Windows can still create an additional short 8.3 alias for a long file name.

O.m.g.

They should have removed this ancient handbrake long ago. Now I learn that it not just still exists, but is also still engaged by default.

OK so 5 years is kinda game changer.
Around here, I have only ever seen 1 year (or none at all).

For refurbished drives, the SMART values are reset to “new”.

Would you be satisfied if all your refurb drives live only for the duration of this warranty?

I wouldn’t. Especially as a private buyer (or a small business) I would expect that most of them must live much longer than that.

But after knowing all what is really going on with this refurb business, you have to expect to actually use the warranty, that is, see drives actually fail within the warranty period and then request replacements by warranty claims. Not as an exception, but for a good part of all that you have bought “refurbished”.

fairly cheap refurb hard drive seller

Rant:

As a private person, you should avoid refurbished hard drives like the pest!

Imagine buying a used car where the mileage counter has been reset to zero and the vehicle identification number has been tampered with, so that you cannot find out it’s history. You see that it looks shiny and you know that it has been checked (well, somewhat), but you don’t know that checklist. You even know that nobody knows that checklist.

Seriously, you can only assume the worst about this used hard drive’s real condition (years of usage, highest temperature, number of bad sectors…), and also about this reseller.

Refurbished hard drives can only be bought by data centers (or other mass users), where their failure rate is calculated by statistics, but not by 5 or 20 failed drives.

ISO standardized abbreviations are mandatory for country-domains.

Even Trump cannot change “.us” into “.tr” :-) (but please don’t tell him anyway)

No, he built a wall and made Google pay for it.

I could live with that.

We should resist such practise!

I do not say to simply avoid them, because that means they can get away with this shit!

Go there and discuss their floating prices. Ask them what this is, why they are doing such shit. Tell them that you won’t accept it. Steal them their time and nerves.

McD is a centralized company. They are going to recognize what the cattle they feed general public is doing, and they are going to calculate exactly what this public reaction costs them.

The charming part: it wouldn’t be me against Mr Recorder-user, but the public against Mr Recorder-user, and then I would be the witness.

It’s not recording. Here is the privacy paper

If it takes the audio and sends it to anywhere (for example to the nearest iphone), then nobody needs to ask anymore what they call it in their fancy papers 😉

In practice you need to either disallow people entering private rooms or force them to take off

Well, I could do that anyway but that’s not what the law is about.

The law says, who uses such a device in a private room (restroom, bedroom), goes to jail for several years.

So it doesn’t need me to tell that person “do not enter” or anything.

There is another law (harder to explain in foreign language) that forbids to create or have (!) any devices that do recording and telecommunication but look like something else.

Pretty much all “smart” devices are always listening

Bull.

My home is full of smart sensors, actors and little controllers. None of them needs a microphone so far. They have so much better ways to talk to each other.

I need a microphone only when I want to talk to other humans.

That makes them extremely illegal devices in private rooms.

(German law)

No. Too many prerequisites before I could even start testing.

The common solution is not to replace the UPS but only the battery inside. They are standard sizes and for a cheap UPS probably around 10 - 20 bucks.

Not far. Current LLMs have kinda stubbornness. They cling to their own conclusions even after you told them they are wrong. So if you ask them for proof, then most times they come up with something that’s convincing.

the people currently in charge

They don’t even matter, because here it was some expert analyst super hero at work.

the parental control […] could almost entirely control the car, including its speed

They assume kids in the driver seat who need to be controlled? How weird is that??