The look of the font is not copyrightable. The actual typeface itself is. Font foundries, which predate computers by centuries, have long existed by selling font blocks used when typesetting. They got another boost thanks to the Linotype machines which produced lines of type (hence Linotype) using font blocks that impressed hot lead. Those lines of lead type were then arranged into blocks for printing newspapers and such.

And later on those same foundries sold their typefaces for typewriters

The shape of the characters themselves aren't copyrightable, but the actual thing containing the characters are - like those type blocks used for printing presses, to those used for Linotype machines, to the type bars/balls/rollers/etc used for typewriters and printers and embedded in ROMs and such to font files.

OF course, anyone else can clone the shape of a typeface, but a font file is not just a collection of shapes or a bitmap. It's actually an executable program called to draw the type as it's called to. It's why you can have fonts that do weird things like turn -> into an arrow without any help from an editor - the font renderer is responsible for seeing those kinds of ligatures and applying the special rules and running the program to modify the shapes, kerning and leading (like the element because lines of lead were used to separate lines of type) and other parameters.

The key part here though is that files like PostScript and PDF do not contain rendered font images out - instead they contain embedded versions of the font itself. This dates back to the big typesetting machines where they have an onboard font repository so a document calling on Times New Roman would use the internal font in ROM. Of course, if you have a font not implemented by the equipment, you either got a substitution (and the curious results from that), or you got missing text. PostScript then embedded fonts (but only if they were licensed to embed!) so this was less of a problem.

PDF continued the tradition of allowing embedding of fonts into itself, but often times fonts are licensed for a purpose and embedding might not be a licensed feature. The fact that GUIs are popular and GUI-based printers (the so called "GDI" printers) that used the PC's graphics rendering to prepare the page for the printer made licensing a real mess.

It's why there are "Fonts for the Web" by Microsoft - who created their own set of fonts which they made freely available, as well as some made freely available for Linux. But the old font catalogs are still around, usually alongside the books of Pantone colors.

And yes, embedding a font you don't have rights to is a thing.

Apple was already moving to India and other places long before Trump won the election. They already have been making some stuff in India for a few years now.

Apple has places they can invest in - they did a big investment in Indonesia. And they have factories in Brazil to counter high tariffs there (which only are slightly cheaper - it is still cheaper to buy a plane ticket to the US and buy the iPhone there than to buy it locally).

China is still their main manufacturing base, and likely things that sell less will go up in price. iMacs and Mac Pros were made in the US will likely continue to do so, but let the price rise. (Those products had manufacturing runs in the US before Trump. but even though the lower demand of those products, they still couldn't meet US demand. Mac Pro (trash can) basically ran their (US) screw supplier triple shifts and still could not make enough screws for domestic Mac Pro sales.

So Apple has options - they already have invested in Indonesia - most of it was just for local production purposes, but I'm sure they'll be tapped to make product for the US as well.

Apple is already better than most companies in having their supply chains spread out - electronics is still largely in China but Apple has plants elsewhere to satisfy usually local laws.

If you've got elderly parents or just elderly friends given the age bracket of this forum then you need to keep an eye on what they're doing in their finances. Because for at a minimum the next 4 years it's open season for grifters and they can hunt whatever they like with absolutely no oversight or consequences.

Millions and millions of seniors are going to have their savings wiped out and when they do they're going to have to hit up their kids for money.

Along with the cutting of Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, those parents will be in the care of their kids sooner rather than later.

And there are plenty of parents whose kids have moved away, or are estranged from, or other things.

It may not be a good look in a couple of winters when homeless seniors start dying on the streets. Homeless people were easy to ignore as "lazy bums" before, but homeless seniors is not so easy to ignore - they can't be lazy, they likely were retired or too old to work.

That makes no sense. Why would they go to the expense and hassle of your scenario to do something they could do in a few minutes just by laying off people who aren't there?

Layoffs cost money, they hurt shareholder perception, and government takes note because of WARN act and such.

Remember, Intel laid off 15% of their workforce last year, and another 20% was just announced, bringing them down from over 100,000 employees to around 80,000 employees (still twice as big as AMD, though, with 30,000 employees)

RTO is basically the third leg to layoffs - and usually be of the ones that are "expensive" - the ones earning high salaries and have options to go elsewhere, who may be around for a long time and have a lot of banked PTO and any layoff would demand serious amounts of severance pay (and know this, so they would hire an employment attorney to see how much more they can get).

