Summary: I’d locked eyes with Mensah, looking like that. My energy weapons had deployed, without my awareness or direction. My targeting systems had identified her and Bharadwaj, quite insistently, as direct and immediate threats.

Maybe this is just a temporary, dangerous, system glitch, and a hard restart will fix me. I’ll just restart, comb through my code, do some debugging, find the corrupted files or whatever, and then I won’t indiscriminately murder my most trusted humans.

I should know by now to always assume the worst.

In which SecUnit is having some survival threat…response errors. And some…’targeting its humans’ malfunctions. And some…blackouts when restarting. I’m sure it’s fine.

Chapters 1 & 2 of my "SecUnit discovers it's not alone in its head, extreme amounts of stress and drama ensue" fic are now LIVE.

This is part 1 in a series. All 19 chapters are COMPLETE (aside from final edits) and I will be posting new chapters twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturday/Sundays while continuing to write part 2. This is a gen fic, focused on trauma (recovery), h/c, and heavily on Three & MB, also featuring ART and the PresAux crew in later chapters

It would mean the world to us if you checked it out and gave it some love. This is our first published fanfic in almost a decade and our first in this fandom, and it also ended up becoming profoundly personal and a little autobiographical, whoops! 

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.

If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?

If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?

Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.

(source)