Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?
In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can't find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.
How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that's what the article implicates is the problem. For the exoskeleton itself there are no excuses.
But people don't want that. They want small, sleek devices that don't weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.
From what I can tell the battery in question wasn't the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.
Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can't produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That's prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.
A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it's not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.
It's pretty shitty that the company didn't produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can't expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.
This isn't exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.
In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.
However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.
Looks like it's one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezara_viridula (third instar, maybe fourth?).
These bugs go through five stages of moulting changing shape and size every time, so in a few weeks they may just look like a bug you'll recognise.
Obviously China's meddling with academic discourse is troubling, but what universities accept busts for random political activists? I don't think I've ever seen any bust in universities that weren't of people of great importance to the university itself.
I also completely get universities not wanting to deal with the anger and outrage of nationalist Chinese expats. They can get real angry when you go against Chinese propaganda, probably a result of many years of brainwashing by the Chinese government in their youth. It just takes one weirdo to deface a statue and suddenly you're in the middle of a massive controversy and need to either file charges (and deal with angry Chinese people) or not (and deal with angry people opposing China's dictatorial regime).
I'm anti-CCP but that doesn't mean I'll accept a bust it a Chinese human rights activist.
Arbitration court with one person is a win for the company. Arbitration court with a thousand people is a massive loss for the company. That's why these arbitration clauses aren't always bad. If anything, for small cases they're good for the people because the bulk of the legal charges are paid by the companies that write these clauses.
A bunch of large companies went through a phase where they all went for arbitration clauses, and a bunch of them moved back quickly after they found out how much more expensive paying for ten thousand arbitration cases was compared to just one single class action lawsuit. Maintaining ten thousand legally binding, individually composed outcomes can haunt them for decades if they're unlucky.
Steam has learned the same lesson here.
Lemmy has a toggle in the settings to hide all bot accounts. If you don't like bots, you should turn it on!
The possibilities are limited and the legal responsibilities untenable. It's a fun idea, though! Technically there's nothing preventing you from distributing WiFi access points in your neighbourhoods and having everyone hook up their home network into a local, shared mesh for instance.
With a private IP address range (probably best to use IPv6 to prevent conflicts there, but you can try to allocate private IPv4 addresses if you like a challenge) you can even have your own internet next to the normal internet and use both.
Based on my experience with drunks around roads, the cars generally aren't at fault. People do real stupid shit when they're drunk, like taking a highway tunnel instead of walking the extra 500m for the pedestrian tunnel. You can have all the protection you want, but if you're to drunk to walk straight and end up in traffic there's nothing to protect you. Same shit also happens with train tracks every now and then. Hell, I've even read stories about traffic deaths when drunk people and bikes collided (especially if the person on the bike was elderly).
If you're drunk enough that you can't navigate the streets about as well as when you're sober, take a cab or the bus or have someone pick you up. That'll also help in case you run into health issues because of excessive alcohol intake.
As a bonus for drunk accidents: because of the delayed response you may walk away from certain crashes with fewer injuries because your body doesn't tense up to attempt to distribute the impact. On the other hand, you're much worse off with other accidents.
I don't think VR headsets put the battery in front of your eyes, the weight would make them uncomfortable. They're probably somewhere on the side of the device, or in Apple's case, around your waist.
Bad chargers, clearly damaged devices that are still used, you name it. Several exploding iPhone stories turned out to be the result of cheap, shitty chargers. Anything with a lithium battery can light on fire or even explode if you handle it wrong.
There's a good chance that Samsung should still be made to pay up for the damages and compensation, but I've seen people do very stupid things to portable electronics containing batteries.
Based on the pictures, the earphone looks like it was on fire on both sides. That's not a literal explosion at least (there'd be more than just hearing damage if it were). My guess is the lithium battery got damaged somehow and the escaping hydrogen gas caught fire One reason not to use earphones that have batteries inside your ear; had the batteries been hanging from the bottom like those Apple ones, the hearing damage probably wouldn't have been as bad.
I've never worked for a company with the shitty HR people complain about online. Must be a regional thing.
I don't have the expectation that HR will always be there to protect you (though one company I've worked for had HR that actively fought upper management for things like raises and pension stuff). HR is there so the company, and by extension everyone in the company, can do their work properly. If you have a conflict at work, they're not obligated to be on your side.
The standards bodies used to recommend /48 as a default and have scaled down to /56. Anything smaller makes sense for stuff like servers but there's no good reason to do it. I guess penny-pinching is a reason, but it's not the norm.
If all else fails, hurricane electric will hand out /48s for free, you just can't use them to watch things like Netflix.
They know you blocked it. They could just hide the element. The feed may be sent to your device, but there's no reason to show blocked content like this.
Unfortunate. The Samsung store is probably the biggest non-Chinese competitor to Google Play, and now it's picking up Google's annoying practices.
I know people like to be dismissive about every app they don't personally use, but the Samsung Store really isn't all that bad. A whole bunch of paid apps can be bought there for cheap or even gotten for free sometimes. I wish more people used it so Google would actually feel pressure to make the Play Store better.
Some TLDs do. Others don't. Most commercial ones have very few restrictions. Country code TLDs like .ai or .io or .af may cause issues. I believe .cat is only meant for Catalan content, for instance.
I wouldn't put any porn or feminist activism on the Tslibsn's TLD (.af) and a whole bunch of other countries may not be compatible with other types of websites either.
It's rare that anyone checks, but if you violate the rules and someone reports you, you may be in trouble. Most domain registrars also have rules about your registration contact (name, address, etc.) be accurate and inaccurate information may be enough reason to take your domain from you.
If you buy a domain, you're presented with terms of service. Read them and you'll know the rules that apply.
The Fediverse is a terrible name that only pushes people away. I'd welcome the change of name.
However, the Fediverse was never just about ActivityPub either. The old GnuSocial protocol ActivityPub is based on is also part of the Fediverse. So is XMPP and I suppose by extension Matrix. Like it or not, ATProto is part of the Fediverse too, even though most Fediverse software doesn't speak it. Services can speak multiple protocols, they don't need to restrict themselves to just ActivityPub.
ActivityPub folks are probably the largest group of people actually developing an interoperable social media network, though. ATProto is federated but small servers don't stand a chance against the Bluesky firehose (hundreds of gigabytes of content per day on bad days!) because the protocol is based around "large servers talk to other large servers". Other federating protocols simply don't really care much about activism anymore.
Nobody is taking the "social web" away from your IRC channels and your NNTP news groups and your SMTP mailing lists. You can still call them the social web. And frankly, it would be wonderful if more ActivityPub services would speak NNTP because both share the same goals. "I also used to have a social web" doesn't conflict with "ActivityPub is part of the social web".
Depends on where you live, I suppose. Here they sure can.