But do RTO, and those expensive employees leave on their own accord - depending on the state you may or may not need to pay out PTO, and because they left voluntarily, things like severance don't come into the picture. And depending on where they go, their non-compete may actually still hold water (non-competes generally don't survive layoffs because you're going to take any job you can get. And yes, while some states have banned non-competes, if you voluntarily leave to another state things get complicated).

In other words, layoffs aren't cheap, are bad for the market and so on. RTO mandates making people leave voluntarily though, are a great way to do a "stealth" layoff getting rid of people who may be too expensive to lay off normallyby encouraging them to leave voluntarily.

And we are only seeing this now because RTO mandates aren't considered a "change of employment terms" because most of those employees were likely doing 5 days in the office pre-pandemic, and thus RTO is a free pass to avoiding constructive dismissal charges.

But I would kill for a law requiring cell phone batteries to be user replaceable. There is absolutely no reason why they can't be except it encourages you to buy a new cell phone because of the high cost of replacing the battery.

What do you mean? You can replace the battery quite easily yourself on newer smartphones. Sure it requires tools, but nothing too esoteric. Hell, they're not even expensive - iFixit sells DIY kits for $50 including all the tools and batteries.

You can also visit a cellphone repair store at a mall and have them replace a battery for you on the cheap - $50-75. Includes new battery and they'll do it for you in 15 minutes. I think Apple charges $100 for the privilege, but that's expected for any manufacturer option. Hell, Apple even has the "fun" way of removing the battery where you apply a 9V battery for 30 seconds and it just pops off. (Sadly I think that's heavily patented so it's not like 3rd party replacements will have that option, but the phones that have it you can buy the batteries from Apple).

My old cellphone which had replaceable batteries you had to buy them for $150 each. And beyond a couple of years, you couldn't buy them anymore. You can still get replacement batteries for 5+ year old phones and have them replaced for less than the cost of a spare one back in the day.

Sure, the early days were sketchy, but these days battery replacements are pretty routine and all the equipment is easily available to the point there are mobile kiosks that do phone repairs.

And honestly, I'd rather pay to have someone change the battery simply because they'd have the experience in doing it a million times a day over my clumsy ass. They'd do it in 15 minutes and make it look pro versus me taking a couple of hours and then it looks like crap.

The lens was not scratched, the mirror was ground the wrong shape. The orbit was not wrong, it was an issue with its stabilization. You would have known if you had researched it, but you did not. Deorbit yourself into a landfill.

It also helps to know the actual error in the mirror was only a few microns - thinner than a sheet of paper. Grinding the mirror was also something that was basically a 24/7 operation done over 6 months or so, so you can imagine the precision required for everything to remain solid and not bend due to the mass being removed, or temperature differences and other things.

It was a big fiasco, but one that you realize is likely at the peak of technology at the time to have a tiny error.

Of course, the fact it had the error is why the other servicing missions put effectively "glasses" on it, and because of those, we were able to retrofit in new equipment that let us see way better than ever before. The Hubble of today well exceeds the specs that it launched it, and likely if it was perfect the first time around the modifications it had over the years wouldn't have happened. So while a very expensive mistake to fix, it resulted in advanced to both itself and science and technology in many fields.

The problem with Hubble is the fact its gyro stabilizers are failing - its down to 2 of 6 (redundant triplets for XYZ stabilization) gyro reaction wheels.that are still functional. We could do a servicing mission - IF the space shuttle was still available. The problem is, of course, it isn't, so a servicing mission is much harder and it's really only a matter of time before the remaining wheels fail and there's no way to stabilize Hubble.

The life extension of Hubble was one of the final space shuttle missions.

The plus side is, when Hubble dies, advancements in optics technology means earth-based telescopes can take over as 35 years of technology advancement in optics, computing and imaging make it that we can take Hubble quality images on Earth. James Webb is the spiritual successor. It's basically at the point where Hubble is a nice to have and if we had unlimited budget, we probably could keep it going, but we can make do without it just fine.

