I don't know about you, but Intel SGX is deprecated/no longer exists. It only exists in Generation 8-12 CPUs, but Generation 11 and 12 CPUs received a microcode update that disabled it because of the problems it had.

And for anyone wondering, no, it was not AMD compatible. AMD has their own protection system based on ARM TrustZone technology. (And it has nothing to do with Intel ME or the AMD equivalent).

SGX was used by the UHD Blu-Ray folks, so it also means you cannot play discs on any PC now, making UHD Blu-Ray drives somewhat obsolete. (Now, you can RIP the discs just fine as they don't need anything special.).

The reason SGX was removed was due to a massive security flaw in it that let it leak out the secrets, and Intel deemed it unfixable and phased it out by deprecating it for Gen 11 and 12 before removing it.

Most businesses can't operate if the registers are down either, cashless or not.

Most inventory systems are computerized, and registers are linked with the inventory system so additional can be ordered. At the same time, the registers track the payment method so it can keep tabs on how much cash is in the register.

Thus, if the backend server goes down, the register goes down, and cash may not be accepted.

Now, a small business might be able to go back to pen and paper recording transactions, but that can be too hard - I've seen people break out the calculator just to calculate change, so basic math skills are lacking to the point I don't think many could work without a calculator.

The tax was probably going to be difficult to enforce. If Trump is going to take that as a win than it was a good sacrifice to make. Once he has his thing to brag about he will concede more.

That is probably the calculus behind it. You have to remember the G7 agreed to a minimum income tax which includes a DST, just Canada and France implemented it early.

This was a huge thorn in Biden's side, and Biden himself was trying to get it rescinded. No doubt in another timeline, Kamala Harris would be challenging it because it could potentially violate the USMCA/CUSMA agreement.

Trump wants "wins". So this counts - the Trump administration has said they are resuming trade talks. Plus, Trump needs a win soon - his "we have dozens of trade deals in July" is coming up. So far, all his trade deals have been nothing more than status quo or worse for the US, so now is the time to get Trump his "win" of screwing over the US.

It won't be long for lawyers to get in on the game - that because you were driving a vehicle with a tall hood, you knew it was going to cause more damage and thus you should pay more damages to the person you hit.

Get that going a few times and the insurance industry will adjust rates appropriately so people who drive big vehicles now have to pay for significantly more liability insurance because their vehicles are more likely to cause more damage to people.

Shouldn't take more than a few years for it to be sorted out - a few legal cases by ambulance chasers, and a few changes to insurance policies and now there's a market push for smaller vehicles again.

And most of the push to larger vehicles isn't CAFE or whatever. It's car companies - big vehicles are simply more profitable. They could sell you an econobox for $15,000, but they'd really rather you buy the F950 for $150,000 instead. That monster truck probably makes about 4 econoboxes worth of profit. I did NOT say make 4 times as much profit as the econobox. I said 4 econoboxes worth of profit. Probably 20 times the profit of the econobox.

TACO Tuesday is Canada Day this year, actually.

You also often do it as you're older and wiser and know that sometimes, the problem will solve itself as well.

A tough problem at work? Putting it aside and suddenly the next day it's no longer a problem because it's been made moot.

It helps avoid a lot of wasted effort. Experience will help tell you which problems you need to tackle immediately, which ones you need to put aside for the "aha" moment, and which ones you need to put aside because it'll disappear in a week's time.

The problem IPv6 is solving isn't a problem today, because the problem IPv6 is solving is no longer workable.

People hated NAT because it puts up a basic stateful firewall between endpoints. And we needed that because we don't have enough IPv4 addresses.

IPv6 was to preserve that end to end connectivity, and not have to do all sorts of hacky workarounds like FTP proxies, port forwarding and other such things like STUN. It was also to make IPSec practical and workable.

But how much of that is true now? You don't see FTP proxies anymore - because PASV mode, but also because no one uses FTP anymore. It's either FTPS, or SFTP (ftp secure, which uses TLS over the FTP connection, breaking the gateway, or secure FTP, a protocol working over SSH).

End to end connectivity is broken because no one would consider putting up anything on the Internet without putting it behind a firewall. So all the nasty IPv4 hacks have to be preserved on IPv6.

We've also gone higher on the stack - where a lot of things happen over HTTPS and now we have firewalls that inspect way up the network stack.

The fundamental reason for having IPv6 got broken over a decade ago, and people stopped bothering because it had no benefits over what exists now.

It still has use - it does have a larger address space, but that's the only benefit it added. So it's popular on sites that have so many devices that they exceed the IPv4 private address space.

That's the reason IPv6 isn't the primary protocol, despite being around for over 3 decades now.

In a way, you can see it as the electrification of cars - EV owners are the new IPv6 adopters. We've been running out of oil for about the same amount of time, but we've also been getting better at extracting harder to extract oil (at increased cost - we aren't getting $1/gallon gas anymore despite it not being all that long ago).

Also, IPv6 purists are just nasty to work behind. IPv6 would replace everything you need - no need for DHCP, NAT, etc anymore i IPv6 does it all. Of course, that attitude dismisses why someone might want DHCP, or NAT, and yes, DHCPv6 and NATv6 exist for those reasons, but the purists hated them for existing and for ignoring very real issues for why one might want to have them.

That, and the music and movie industry should be pushing for IPv6 more heavily because it destroys a key argument in the lawsuits - that the person using the IP address is the guilty party. With everything having independent IPv6 addresses, it's far easier to go after the pirates because they're likely the sole user of a computing device with that IP address. Not an entire family behind a single IPv4 address, when you can have every kid's phone having a unique IP so you can sue just the kid.

It's not because they build stuff. The US builds lots of stuff.

The problem is more cultural than anything else - the Chinese simply believe in education and an educated workforce. The US, well, has pretty much gone the other way, where intellectualism is seen as a major drawback.

