They’re Japanese patents, so maybe they’re already circulating in Japanese media and haven’t been translated yet.

Alternatively, maybe the Japanese Patent Office requires you to follow some bureaucratic process to get a copy: like you have to be a lawyer and it takes 4-6 weeks to get your reply. I don’t know, but Japan just finally got rid of its last laws requiring floppy disks for certain processes a few years back, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility

I’m sure we’ll hear the details soon.

You could probably do a season about how all the people making up and spreading the conspiracies are all part of a conspiracy…

I tried to switch to Tidal, but I found their app not as good, their integration with Sonos lacking, and no parental controls, which is important to me. Music selection was pretty good. A lot of niche stuff isn’t there, sadly. For example I sometimes listen to college acapella groups, and there just isn’t as much there. All the popular music is there though.

I mean, you got my upvote already, but one big reason is that Robertson wanted to control all the manufacturing of the screws and the bits. Phillips licensed his patent out and let anyone make them just taking a tiny licensing fee. Made a fortune on volume. Robertson: good engineer, bad businessman.

I don’t fully agree with these, but these are the cases I’ve heard of:

• Deeper integration with webcams
• USB authentication devices like Yubikeys

I think these are better served with extensions or specific browser protocols that communicate with native apps in order to keep the crazy web world more isolated from the high-value computer world, but what do I know? My guess is that someone at Google went “You know, we’re creating a lot of these specific protocols to communicate with webcams, printers, and now we want to do authentication dongles. You know what? They all use USB? Why don’t we just create a general way to access USB?”

In the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm:

There’s the topic of this conversation, WebUSB. I happen to believe that a missing feature here for Firefox is a good thing, mind you…