The point is secure key transmission and communications using ordinary commercial equipment already installed out there.

Quantum key distribution doesn't require use of an algorithm to generate the key stream - with adequate bandwidth you can use one-time pads that are basically communicated down the same channel.

If someone taps the channel to steal the key, it can be detected unless the tapper is extremely lucky.

Basically it boils down to this, let's use light polarization. I can send light down an optical fiber, and before I do, I randomly choose a polarizer. You at the other end, also randomly choose a polarizer. I send a bit. I then choose another polarizer, and send another bit. At the end, I communicate with you what polarizers I used, and you send me what polarizers you used. We compare the list of polarizers, and when we both chose the same polarizer, that's a bit for the key we use.

If someone taps the line, they would have had to use their own polarizers to read the stream out. The thing is, if they chose wrong, it scrambles the bit - both his measurement of the bit, and yours are completely screwed up. And depending on the polarizers chosen, there's even chance they get scrambled in opposite ways - so I can send a 1 bit with my polarizer, the attacker uses their polarizer and it can result in a 50-50 chance of being a 1 or a 0 bit. But it also means when you get the bit, there's a 50-50 chance it's a 1 or 0 bit as well. If we communicate a hash of the key, we can discover the media has been tapped because our hases won't agree. And if the attacker attempts to intercept my hash with their hash, theirs likely won't match as well because the bit flips end up random,

The only way the key can come out correct for everyone is either the medium isn't being attacked, or the attacker managed to use the right polarizer at the right time to get the same bits.

AI isn't good enough for basic math yet. It barely can do the basic multiplication table.

Though, if AI can be used to teach math better, then maybe cashiers won't panic the next time I give odd change or something.

People like to discount how "there's no need for math" then see the look of pure panic on people's faces when you pay in cash. Especially if the register goes down or they mis-enter the amount of money and need to calculate how much change manually. Or how they need to reach for a calculator, or how they haven't realized their phone has a calculator.

I think we need to bring back basic arithmetic as a requirement for K-12. Pen and paper, addition and subtraction with 4-digit numbers, multiplication with 2 digit numbers, and division with up to 5 or 6 digits total (e.g., divide a 4 dividend with a 2 digit divisor). Should be a high school graduation requirement that you can at least do that.

AI can be used to help teach and reinforce the basics.

The large national company I work for used to be strict on-prem only and had 1 major outage that impacted the entire business in 15 years and that was down to a missed patching related configuration issue on our AD controllers that was resolved in under 2 hours.

Since 2020 there was a move to cloud services that was mostly implemented to quickly bring in remote working for the entire company. It was then extended to include all IT services including various services from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others (all of which we had previously on-prem). Since then we have had no fewer than 6 outages lasting over 4 hours in 5 years. All of these outside our control to resolve and one of those lasted almost 2 days.

While it can be easier to manage/scale and introduce significant cost savings it is false to say that moving off-prem is as/more reliable than properly managed on-prem.

The words "large national company" describe a company able to do it themselves. If you haven't noticed, most companies aren't large at all - many are small and many have less than 100 users. Now, perhaps they can afford a single IT person to help manage it all, but I'm sure that small business cannot afford to host everything on-prem simply because of the costs of everything. Heck, I've seen many where their newest server was a refurbished Dell or HPE that was 5 years old when they acquired it - there's no budget for IT equipment and an internet connection better than cable or DSL.

Cloud is a lifesaver for these companies - take email hosting is probably outsourced simply because said IT person is too busy handling the day to day that they don't have the bandwidth to handle mission critical email - that email server goes down, the company is dead in the water and there's no budget for a new server.

And M365 is a lifesaver - license per user, not per machine so no need to track licensing anymore.

Sure cloud is more expensive. But most companies just don't have the ability to do everything on-prem because either they're too small, or the budget needed for adequate uptime is just not there. Especially for companies working in rural areas servicing them (e.g., rural utilities, where customers are usually in the thousands). Today's IT heavy workload means those people don't usually have budget for full time IT staff and most of their employees work in the field, a only a handful in the office. At this point if something goes down it can go down for days simply because the IT guy is on rotation, or it requires driving multiple hours to and from the remote site to fix it.

