rights extend to any subsequent use of their patented product, so that Impression Products' refurbishing and refilling, and subsequent sale of, expended Lexmark toner cartridges constitutes infringement of their patent. If SCOTUS rules in their favor, it would put a severe damper on, if not kill outright, the ability to sell refilled and remanufactured cartridges. Since I don't see (although IANAL) how a toner cartridge could be a sufficiently innovative and unobvious advance to justify a utilityt patent, this patent of Lexmark's would presumably be a design patent, which would have a term of 14 years; the ability to prevent knockoff and refilled cartridges from being sold would effectively give Lexmark a monopoly over sales of toner for its printers; I don't see many people continuing to use the same printer for more than fourteen years.
The real stumbling block is setting up an orderly approval process by the Chinese government for the 'recommended products' pop-ups on the Windows start pane so that Microsoft can push ads-in-all-but-name to Chinese users with the same frequency as users of thte regular versions do, and to arrange to fork all their telemetry transmissions to ensure that the Chinese government gets an automatic feed of every individual's use of Windows 10 without having to have pesky monitoring software installed.
Number Three. The Larch.
The Larch.
A cautionary tale illustrating some of the associated risks of this sort of augmentation is Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Memory. One of the major characters, decades previously to the story, had had a mnemonic memory chip implanted, which gave him perfect memory and recall. During the course of the story, the memory chip is damaged (which throws the character into disjoint fugues as it begins to kick back memories randomly) and later removed, after which the character discovers that after decades of the chip giving him perfect recall, his brain learned to rely more and more on the chip for long-term detail memory, impairing his ability to retain long-term memories after its removal, as well as the outright loss of most of the memories the chip had held because there was no 'local copy'. A clear case illustrating the problems of memory storage with no backups.