I feel the same way. Can I suggest the following interview for your peruse?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I guess they didn't threaten your sovereignty?

It's easier than that. Just buy European - period. The rest of the world is going to do the same thing BTW. Everyone knows European products are the best cause of good regulations. And we won't pull the plug out of things we sell you for no reason.

I do IT projects for government entities and the magic word right now is sovereignty. They are cutting out US and Chinese manufacturers from the entire supply chain. Byebye Cisco, Broadcom, Dell, HP, IBM, etc.

You can't make us buy US stuff if we refuse, and that's exactly what's happening.

Well, we're doing it anyway. I work for government agencies in the EU and they have only 1 priority right now: sovereignty. And that means removing the US and China out of every single supply chain you can think of. And that means this money is no longer flowing to US companies, which I think people are not quite understanding at the moment. This is going to have a huge impact on these companies if 500 million of the richest people on earth start spending their money somewhere else. If I were an investor I would be getting my money out of the US right now, because there will be a reckoning for what Trump did to us.

1. The world hasn't had time to react yet. I do projects for the public sector in Europe, and #1 on every list is "sovereignty". And they're not talking about China. It is about removing the US from the supply chain completely.

2. Trump/Hegseth shut down the new drone division of the US army just cause they hated its general. In the meantime the EU is working with Ukraine to produce drones. What use is an aircraft carrier when you can build half a million drones for the same budget? And as for a coast guard, we have plenty of those. Don't worry. As for the EU military being jobs programs, you're talking about the 1980s. You see, in the EU we hire decent people for the military, not the refuse of society like in the US.

3. It's true that EU education level is dropping, but the education level in the US is dropping too, and it was never decent to begin with. In the EU education exists to educate people, in the US it exists to prepare workers for industry. Also we've been dealing with Trumps for decades because we have better working constitutions and electoral systems. Sure, let Le Pen come and be president, and see how she fares. I'll get ready with some popcorn. For reference look at Italy and see how the extreme right is doing there. They're in power, but they can't destroy the company because the EU won't let them.

4. You were never propping up anyone. The Marshall plan wasn't a gift - they were loans, and loans that could only be used to buy American equipment. The EU made the US rich.

And of course we want the US to be rich and prosperous. You seem to forget that the economy is not a zero sum game.

More correctly, it is default on for nearly 100% of computers sold. Large orgs want it that way (it's a feature), makes installs easier. And yes, that includes all servers, workstations and laptops in the world, except perhaps special purpose stuff (military, space, etc).

It's correct. I've never seen any machine with a default BIOS configuration where PXE booting is disabled. This is considered a feature (makes installations faster). You need to switch it off in the BIOS to stop that.

It is not off by default. I have seen a lot of different hardware in my life (I basically do booting for a living), and I have never encountered a BIOS that had PXE disabled by default.

BIOS has a boot order, and as far as I can recall PXE is always the last option. The order of what comes before varies, e.g. whether or not USB boot is tried first.

In fact, on most systems if they cannot boot, they keep rebooting and ending up in a loop trying PXE boot over and over, and then giving up and rebooting again. But it should be noted that of course, if you get access via PXE you already have full control over the system anyway. The new thing here is that you can use a single "malformed" packet with a payload instead of having to set up a DHCP and tftpboot server to deliver a malicious payload. The fact also that this happens before TPM is enabled makes is extra serious, as there is no way to stop any malicious code executing.

BIOS upgrades can be helpful if they contain a fix, but they tend to be unavailable on consumer hardware fairly quickly after the vendor stops selling and supporting it. Also BIOS upgrades are know to be finicky, and it's very easy to brick your system, which means opening up the box and connecting to the chip with a CH341A EEPROM programmer, something which not everyone is going to be capable of. Some machines have way to recover from a bricked BIOS, but in my experience those don't work most of the time and you end up reprogramming anyway. On many laptops the BIOS is on the back of the mainboard which typically means disassembling the system to get the CPU cooler off.

On nearly all machines it's enabled by default, but it's usually the last boot option.

AFAIK it was only put in the PRO versions of Intel NUCs, the other NUCs I have don't have it. It's really handy to have, because you don't need physical access to the box anymore. So I use the PRO boxes a lot for testing.

Of course on server hardware it's a different thing. It's hard to find any server that doesn't have it. On some boxes it's even a licensed feature that you need to buy^H^H^H rent to get it to work (the bastards).

I do believe you reised to the occasion here.

In real countries, worker conditions are subject to negotiations, not dictates.

This is Slashdot :)

This also clarifies things (why am I not surprised):

Muslims believe in Christ too. Does that make them Christians? Or, by the same mechanism, are Christians also Jews (Jesus was a Jew)?