Cloud is not ideal, but if you don't have someone able to maintain your server infrastructure for you full time, it might be the best option for the harried IT guy who has to deal with typical day to day issues and needs time off and not worry about the email server dying while their off on vacation.

That's not going to happen for much longer. It will be to China's and Canada's benefit to work out direct trade.

There is direct trade between China and Canada. The general issue is that goods destined for both the US and Canada often get shipped to the US first - the US sales can fill containers, while Canadian orders for same generally don't, so it's generally been more efficient to ship to the US, break the container at the distribution center and ship the Canadian orders from there to either the Canadian distribution center or direct to Canadians.

This is solvable, just usually takes a few weeks/months to get it set up properly.

Consumers in the rest of the world need to keep a close eye on this. If companies try to spread the cost of the Trump tariffs to us, we need to reject their products. Americans pay 100% of the cost, not us.

Sony is already trying it, so avoid their stuff.

And sometimes it's unavoidable. Some stuff has traditionally gone through the United States for shipment elsewhere.

It's a problem because if you want a PS5 in say, Canada, the boat could come from China, then land at the Port of LA, where it's assessed tariffs. Then that PS5 is re-exported to Canada. Same thing happens for many other industries as well - board games are often shipped into the US before going to Canada.

It's causing great upheaval in the shipping industry right now because obviously that's not an ideal situation, and I'm sure Nintendo was also trying to figure out the logistics of everything as well - can they ship to Canada then export it to the US?

Boats are turning around and other fun stuff because of it, and likely ports in Canada are being queried on their cargo handling capabilities. Of course, reciprocal tariffs are also being factored in

If you like physical media, PS5 discs are made in Mexico (USMCA/CUSMA agreement) or Austria (tariffs). They are imported into the US, then exported to Canada and other places. Chances are because the value of such things is low that Sony will likely eat the cost of tariffs (it costs under a dollar per unit), but it's something to note.

Did Google not pay "fees" to the right people? Knowing the way a certain president made bilionares richer while appearing to bumble about with tarrifs, surely what they are doing is trying to make money for the "right" people?

Don't worry. Google was only found guilty last week. They haven't been sentenced yet. There's still time for Google to pay the right people to make it go away.

In the end that's all that matters - Google being guilty means diddly squat, like Microsoft was found guilty. All that matters is the sentence and there's a lot of leeway there.

Great, but why weren't they doing this before now? Were these rare Earth metals cheap enough to source that it wasn't cost-effective for them to reclaim them, until now?

Yes, because China kept dumping because they have a lot of it.

Rare Earths are available in quite a number of places - the US, Australia, etc. have quantities of rare earths. It's just that China made it cheaper to buy it from them.

With China restricting exports, it's suddenly more worthwhile to restart those mines and recovery as prices rise.

The thing with recycling it is also difficult to recover which makes it less cost effective than mining it. But since prices are rising quickly it's likely starting to become economic to do so. Of course, it also means you'd be paying more for storage, but winning, I guess?

CodeWeavers may be a commercial product, but most of that money goes towards supporting WINE - they hire WINE devs to work on it.

You can basically think of CodeWeavers as the commercial arm of WINE whose goal is to provide WINE with the monetary and developer support it needs to keep the project running.

You know, sort of the whole "how to make money using FOSS - charge for support". The whole point of CodeWeavers is to offer that commercial support.

Valve may not provide monetary support, but they provide code support for the project, improving it greatly. Proton also doesn't directly compete with WINE as Proton only runs within Steam itself. If you wanted to run it independently you need to use WINE directly.

And this kid's code is open source. Someone else can take it over and continue the project. That's why Open Source is better - if the original developer stops supporting it someone else can fork it and take it over.

Chances are if it really was a problem for CodeWeavers they'd probably just discontinue working on the macOS port of WINE and let it break eventually.

It's already been explored by Marshall Brain's Manna.

The complete text is there, basically going through what happens when the world is automated away and basically everyone is stuffed into tiny buildings that the owners are forced to provide so they could have their wealth.

It even shows how insidious it is - starting at the bottom. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that automation at fast food joints hasn't reduced employment but increased it as the automated kiosks and apps have been encouraging more people to order requiring more people to prepare the food.