In sampling and statistics, I'm pretty sure there are terms for that. To account for the fact that not 100% of the population are being sampled. Hmmm, I wonder what that term is.

Ironically, using web push and web notification would solve this privacy issue since it falls upon the browser to provide the push mechanism. And browsers can be used without an account unless they want to enshittify that too

There are areas that can be improved to reduce waste tho. Providing e-reader for example instead of a full blown tablet to reduce book waste is I think would help. Plus students don't have to lug around their textbook AND workbook at the same time. Like legit, tech can be helpful IF they are implemented TO ACTUALLY HELP and not to sell something

IMEI and GSM in general is one of those "industry standard" that are so heavily paywalled that the effort to reverse engineer it is pretty hard. You can look at osmocomm, the umbrella open source project that tries to make mobile communication more accessible and open

Then why can't QT provide the same benefit of delivering cross platform developing experience? See, that is the core issue. You write FOR the platform not for yourself. In the web space, the platform writes FOR you lest they want to break compliance with the rest of the web standard. When you are writing web application, you are writing program in a standard that the platform WILL follow instead of you following whatever the platform dictates at the time of their convenience

My point is, clear up your mistakes in communication. It doesn't help anyone to spread misinformation. I hate MS as the linux guy next door, but making false accusations, intentionally or not, will make people stay away from you. Because as I stated, I immediately understand the context just from you sending ToS of a plugin owned by MS. But your accusation is different entirely than your intention.

I never have a problem with your follow up, even if you still did not specify your intention explicitly. At least the ToS is for a plugin that is owned by MS so it provides a clue to what you're referring to. I have a problem with your original statement.

... A lot of the functionality is in the marketplace but non Microsoft products aren't legally allowed to use it and you're not allowed to distribute builds of the plugins.

To put differently:

A lot of the functionality is in the marketplace. Non MS products aren't legally allowed to use it (1). You're not allowed to distribute builds of the plugin(s) (2).

See the problem? That statement with the follow up is accusing MS restricting your right to use MS marketplace from non MS product as a problem (1), and THEN accusing that you cannot distribute the build of the plugins from said marketplace (2) which is only true for MS owned plugins.

Yes, hence why I commented that MS never prohibits you from publishing your extension elsewhere. Nor does MS forbid you from using other marketplaces when using their product. It's like saying valve is prohibiting game dev from publishing their game elsewhere or distributing their game outside of steam. It's just not true. And MS has all the right to limit their marketplace to their own client too. After all, it is first and foremost, their service for their product specifically. It's like you're making an unofficial client for youtube.

P2P takedown requires every participating node to take it down. Not impossible but highly improbable

Look my man, I am genuinely confused here. What online service are you talking about? PIO only provides their registry and that is it. They didn't even take a mandatory payment, only donations. If you are talking about the IoT ecosystem, then that is an entirely different beast.

What do you mean PlatformIO is cloud backed? As far as I know, PIO is just a vscode extension to manage embedded projects and it does just that very well IMHO. Heck, you can even use it not as an extension but as a python library/script. Sure, you can maybe connect it to some cloud service but it is not a requirement (but I don't even know if they provide any service whatsoever beside their repository). Your code is still stored locally, the compiler, tooling, and framework used is downloaded too. You can, of course opt to store your code to the remote git repository but that is a whole other matter. Also, you can always configure where to pull everything from. Also, the thing that you mention about flashing MCU from chromium based browser cannot be generalized. It's highly dependent on the system in question. I doubt you can flash STM32F103 (a.k.a. blue pill) using the usual stm bootloader.