Nollij

My point is that every company is a tech company.

It's easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that's not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.

Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.

It's very much the Oracle model.

A long time ago, Oracle DB could handle workloads much, much larger than any of their competitors. If you needed Oracle, none of the others were even a possibility. There are even tales that it was a point of pride for some execs.

Then Oracle decided to put the screws to their customers. Since they had no competition, and their customers had deep pockets (otherwise they wouldn't have had such large databases), they could gouge all they wanted. They even got new customers, because they had no competition.

Fast forward and there are now a number of meaningful competitors. But it's not easy to switch to a different DB software, and there are a ton of experienced Oracle devs/DBAs out there. There are very few new projects built using Oracle, but the existing ones will live forever (think COBOL) and keep sucking down licensing fees.

VMware thinks they are similarly entrenched, and in some cases they're right. But it's not the simple hypervisor that everyone is talking about. That can easily be replaced by a dozen alternatives at the next refresh. Instead it's the extended stack, the APIs and whatnot, that will require significant development work to switch to a new system.

You should probably know that strangling someone is a strong indicator of a future murder attempt. Far more than other forms of battery.

You definitely need to consider your own safety, and those around you

Sometimes. It was also frequently not connected to anything.

Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren't easy to invoke.

I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.

Uber's insurance is pretty bad. Many get the additional coverage from their regular insurer anyway because of this. That coverage also (usually) applies to this situation as well.

Ain't no one approaching the T-800 to steal your wallet or anything. Curiosity, sure. But you don't look at that and think "easy target"

Now, if I've done something specific to be a target, I'm not sure it would be an effective bodyguard.

"handle" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as "safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control". Which isn't a small task in itself, but it's a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.

I'm pretty sure they mean the Russian Reversal jokes, usually attributed to Yakov Smirnoff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia

There's a problem with your premise. NATO (much like the UN) is not a military force of its own. Rather, it's an agreement between many nations, each with their own militaries. There is no NATO army. There is an agreement of the United States (with its army), the UK (with its army). Germany (with its army), etc.

Each of them could independently invade. They could even negotiate an agreement to invade. But that would have limited impact on NATO. The big thing would be that any invading country loses the agreed upon defenses of the rest.

Will this help users on Bing with their number 1 desired search destination, Google?

Or their 7th most common destination, Bing?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703263/google-lawyer-argues-bing-used-find-google-top-search-defaults