It was solved for a brief time. Now people have these plastic coins you sometimes recieve as a promotional gift and since it is not a real coin, people stop putting the carts to the corral. You can witness this every time holidays are coming up and people are stocking their groceries. And the culprit is always middle-aged Karens who also don’t indicate when leaving the parking lot in their SUV.

Simplified:

Having a fridge running is nothing complicated compared to a computer. The compressor and the light inside are the only things that are being powered. Both components work mechanically: The compressor has an electric motor that is running when fed with electricity. Pistons inside the compressor are linked mechanically to the electric motor. The light inside the fridge is operated with a switch that is mecahanically connected to the door. The light is off when the door is closed. As long as electricity is fed to the fridge, it keeps running.

Computers however are more complicated, as they basically are running clocks that connect an event with a time stamp. They can get disturbed easily when several events happen. When a computer is running long enough it can happen that the memory overflows when a specific event is being executed for example. For this reason it is renommended that your smartphone is supposed to be restarted at least one a month, otherwise it couldn’t function properly.

If refrigerators were operated the same way as a computer, like your laptop or smartphone, I bet it has to be restarted every once in a while, otherwise a malfunction would occur. To my knowledge refrigerators are built the same like 40 years ago, albeit with more efficient compressors, better insulation and less harmful refrigerant.

Really? My laptop doesn’t. Maybe it depends on if the battery is designed to be removed by customer or if it is hidden inside the laptop, making it accessible only with tools.

Since laptops are equipped with a battery anyway, they lack of a coin cell (mostly a CR2032 cell) to keep track of time. This means that your laptop will not be able to estimate the correct time and date when powered with energy outside of the original battery, and these settings have to be made manually each time your laptop will be used.

It will work fine without the correct time set, but you might have issues with files that are created “in the future” (from your laptops perspective).

I have an old laptop (still in use occasionally, because I have a scanner that is too old to be operated with current software) where I replaced its battery once. The sign the battery was dead was that the OS issued a warning the laptop was not able to tell the correct time.

Yes. I’d rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.

The technology behind telecommunication.

Today everything happens inside your router, fast and silent. My father was a telecommunications engineer. When I was a amall boy (late 1980s) he once took me to his workplace (it was in the evening and he was supposed to troubleshoot). What today fits onto a few silicone chips inside a router took much more space back them.

I was in a room that was filled with several wardsobe-sized cabinets. Inside there were hundreds of electro-mechanical relays that were in motion, spinning and clicking, each time someone in the city dialed a number (back then rotary phones were quite common). It was quite loud. There also was a phone receptor inside one of the cabinets where one could tap into an established connection, listening into the conversation two strage people had (it was for checking if a connectiion works).

I still remeber the distinct “electrical” smell of that room (probably hazardous vapors from long forbidden cable insulation and other electrical components).

So when you dialed a number at one place with your rotary phone, you were able to move some electro-mechanical parts at another place that could be located somewhere else around the globe (hence long distance calls).