Software updates can be deployed regionally either based on carrier or by product SKU. If there are different SKUs for North American vs EU phones, which is almost universally the case because of differing regional requirements such as radio technology, target price points and so on. That means that phone model ‘X (NA)’ could have a different update schedule than ‘X (EU)’.

Why? money, of course. There is a small cost to supporting a SKU for updates, even if it’s the same software that’s already being deployed to another SKU. That increases if the two SKUs have different processors (Samsung does this). On top of that, longer update schedules means people aren’t replacing their phones as often, which means theoretically less sales - though I find that claim dubious as many people replace their phones long before they lose software support.

So yes, while it’s possible that a company might honour a 7 year update schedule outside of EU, it would be by their choice to do so.

The next four words in the article explains it… “Connected to a TV”

Something like this is useful as well if you have a large item to convert since you can offload that processing to your server/NAS and not have it bog down your PC/phone/etc

Probably analogous to command economy? Basically all industry is centrally planned, so it’s not company A decides it wants to make some widget and company b decides they want to use company A’s widget in their new product that they’ve independently decided to make. The government says we need <product> which needs <widget>, thus company A shall make <widget> and company B will use <widget> to make <product>.

This is by no means an accurate representation of the whole system or an opinion on either, but just to give a simple idea of the difference.

3d-printed concrete houses are already a thing, there’s no need for human-like machines to build stuff. They can be purpose-built to perform whatever portion of the house-building task they need to do. There’s absolutely no barrier today from having a hive of machines built for specific purposes build houses, besides the fact that no-one as of yet has stitched the necessary components together.

It’s not at all out of the question that an AI can be trained up on a dataset of engineering diagrams, house layouts, materials, and construction methods, with subordinate AIs trained on the specific aspects of housing systems like insulation, roofing, plumbing, framing, electrical, etc. which are then used to drive the actual machines building the house. The principal human requirement at that point would be the need for engineers to check the math and sign-off on a design for safety purposes.

When refining a process, it becomes exponentially more difficult and expensive the closer you get to 100% efficiency. 0-95% costs less than 95-99%, which costs less than 99%-99.99%