A bank I used for a mortgage has mandatory text message 2fa if they think you’re on a new device (won’t allow google auth/etc). And web browsers like firefox/brave block enough cookies/etc that it requires the “new device” authentication everytime I log in.

Problem is, for a couple months there was some delay with their text messages. It would take 10-20 minutes to send your 2fa code, and the code would expire after 5 min, meaning that by the time you got the code it was always expired and unusable.

Made it completely impossible to log in to pay my mortgage payments. Led to some really frustrating talks on the phone about how I didn’t want to pay with a credit card over the phone, I wanted them to fix their damn system so I could log in and pay via bank transfer like usual.

Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.

If you’re trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can’t disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.

This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.

Yes I’ve seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.

Sounds like Play Music All Access subscribers are safe for the time being.

Having a usable product while your opponents continually shoot themselves in the foot is a viable market strategy.

I suspect we may see a lot of countries get pushy about trying to encourage people to have kids. There were lots of short term economic benefits to pushing families into having both partners working, but in the long term countries are still built around needing a growing population to do well.

You can offset lower birthrates with immigration to an extent, but itherwise we would need pretty major social changes to sustain society if birth rates continue to decline.

New drugs get a period of time where the company that developed it has exclusive manufacturing rights. The idea is that if anyone can start making the drug immediately, there’s not a good reason for companies to spend money to develop new drugs. However if demand for a drug is greater than the ability of the creating company to produce the drug, other companies are allowed to temporarily step in and make up the difference.

No, because apple’s monopoly doesnt count because they’re upfront about it being a monopoly.

Which is stupid, but that’s how it works apparently

Windows is absolutely abusing their position as the dominant OS to push their other products. The number of “no don’t do that” messages and pop ups when trying to install chrome on a windows computer is clearly anti-competitive, and the only reason microsoft has been getting away with it is because Edge/etc hasn’t achieved enough market share.

Right, but in my case I’m not actually a customer of the local electric company that offers fiber. However pressure from them got my telco company (the only choice I have besides satellite) to offer me fiber, raising my max speed from 3Mb/s to 1000Mb/s.

Do you live off grid?

Definitely seeing that where I live. One of the local electric companies started offering gigabit fiber for $75, where most people were paying a lot more than that for DSL or low quality satellite (which were the only choices before). It’s been a huge improvement for those people, and it’s forced some of the long stagnant Telco companies to actually compete and start rolling out fiber of their own.

They added wifi with a extra circuit board hidden inside the calculator case. It’s connected to the calculators communication port, and pretends to be another calculator. So they can use the calculator’s built in “send” function to send variables/text/etc to the hidden card, which then uses it’s internet connection to look up answers and send the results back.

This definitely feels like terrorist attack tactics, since it does more to cause fear than actually fatalities. You make some really good points though, it’s unfortunate that you’re getting so many downvotes for factual information.

As for the terrorist group designation, you can see a list of all countries and entities that consider Hezbollah a terrorist group here.. It does include both the European Union and the United States, along with many other countries. There are some countries that don’t consider them a terrorist group, notably Russia, China, and North Korea.

Obviously there have been major improvements over the past 80 years, but that’s still considered the first neural network. The need for multi-layer neural networks was recognized by 1969, but the knowledge of how to do that took awhile to be worked out.

Fun fact, the Perceptron is basically the first machine learning AI, and it was invented in 1943. It took a long time and many advancements in hardware before it became recognizable as the AI of today, but it’s hardly a new idea.

Clearly this shows that North Korea is the peak example of a successful society, and that the rest of the world should aspire to mimic them in all their wise practices.

Usually these laws have somewhat neutered benefits though. Even though employees may have a right to ignore calls/texts/etc, the company can still decide to let you go (for “unrelated reasons”) or promote other people instead. If they don’t explicitly say they’re doing it as retaliation for refusing to communicate after hours, you can’t really hold them accountable.

This seems cool, but hasn’t Windows 11 started blocking some different apps that replace parts of the UI?

the data from india is incomplete and not fit for the analysis you’re attempting.

Yeah, that’s the main reason I didn’t include it. I couldn’t find anything representing good numbers, at least not without more time researching it than I actually have available at the moment.