So China celebrates their nerds, geeks, and other bookish people. The US celebrates their celebrities and sports heroes.

It reflects on politics too - being an intelligent person is considered bad compared to one with a lot of charisma or such. Just think back to any recent election where the main talking point has been how "XXX candidate has degrees from MIT, Harvard, ... but what does he know about the REAL WORLD (insert scary music)".

That's basically been the thing since the US had an actor be President and it's only declined since. And likely made worse because people think Musk is an engineer and smart, when in reality, not so much (he was lucky. He got rich by cashing in on Paypal. Everything else is stolen credit - Tesla he pushed out the founders, SpaceX he did the same - they weren't created by him, just small companies that only grew by his celebrity).

Plenty of US companies need talent - but you'll find that talent is often in immigrants who come over to apply their knowledge and grow US companies.

Face it, it's all about celebrity in the US nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest growing categories of job is "content creator" (unbrella term - we all know it means YouTuber, TikToker, Instagrammer, etc). Being smart isn't seen as a positive in America -

Actually, the problem was the way the passwords were generated.

The firmware doesn't use a default password. Instead, it uses a password generator that takes the serial number and produces a unique password from it. That password can then printed on the device itself so the user can read it and log in.

Of course, a simpler way would be to just randomly generate the password. Most printers have screens, and printers meant for the home can use those screens to display the current password. A home user isn't likely to be remote administering the printer, after all. If the user wants, they can reset the password and a new password can be displayed on the screen, because who the heck remembers the password? They set it up once, it's used for years and never reconfigured again. Then something happens and they need the password, but they'd have forgotten it. So a quick "reset password" would just cause a new one to be generated and shown on the screen. Or just skip the whole interaction entirely and ask the user to enter in what's shown on the screen as an OTP. Home users don't need to secure it when physical security is going to be the primary security method.

And hey, it also means Brother can sell enterprise-focused printers for companies because they lack those silly things you only need for home, so you have printers for home users, and printers for businesses.

First, "Megatron" may be trademarked by Hasbro, but only the in the name of a character for a toy. You can look it up very easily on the USPTO website.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNu...

If you do a search, there are a half dozen other companies claiming the exact same trademark. One uses it as a name for their jumbotron system. Another is for wine. A few for control systems, and a RV.
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/sea...

There's also a bunch of dead listings for that as well.

Many people can share a trademark - as long as the category of products don't overlap, it's acceptable, and chances are likely to happen.

So unless Microsoft is aiming to create a toy, Hasbro doesn't have to do jack squat because I'm sure a computer program is not likely to have much relation with a shape-changing toy.

The problem with the US tariff plan is that there are currently about 500,000 manufacturing jobs out there right now that are unfulfilled.

That's not jobs created by tariffs, that's just jobs out there that no one is applying for.

All the new manufacturing jobs being created ignores that fact that there's plenty of jobs out there right now going unfilled. So who's going to fill those new jobs being created by tariffs?

And yes, we all know jobs are going unfilled because they're likely either really physical, have pay that's crap, or both.

Reward points are something they had from Xbox - where doing certain things would get you points which could be redeemed for stuff like extra Xbox Live subscriptions and such.

1000 points isn't much - it's easily obtained over about 3 weeks of things or less if you use Bing, Xbox and PC games.

GOG Galaxy already integrates other store libraries into itself - I know it supports Steam, Epic Games Store, and Humble, but it has integrations with other stores. It then tells you what stores have the game. It's invaluable to keeping track of your library to avoid buying games multiple times.

If you aren't printing tons of photos, you're better off using the photo kiosk and having them printed that way. Or better yet, some places use real photo development machines, so you can send your photo off to them and it'll get printed on real photo paper.

That way you avoid being stuck with inkjets (switch to a laser printer - like Brother which has lots of 3rd party toner options).

The photo paper places often are able to print a photo for 25 cents a pop usually. This is usually much cheaper than doing it yourself, and the final output on photo paper is far superior to the inkjet special paper. Plus they last longer and aren't ruined by a little water.

Is that as a business which you really want is much much higher turnover than that. You want to get your customers in and then get them out after they've giving you money.

If you're going to have somebody hanging around for 20 to 40 minutes you can't have them doing that if you're not continuously making money off of them.

First, gas stations don't actually make a lot of money. The actual profit a gas station makes is a few pennies per gallon (or about a penny per litre). That's the profit at the pump.

That's why gas stations have convenience stores attached to them - the profit made by people who pump gas only is very low, but it goes up significantly if they pop in and pick up stuff like cigarettes, coffee, soda or snacks.

Now, to say a Buc-ee's or Wawa is a gas station is incorrect. They are more like Costco - they are a store that ALSO sells gas. That is people are coming to them for food, snacks, and other things, and also happen to be going there for gas.

As EVs charge, they are making money - every minute on the charger they are making money selling electricity. And it's likely quite lucrative - because the goal is to get people to buy food in the store. If you go there for gas and leave, they make maybe a quarter off you. But if you're also going in to get food and smokes and other stuff, well now they're making a few dollars off you. So it's 5 minutes and a quarter for gas, or half an hour to 45 minutes where they can make several dollars. And if you're in an EV, you're a captive market for lunch there.

Gas stations don't make much money off gas. That's why stores that also sell gas have become a new retail category as they end up having higher profits than gas stations.

And land? Those places set up basically in the middle of nowhere, and they can own acres of land cheap. So cheap they usually are funding the creation of an offramp from the interstate or funding upgrades to a otherwise rural exit ramp used by very few people and bringing more traffic to it. A Buc-ee's or Wawa don't generally tend to be in the cities and if they are, they aren't as big (usually far less pumps) because they're more in the convenience market at that point.