I was most disappointed when I read that he left the group chat. Missed opportunity for some top-class trolling:
Although that may have had him arrested/raided for accessing most secret information he lacks clearance for, so leaving upon finding out it was the real thing and not a joke group was the better move.
Apple got an special exemption the last time the EU standardised the port to Micro-USB.
The writing would have been on the wall for them. Especially as thunderbolt 3+ uses the USB-C connector, there was no guarantee the EU would give them exception again, and lightning is almost certainly not designed to handle the wattage needed to charge a Mac.
But otherwise, if not compelled, I doubt that Apple would have carried it over to the mobile devices. The timing is fortuitous, but likely because Apple has a little leeway before the EU forbade their devices/fined them for not following the law.
They are often up, but not at full power. TOS made many references to the computer raising the automatic defence screens, and by TNG, starships had navigational deflector shields that were always on.
I don't know for certain, but it seems possible that shields may not be usable at warp. I don't remember any specific episode where that happened, but it seems possible. But even then, a ship could just be programmed to bring them up as it drops out of warp.
I want to say it's the opposite, actually. Shields, at least on some level, are required for safe warp drive operation. Voyager had an episode where they were unable to jump to warp speed because their shields were inoperative.
However, they're probably not at full, since warp drive puts considerable strain on the power systems, enough that your average starship may not be able to power their shields at full, and maintain warp drive at the same time. You may need a high-power ship like the Protostar with its dual core system to make it work.
One reason brought up frequently is that raising shields could be taken as an act of aggression. But if you arrive with shields already up, then you're not doing anything aggressive, you just arrived that way, so I don't think this makes much sense in a world where most Starfleet ships just keep their shields up.
Only if they don't have a baseline. Starfleet ships seem to have no problem detecting ships charging their shields and weapons, even if it is an alien ship with technologies and configuration that they have never encountered before. There is no reason to think that aliens would be any different in that regard.
I guess it could be possible that the power usage of the shields is too much for the day-to-day use. But again, it seems like a lot of missions clearly begin with "dropping out of warp into an unfamiliar area" and those are the times where your shields should just be up by default.
Shields interfere with a lot of systems, not just the transporter. It also messes with sensors, which is why ships like the constitution-class Enterprise and Phoenix have their shields set up so that they're lowered on a cycle to allow the (high-power) sensors to operate in that gap.
If you're in a new place taking sensor readings, having shields would unnecessarily hamper your readings, so you may end up spending longer there, or be unable to take some readings at all.
Because it takes work to obey the rules, and you get less data for it. The theoretical competitor could get more ignoring those and get some vague advantage for it.
I'd not be surprised if the crawlers they used were bare-basic utilities set up to just grab everything without worrying about rules and the like.
You can always trust Microsoft to make two version of the same application and to have really bad naming.
And to make bad naming worse naming, since they switched Office's name to 365 Copilot, not to be confused with 365 (office premium), Copilot (ChatGPT interface), or Copilot (Office text assistant). Office was a perfectly serviceable name they'd used for decades. It's like Twitter rebranding themselves to a single latter like Y. Why would they throw away branding like that?
People are liable to look for office, not find it, and go "oh, Microsoft doesn't sell Word any more ☹️'
We also don't know if it was just that gene that was altered, or if there are other effects. Modern gene editing isn't so precise that we can edit just the gene we want. A lot of genes with similar sequences as the target can also be affected.
It's basically like firing a shotgun at the house they live in. You might hit the one you want, but you may also hit other unrelated genes in the process.
It's arguable that it would stop completely, if it survived falling out of the warp field.
The times we've seen ships fall out of warp for one reason or another, they typically slow to a stop, rather than keeping all the inertia like we would expect them to, or stopping instantly like they would if the warp field was doing all the work.
Would it stay in high speed motion until interacted upon by something else (meteoroids/dust/gravitational fields)?
No, we've seen that warp field/engine failures will cause the ship to drop to sublight, if they don't slow to stop, rather than maintaining their current speed.
Or would it disintegrate under this kind of speed?
If it crosses the boundary of the warp field, it might be disintegrated by the resulting stresses, since warp field boundaries can be pretty rough.
Except that the numbers are also prone to change, like if it's been stolen. They're technically not supposed to be an identification code anyhow.